The human action and the fiction of entreprerneurship of yourself: criticism to Von Mises’ neoliberal ideology

Abstract

To think about education, democracy, and social justice in the global context, it is essential to focus on the rationality formed by the economic and political system of the so-called Neoliberalism. The neoliberal ideological system has been exerting decisive influence over the contemporary democratic governments since it began to take shape in the second half of the 20th century. Notably, such an influence has implied serious threats to education and social justice, to the extent that neoliberalism exclusively appeals to the economic dimension to explain individual self-realization and the improvement of social life conditions. This article aims to critically analyze the neoliberal theory proposed by Ludwig von Mises, conceiving it as a reductionist model of the concepts of human action, freedom, and the State. More precisely, it seeks to characterize this theory as an ideology anchored in the concepts of the free market, culminating in the formation of homo agens, the “entrepreneurship” of the capitalist system. The methodology adopted is critical-interpretative in nature. It develops an analysis of the neoliberal model of the Austrian-American author, based on authors such as Hannah Arendt (1999, 2013), Pierre Dardot, Christian Laval (2016), Wendy Brown (2019), anchored in theories of contemporary justice as in John Rawls’ (2011, 2016). In addition to the criticisms, the text proposes mainly in the third part and in the conclusion some perspectives to overcome the neoliberal state model which rules the economic and political scenarios of several countries.