I would like to thank Professor Dennis Pilon for engaging with Neoliberal Parliamentarism's central ideas. While his comments are taken in the utmost spirit of intellectual reciprocity, I hope to use this review to clarify that what Pilon refers to as a “tension” between the neoliberalism and state theory streams in the structure of Neoliberal Parliamentarism is, in fact, an example of the broader epistemological struggle at the heart of the neoliberal critique of liberalism, articulating itself through the parliamentary institutional form.
Neoliberal Parliamentarism is, in many ways, a tale about the crisis of liberal institutions set in motion by neoliberalism's political and ideological ascendency. Neoliberalism, it must be recalled, emerged from an effort to “renovate” the liberal tradition, which its foundational thinkers believed had been captured by the forces of collectivism. The problem of the expansion of the welfare state was, in this respect, a constitutional and political issue internal to the institutional forms of modern liberalism itself.
Chapter 3 of Neoliberal Parliamentarism offers a summary of the differences between classical (or “old”) and modern (or “new”) liberalism, demonstrating that the demarcation point in the early nineteenth century, when Friedrich Hayek believed liberalism had been irretrievably corrupted, was also the moment at which the ideas of responsible government and representative democracy began to gain intellectual currency.
Far from being simply what Pilon calls a “debate among liberal theorists,” chapter 3 describes a critical epistemological rupture that transformed liberalism from its classical to its modern era and lies at the heart of contemporary disputes about the role and function of democratic institutions.
Hayek's theory of the state was animated by a deep pessimism in the capabilities of human reason. Concerned about the tyranny of a single individual, or group of individuals acting on behalf of the community, Hayek sought a return to the classical liberal ideal of limited government that had been buried in the nineteenth century, rejecting parliamentary sovereignty as an overreach of legislative authority.
Neoliberal Parliamentarism grapples with the material representations of this transformational shift. As the logic of economic rationalism became hegemonic by the 1990s, governments from all three major political parties in Ontario began to use the justifications of economic or fiscal crises to rationalize the smashing of parliamentary precedent to secure the passage of politically contentious neoliberal reforms.
When the purported demands of the market began to clash with the slow and deliberate nature of parliamentary accountability measures, and the rights afforded to the opposition, the result was a series of political inflection points that were, in nearly every case, resolved in favour of the executive.
In this respect, the articulation of crisis of liberalism did, in fact, commonly take the form of what Pilon claims are “antidemocratic neoliberals versus defenders of a traditional view of the role and purpose of legislatures.” The evidence suggests that in addition to the political and social conflicts neoliberalism generated, the epistemological debate at the heart of the neoliberal critique of liberalism was often revealed through the performance of conventional parliamentary roles.
For instance, when in opposition, the Progressive Conservatives commonly contradicted their stated ideological principles by resisting unpopular Liberal or NDP austerity measures and objecting to the procedural means used to secure their passage, setting the stage for the kind of dynamic Pilon mentions.
Largely unwittingly, the debates surrounding the use of restrictive parliamentary procedures often served as platforms for broader disputes about the legitimacy and efficacy of modern conceptions of liberalism and democratic accountability in the age of globalized capitalism. In this way, what appears to be a tension between state theory and neoliberalism in the structure of Neoliberal Parliamentarism is rather the mediation of the crisis of modern liberalism giving expression to itself as the performance of pure opposition or pure negation by either government or opposition in their parliamentary roles.
The variegated and chameleon nature of neoliberalism makes it difficult to speak of a universal approach to this process. It is for this reason that, as Pilon notes, I am careful not to declare “neoliberal parliamentarism” a theory in the absolute sense. Its purpose is to offer a concept to grasp a concrete shift in approach to legislative and political institutions that I claim has a coherent theoretical and ideological framework, common origins, approaches, objectives and strategies. In this respect, it might better be described as a general principle that attempts to grapple with circumstances as they commonly present themselves in the real world of legislating.
