Cloth $82.50 ISBN: 9780226545394 Published June 2012
Paper $27.50 ISBN: 9780226545400 Published June 2012
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The Moral Neoliberal

Welfare and Citizenship in Italy

Andrea Muehlebach

The Moral Neoliberal
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Andrea Muehlebach

288 pages | 5 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2012
Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning
Cloth $82.50 ISBN: 9780226545394 Published June 2012
Paper $27.50 ISBN: 9780226545400 Published June 2012
E-book $7.00 to $27.50 About E-books ISBN: 9780226545417 Published May 2012
Morality is often imagined to be at odds with capitalism and its focus on the bottom line, but in The Moral Neoliberal morality is shown as the opposite: an indispensible tool for capitalist transformation. Set within the shifting landscape of neoliberal welfare reform in the Lombardy region of Italy, Andrea Muehlebach tracks the phenomenal rise of voluntarism in the wake of the state’s withdrawal of social service programs. Using anthropological tools, she shows how socialist volunteers are interpreting their unwaged labor as an expression of social solidarity, with Catholic volunteers thinking of theirs as an expression of charity and love. Such interpretations pave the way for a mass mobilization of an ethical citizenry that is put to work by the state.
 
Visiting several sites across the region, from Milanese high schools to the offices of state social workers to the homes of the needy, Muehlebach mounts a powerful argument that the neoliberal state nurtures selflessness in order to cement some of its most controversial reforms. At the same time, she also shows how the insertion of such an anticapitalist narrative into the heart of neoliberalization can have unintended consequences. 

 

Etienne Balibar, University of California, Irvine
“In a book that is both carefully documented and beautifully conceptualized, Andrea Muehlebach has explored a question of great relevance for contemporary debates about the forms of governmentality and subjectivation associated with the rise of neoliberalism: the new ‘ethical citizenship,’ which substitutes public systems of social security with voluntary forms of collective caretaking. Running contrary to some influential recent analyses of ‘self-entrepreneurship’ as a modality of voluntary servitude in a society entirely governed by market rules, she does not, however, contribute to the complacent image of the new mass consumption society. Rather, she describes a social dynamic of great indetermination, both ethically and politically.
 

Her inquiry, focusing on a famous working class municipality in the periphery of Milan, where catholic and communist solidarities are now assuming new functions, also provides a fascinating insight into the history of contemporary Italy, explaining why it remains a ‘laboratory’ of social change which has world-wide significance.”

Sylvia Yanagisako, Stanford University

“In this astute ethnography of voluntarism in a working-class town in the de-industrialized periphery of Milan, Andrea Muehlebach demonstrates convincingly that contemporary neoliberal reforms produce not only rational, instrumental subjects but simultaneously compassionate, ethical citizens with deep moral commitments. Her acute and nuanced analysis of the pedagogical techniques employed in volunteer training classes and the quotidian practices and discourses of volunteers, shows how unremunerated voluntary labor, construed as intimate, compassionate acts of gifting outside the realm of commodified market exchange, is cultivated and managed by legal regimes and administrative policies just as the securities of the modern Italian welfare state are being dismantled.”

Jane Schneider, City University of New York
“This book makes the provocative argument that neoliberal capitalism, although it has been unjust and disruptive in Italy as elsewhere, has also embraced a new kind of social solidarity based on volunteer care-giving. Dr. Muehlebach takes us inside the daily practices of retiree volunteers caring for frail elderly in a declining factory town near Milan. Through her keen eye and beautiful prose, we discover how they differentiate what they are doing from charity; how they define themselves as morally emancipated; how they understand concepts like solidarity, pity, giving, compassion, commitment, materialism, and heart. Her attention is an eye-opener for all of us trapped in easy judgment and provides a study with wide implications beyond the Italian case.”

Douglas Holmes
“The Moral Neoliberal is an outstanding book addressing with great precision and authority a decisive series of transformations unfolding in Italy and, by extension, across Europe. The ethnographic narrative is vibrant, the argumentation is crisp, and the analysis is persuasive. Andrea Muehlebach’s investigation is premised on a forceful rejection of the conventional understanding of contemporary social order that is awkwardly and imprecisely glossed as ‘neoliberal.’ She provides an alternative architecture of a ‘moral neoliberalism’ populated by engaged, reflexive subjects who are experimenting with the imperatives of what she terms ‘ethical citizenship.’ The results are breathtaking.”--Douglas Holmes, State University of New York

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part I
Chapter 1: An Opulence of Virtue
 Death of a King
 Markets and Morals
 An Opulence of Virtue

Chapter 2: Ethical Citizenship
 A Crisis of Loneliness
 Who Cares?
 Ethical Citizenship
 The Moral Neoliberal

Part II
Chapter 3: Consecrations: From Welfare State to Welfare Community
 The Oath
 Welfare Community
 Sacred Social
 Sacralizing “Activity”
 A Temple of Humanity
 The Ethical State
 Social Capitalism
 The Catholicization of Neoliberalism

Part III
Chapter 4: The Production of Compassion
 A Heartfelt Citizenship
 The Production of Dispassion
 The Production of Compassion 1: The Public Management of Virtue
 The Production of Compassion 2: Education of Desire
 The Production of Compassion 3: Arts of Suffering, Feeling, Listening
 The Production of Compassion 4: Empowerment
 Doubt
 Privatizing the Public Sphere

Chapter 5: An Age Full of Virtue
 Super Seniors
 An Age Full of Virtue
 Labor, Life Cycle, and Generational Contract
 Learning to Labor, or, Citizenship as Work
 Care of the Self
 A New Generational Contract

Chapter 6: Aftereffects of Utopian Practice
 The Question of Solidarity
 Lavoro or Impegno? Work or Commitment?
 Passions at Work
 Aftereffects of Utopian Practice
 From Politics to Ethics
 From Ethics to Politics; or, the Social Life of Social Citizenship

Chapter 7: The Private Face of Privatization
 Enemy in the House
 The Professor and the Angel
 Ethical Citizenship as Relational Labor
 The Ethics of Relational Labor
 Appearing in Public
 Disengagement
 Wounding and Healing

Bibliography
Notes 
Index

For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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