Critics of market liberalism (or “neoliberalism”) vary significantly in the criticisms they develop. The best known criticisms today focus on economic consequences of market liberalism—economic inequality, stagnating incomes, or the like. Other critiques emphasize political or legal consequences such as privileged political or legal access accorded to capital owners, or “autonomy” accorded constitutional status in American law. Still others emphasize social consequences of market liberalism such as the erosion of community or a spiritual impoverishment that results from the markets’ “instrumental rationality.”
While often appearing together in everything-and-the-kitchen-sink criticisms of market liberalism (for example, in Milbank and Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue), these different types of arguments do not always depend on one another. Karl Marx, for example, sneered at policies that would raise worker wages without improving their “human status and dignity.” He dismissed these policies as nothing more than “better payment for the slave.”
One less known, but distinctive line of criticism reappearing on both the political left and the political right flows from Romanticism. These new Romantics focus mainly on the negative social implications of market liberalism. Their arguments go beyond the loss of community or solidarity and instead assert that market liberalism impoverishes the human soul, both spiritually and aesthetically.
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