This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.”
Historians of the future will no doubt claim that the “neo-liberal era,” the era of neo-Smithean celebrations of “market naturalism,” was essentially the era of the “intellectual retreat of the political left.”[1] Although the story of this retreat is far too complex and contradictory to explore here, clearly one of the main reasons for the intellectual emaciation of “left politics” after the 1970s was the political right’s ideological appropriation of much of the left’s critical philosophical discourse. Perhaps most significant in this regard was the right’s re-articulation of Hegelian historico-political philosophical narratives into a version of nineteenth-century Whig progressivism; where the telos of western culture and society was conceived as nothing less than a new and final stage of capitalism founded on a triad of consumer culture, information technology, and finance. On the left, the loss of faith in orthodox Hegelian accounts of politics—and the loss of faith in orthodox Marxism is of course a case in point here—was to give rise to a new set of philosophical sensibilities, perhaps the most influential of which was the heterodox Hegelianism of so-called post-structuralist modes of social and cultural critique.
