Neoliberalism and neoconservatism: the philosophical contours of a seemingly unholy marriage

Many Neoconservatives in the Bush administration trace the lineage of their thinking back to the jurisprudence of Carl Schmitt, the fascist whose philosophies were, more often than not, mediated by the works of more traditional conservative thinkers such as Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol. Both the more conventional and more extreme traditions of conservative thought, however, share an open hostility to political liberalism, which they blame both for a “trivialisation” of political life and for the promotion of a relativistic hedonism and a cult of self-interest. In this light, the active embrace of neoliberal economic policies, most clearly instanced by the set of administrative policies imposed over the nascent regime that was established after the ill-fated war in Iraq, is something that has to be both interrogated and explained. This paper accomplishes this task.