Neoliberalism's political theory

Abstract

Theories critical of democracy have always been part of the normative horizon of democratic modernity's experience. Since the 18th Century, the constitutionalization of political regimes, the slow broadening of citizenship, and the expansion of participation have been accompanied by strong normative arguments defending the limitation of suffrage, the limitation of influence of electoral representation on the institutional form of political regimes, the restriction of the broadening of political citizenship towards certain social and culturally defined groups, restrict the arenas of public disagreement and public liberties, and prevent the formation of redistributive demands. With the emergence of elite theory, specially, normative criticism of democracy was associated to the "realistic" diagnosis of its inefficacy. One of the critical traditions of democracy which has enjoyed major relevance in contemporary political relevance is that called "neoliberal" (a category which, in itself, should be thought about). The goal of this article is to examine arguments from neoliberal/libertarian theoreticians about democracy starting from two questions: 1-) Which kind of social ontology justifies the precedence of market over politics and, accordingly, which are the principialist/ontological arguments to think democracy as an arena limited by the market; 2-) which are the consequences of such ontology regarding the normativity of democratic political institutions as a theory that implies a radical limitation of democratic inputs. To answer his questions, we seek to explore the writings of neoliberal ideologues and theoreticians in order to to find explicitly political arguments that deal with problems associated to both questions.