The Marketizers

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A genealogy of the now pervasive idea that politics is a marketplace and that public goods and services should be privatized.Since the 1980s, governments have been reinvented on the model of the market. This shift would have been unimaginable without the emergence of public choice theory in postwar America. The separation of provision and production in public services, the introduction of market-like competition between bureaus and municipalities, the treatment of citizens as customers, and the use of performance incentives all have origins in the writings of public choice theorists. From the 1940s through the 1980s, these economic thinkers gradually eroded the differences between politics and the market as they applied the tools of economics to problems usually considered the purview of political scientists and political philosophers. Deploying the market as the best analogy for understanding political decision-making, they undertook comprehensive revisions of democratic theory. Neoliberal Democracy is a history of these revisions. The book provides new perspectives on neoliberalism by examining how postwar American public choice theorists intervened in democratic theory. It advances two arguments about these interventions: first, that the key characteristic of public choice theory was a reinvention of politics as an equilibrium between the demand for and the supply of publicly provided goods and services. Whereas liberal democracy was based on the separation of the political and the economic, neoliberal democracy is based on a redefinition of politics as a marketplace. Second, the book argues that this redefinition reflected the mid-century expansion of the American public economy. It shows that increasing government expenditures gave impetus to economists' forays in political theory. The extraordinary growth of the postwar public economy essentially made the state into a producer of goods and services and transformed the citizen into a customer of these public goods and services, mirroring the relationship between the firm and the consumer in the private economy.