Noel Molé | American Ethnologist
“In The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy, Andrea Muehlebach invites readers to undo their assumptions about neoliberalism by showing how an ethical turn brings care, love, and the sacred deeply within the fold of its thought and practice. In her intellectually aggressive dismantlings, labyrinthine analytics appear straightforward, and in her lush prose, the contemporary becomes sensually tangible, gently hoisted right up to our faces. . . . Deftly theoretical and bountifully ethnographic, this outstanding book inaugurates new modes of inquiry and reengineers our thinking on these important problems.”
Janina Kehr | Social Anthropology
“Relevant beyond the Italian case, Muehlebach’s book is as much a contribution to the anthropology of neoliberal humanitarian actors and the workings, tensions and ambivalences of their ethical journeys, as it is a brilliant example of an anthropology of the state from below, analyzing citizens’ subjectification and their participation in state-making. Much more is needed of this kind of anthropology in and of Europe, especially at this historical moment, when many European states actively produce their absence through politics of austerity. To ethnographically fathom which forms of care are produced in the absence of the state, by whom, through which kinds of social imaginaries and who is left behind are pressing research questions, ones which should take inspiration and guidance from Muehlebach’s book.”
Marco Briziarelli | Journal of Modern Italian Studies
“Recounting the vicissitudes of Milanese Italians who have become gradually more involved in helping unprivileged people, Muehlebach magisterially illustrates the experience of individuals, collectives, a civil society and, in part, the postmodern condition of the West. . . . considering the lack of sociological and political imagination that seems to characterize the current political discourse inside and outside Italy, Muehlebach,with the post-Keynesian, post-welfarist idea of ‘ethical citizenship’, must be credited for a very powerful effort to enrich the debate.”
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.”
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
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.”
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.”
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
