Market/society: mapping conceptions of power, ideology and subjectivity in Polanyi, Hayek, Foucault, Lukacs

In light of discussions around the common anniversary of the publication of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation and F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, this article puts these texts - iconic representations of social democratic and neoliberal political theory - into conversation with Michel Foucault's subsequent, influential critique of neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics. There are interesting points of contact in the way each text constructs its argument, even as they arrive at distinct positions vis-a-vis the material and subjective nature of market society, while nevertheless sharing an opposition to Marxian approaches. Yet the work of Polanyi and Hayek's Marxian contemporary, Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness, offers precisely a critical framework for understanding the relationship between markets, liberty and society in which the material and the subjective need not be read as antagonistic. It is thus also examined here, in an effort to shed light on how discussions of contemporary neoliberalism are framed.