The Spirit of Austerity

Existing interpretations of the current resurgence of austerity discourses tend to attribute this to a failure to learn the lessons of the financial crisis. The picture of a return to neoliberal business-as-usual, however, sits uneasily with the popular discontent and democratic energies unleashed by the crisis. Indeed, in the USA it is precisely the mobilization of populist forces that has been a driving force behind the turn to austerity. The paper seeks to shed light on this paradoxical connection through a selective genealogy of economy that foregrounds its theological content. Economy is conceptualized as a paradoxical logic of governance, capable of organizing authority and belief in a secularized context that rejects the idolatrous worship of mundane signs. Austerity is not merely or primarily a ‘wrong policy’ but an article of faith, holding out a promise of purification that commands considerable ethical appeal and mobilizational capacity.