by Paweł Skała-Piękoś
Thomas R. Wells that nearly everyone hates neoliberalism, and that we will miss it all the same once it is gone. My own position is simpler and probably less elegant: I even like it. I am thirty-four, I am Polish, and my whole adult life has fallen in years when neoliberalism gave me more chances than it took away. I know its faults, I have felt a few of them personally, and I still think that, for all its sins, it treated us well. For the honest way to measure an order is by the cost of the alternatives. By that measure the defence writes itself. I also know that when someone runs the same measure and gets the opposite result, I have no right to point out an error in their arithmetic. So I want to defend neoliberalism, but differently from the way it is usually defended. The whole of that “differently” is this essay.
The argument about neoliberalism has been fought for years with the same ammunition: on one side, the more than a billion people who climbed out of extreme poverty in the age of globalisation (a large share of it credited to China’s market-plus-strong-state model); on the other, inequality and uprootedness. Both sides are counting the same things: money, percentages, degrees of interference. And the question I think matters most is rarely asked. Did people come out of all those solved problems as authors of their own lives, or as material for other people’s plans; treated as a someone, or processed as a something? It slips away most efficiently from liberals who have soaked up libertarianism and concluded that beyond freedom from interference there is nothing left to ask. I will come back to the libertarians. Something worse than blindness to one question is circling around them.
So much for the first trouble: the missing question. There is a second: the singular. Every doctrine gets flattened this way. What is peculiar is the price: if neoliberalism is less a single doctrine than a shared grammar, the singular erases precisely the thing that decided everything. What arrived in Stockholm was not what arrived in Santiago, nor in Warsaw what arrived in London. Before we decide whether to miss it, let us ask which one we lived with, and what it found when it moved in.
Someone or Something
Liberalism is usually drawn along one axis: freedom–authoritarianism; add democracy, freedom’s American cousin, and we have a single direction for the world. Worthy values yet too small. And the classics sensed this tightness: Mill feared the tyranny of opinion more than the magistrate’s, and Tocqueville described a soft despotism that softens rather than breaks. Let us give the thing they were circling a name: subjecthood. Liberalism has known autonomy, dignity and recognition for a long time, so I claim no discovery. My claim is narrower: that its present-day market idiom has no simple test for what an institution does to the person who does not fit its category.
Subjecthood, here, is the answer to the question “who?”: the author of decisions, or their raw material; a someone or a something. Every order, from the state and the Church to the majority, the market and the algorithm, predicts us somehow. The differences begin when a person deviates from the prediction. You can then correct the person, so that the model fits again. Or you can read the deviation and ask whether you are looking at the author of a correction to the model. The first axis measures how much deviation you are allowed. The second measures what happens to you when you do not fit. It can be checked with four questions. Can you contest the category you have been assigned? Must the institution give reasons? Does a path exist for correcting its model? And is that path a real option, rather than a written one? To be a subject is not to be free of causes, for no one is. It is to have a real chance of entering the loop of your own causality: to inherit a language, a class, a body and a set of fears, and still be the place where part of the inheritance gets examined, corrected and handed on better than it came.
One more thing: freedom and subjecthood can be distinguished but not separated: restrict one, and in time you will weaken the other. Which is why a politics that reads only the interference gauge will certify as free, with a clear conscience, societies in which fewer and fewer people are anyone at all.
Four Addresses
Neoliberalism never arrived on bare ground. Everywhere it found a ready, usually unspoken cultural answer to the question of who counts as a someone, and what it did next depended on that answer. Four addresses: Scandinavia, America, Poland and Western Europe.
Scandinavia. The Nordic countries are not the socialist paradise of Bernie Sanders’s speeches. Denmark’s prime minister travelled to Harvard in 2015 specifically to tell Americans: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” Liberal, market, innovative states, and states in which the question “who?” has an answer older than any economic model. Serfdom never became the dominant condition of the Swedish peasantry, and the free farmers, the bönder, sat in the Riksdag as one of its four estates from the sixteenth century: exceptional for its age, though covering only part of the rural population. Centuries later the historians Berggren and Trägårdh named modern Sweden’s operating principle “statist individualism”: true feeling and solidarity are possible only between people who do not need each other to survive; the state therefore makes people independent of fathers, husbands and employers, so that what binds them is chosen. When the market reforms of the nineties arrived, they arrived in a society accustomed to being listened to. It is easier to marketise a nation of someones than to conjure someones out of a market. That is this essay’s hypothesis, and the remaining addresses will feed it.
America. The United States is the most fluent speaker of freedom the world has known, and Edmund Morgan showed where the fluency was trained: in Virginia, where at the end of the eighteenth century enslaved people made up close to two fifths of the population, and the freedom of the free stood on their labour. Republican liberty and slavery were not a contradiction that time would resolve. They were a working system, and American freedom-talk learned to soar precisely where subjecthood had been divided by race. The war began as a struggle to preserve the Union and became, through emancipation and Black enlistment, a war for the freedom of persons regardless of colour. What concerns me is that the choice ever became necessary. Morgan also described the purchase that keeps such a wound open: the planter elite bought class peace by giving poor whites something cheaper than bread and more precious: somebody lower. Lyndon Johnson, as Bill Moyers remembered it, put it brutally: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.” That front line is invisible on the freedom–authoritarianism axis: it is a conflict of subjecthood with contempt. And on both sides of the Atlantic liberalism has lacked firmness there: it defended freedom from interference far more readily than it defended people from contempt.
Poland. My country knows that purchase, and our version of the wound is older than any transformation. For three centuries the Commonwealth ran Europe’s most curious constitutional experiment: the Golden Liberty of the szlachta, the Polish nobility; elected kings, a veto verging on anarchy, freedom as the proper name of a single estate. Real for one tenth of the population, it stood on serfdom: bondage without police and without a state, as Piotr Napierała and I put it in our history of liberalism, enforced not by an apparatus but by a class. The difference of estate was dressed as a difference of blood, nobles “from the Sarmatians”, peasants “from Ham”, the same move Virginia performed with skin colour. In 1770 Pitt the Elder warned the Lords that England’s freeholders risked being “reduced to a condition baser than the peasantry of Poland”. The hierarchy of the serf manor outlived the manor as a habit of measuring one’s dignity by the distance to somebody beneath. The communist decades did not abolish the habit; they carried out a forcible redistribution of narcissism. Then came 1989. I am a child of that transformation and a defender of it. None of the roads actually available at the time would have treated people better. But the plan had one measure: build a market, tame inflation, survive unemployment. Hundreds of thousands from the liquidated state farms and factories were told they were a transitional cost. The freedom they received was real, but nobody asked them who they wanted to be in it, because the plan had no measure for that. Whoever wonders why the language of noble liberty returns in the mouths of politicians selling hierarchy should start here.
Western Europe. Finally, two opposite conclusions from the same faith in markets. In Britain, much of the post-war Conservative establishment accepted the welfare state, a mixed economy and the government’s responsibility for employment. Thatcherism swept that consensus out, and the prime minister’s famous sentence that “there is no such thing as society”, usually quoted without its continuation about individual men and women, and families, neatly caught the shift onto the single person. In Germany the ordoliberals, who had watched the Weimar Republic die, drew the opposite lesson: markets do not order themselves, so they built a state that polices competition and guards against concentrations of private power. Ludwig Erhard sold it as Wohlstand für Alle, prosperity for all. Two market liberalisms, opposite verdicts.
Neoliberalism is not so much a doctrine as a shared grammar which every country speaks with its own accent: price tells the truth, competition dispenses justice. Inside that grammar sits a quiet assumption: since everything is measured, a human being must be a measurable thing. The assumption works most powerfully where the culture has no older answer of its own to “who?”. To be fair, on the second axis the market can also be a deliverance: it offers an exit from the local tyranny of the parish priest, the official, the town’s only employer. It stands on neither side itself. Which is why some people will miss the same neoliberalism and others will not; and both memories will be honest.
Fascism as a Quotation
The four addresses are not a genealogy of what came next. They show only that the same grammar yields different relations between institution and person, depending on what it finds in place. Now the same test, applied to a new concentration of private power. Classical neoliberalism wanted the market to check the arbitrariness of the state. In the platform economy something new is happening: the owner of the infrastructure sets the rule himself, defines the metric himself, registers the deviation himself and hears the appeal himself. The market does not disappear. It begins to resemble a private jurisdiction. And here the language of freedom can become the language of the sovereignty of those who own the channel.
In 2023 Marc Andreessen, co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, today co-owner of a fund with past stakes in Twitter, Airbnb and Coinbase, published a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” with a list of “patron saints”. On it stands Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: inventor of Futurism, celebrant of war as “the world’s only hygiene”, co-author of the Fascist Manifesto of 1919. The manifesto rewrites him with approval: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” Order demands three steps. Fact: the manifesto installs such a patron and repeats his phrases. Inference: it knowingly adopts an aesthetic fascism ran on: aggression as a value, conquest as beauty, contempt for limits. Hypothesis: that aesthetic now services a project of private, authoritarian sovereignty. Scholars of fascism would add a myth of national rebirth and mass mobilisation, absent here. So I am not saying this is fascism complete. I am saying that “fascism” has stopped being an insult here and become a quotation. And I find it hard to believe such quotations land in manifestos by accident. This new fascism does not grow out of the socialism it denounces on its posters. It circles close to libertarianism, and from there it draws cadres, money and a vocabulary of freedom, which it then harnesses to hierarchy.
Call this variant the Apollonian turn: capitalism elevated to a work of art, administered by the Exceptional. Peter Thiel put it plainly back in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Elon Musk bought himself a platform under the banner of free speech, after which it suspended journalists covering its owner, who publicly defended the suspensions. Apollo is a name they would buy for themselves; it is a quotation from their own wardrobe, not a compliment. But what exactly is this exceptionality? A declaration of one’s own greatness, mixed with money, influence and the will to remake society, correlated only loosely with its consequences for that society; for society, as in every tyranny, stops being the end and becomes the means. Material for aristocrats in love with the “aggressive beauty” of their own visions. The one honest test of exceptionality is a process: does the claim survive correction; can a man be wrong in public, mend, and bear the cost. By that test the new aristocracy is not an elite. It is a hypothesis that refuses to sit its own examination and spends the surplus dismantling the examiners: courts, the press, audit. It prefers immunity.
The founder’s caprice is protected like a work of art; everyone else’s caprice is an anomaly to be optimised away. And before my liberal reader gets too comfortable: the same operation runs in duller typefaces: credit scoring, hiring algorithms, citation metrics, publish or perish. The managerial centre of recent decades processed people too. We liberals have a household fault of our own: in love with distinctions of quality, we mistake control of the channel for evidence of merit.
A New Liberalism
This new aristocracy did not invent the use of freedom against freedom; the trick is as old as humanity, and the szlachta and the planters were merely among its former practitioners. Its move is more contemporary: it has built the manoeuvre into platforms, metrics and private infrastructures which set the rule, measure the deviation and hear the appeal all at once. It does not burn liberal books; it quotes them. Against such an opponent, a liberalism that watches only the interference axis is not wrong; it is defenceless. And when it is naive it becomes obliging: it stamps the papers of freedom’s enemies. Popper described this trap in his famous footnote on the paradox of tolerance: tolerance without limits abolishes itself, disarming the tolerant before those who mean to end tolerance. The new fascism therefore needs a new liberalism, one that understands its opponent. And the defence has one boring, irreplaceable material: institutions. Courts, the press, universities, procedures; everything that lets people differ without fear and be wrong without losing face.
What should this new liberalism promise? Not transfers alone. Reducing the dispute to social policy would repeat the mistake of answering the question “who?” with the answer “how much?”. The second axis does not replace social policy anyway. It is a test of its quality: does help enlarge a person’s real authorship, or merely administer their category more efficiently? The promise is simpler: you will count as someone, among others who count. And this is not poetry. Part of it already stands in legislation. Article 22 of the GDPR recognises the principle this essay turns on: in decisions with serious consequences, automated classification alone should not close the case, and a route to human intervention must exist. California lets any resident forbid the sale of their data with a single browser signal (Sephora ignored it and paid $1.2 million). Its rules on automated decisions are entering into force now. The first is the seed of a right to be read by a human being; the second, of a right not to be read at all. Together they guard against two opposite pathologies: the system that refuses to listen, and the system that wants to know everything. And since deviation can be read only by readers, community stops being individualism’s opposite and becomes its condition: without people and institutions able to read you, nobody is a someone alone. The Swedes were onto something: independence does not end the relationship; it is what makes it worth having.
On method
This essay was written through an AI-enhanced process. The argument, the structure, the successive revisions and the final judgement are mine. I developed the original line of thought in Polish and used AI tools, ChatGPT 5.6 and Claude (Anthropic’s Fable 5), as critical assistance: to test formulations, identify redundancies, flag factual risks, refine transitions, and help transcreate the Polish text into English. My instructions asked the models to challenge the argument rather than flatter it: to propose alternative structures and titles, check for overstatement, and keep the English natural while preserving my voice.
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