There are certain things which are never discussed, never thought about, don't appear
(people appear not to be conscious of them), which nevertheless form a grounding for social
and political life. This is what [Pierre Bourdieu] called "habitus." They are the hidden things
which we take for granted. They are what Gramsci called "common sense." They're so
common sense they seem natural. And we often talk about people behaving naturally. Well,
when when they do that Bourdieu would want to say in reality they're responding to cultural signals
and so on, but they will attribute it to nature, their own nature. It is in their own nature to be
this way. And so habitus is a very interesting kind of concept because it then leads into
this question of, okay, what is the habitus of neoliberalism? And how does that habitus
actually resonate in the world? And again it comes back to this notion of individuality, and
difference, and how difference should be thought about. And I think about this when I',
sort of working myself. Something occurs and i immediately translate it in this way or that way,
and then I say to myself well, no it's not really this way or that way. But that's the habitus at
work. And all of us it seems have undergone a change not only in the conduct of conduct
but also in the habitus. And there is a neoliberal habitus if you like. And this struck
me a great deal in the in the other direction because back in the 1970s, about 1972 or 1973,
Richard Nixon, president of the United States, was faced with a whole wave of anti-capitalist
legislation (in the environmental protection agency, the occupational safety and health,
consumer protection, all those kinds of things) and he was signing all
these into law and he jokingly said, "I guess we are all Keynesians now."
And that was a telling kind of comment because it meant that he saw this as being part
of the order and that he could sign these things because somehow rather they were compatible with
how the world was. We were all Keynesians now so as a Keynesian he would sign these things.
Now in the mid 1990s I remember kind of looking around and suddenly thinking to myself,
we're all neo-liberals now. This was a time when Blair and Clinton were
articulating a progressive left politics which is actually straight neoliberalism. What Clinton was
about, and Blair was about with the famous third way in Britain, this was-- neoliberalism was
becoming, if you like, the habitus in which everybody-- so which all politics was was
cast. And this is what Margaret Thatcher was about when she said there's no such thing as society,
there's only a family. There's only individuals and their families. This is what she was about
when she said "there is no alternative." And when the the perestroika came and the world
changed and Margaret Thatcher said basically to Gorbachev she said, "there is no alternative."
And that inevitability, that kind of almost it is a fact of nature rather than a fact
of politics and culture and all the rest of it, it becomes terribly important. And this
is when neoliberalism becomes embedded in our consciousness and embedded in our subconscious.
And that makes it extremely difficult to get out of neoliberal ways of thinking,
even though it's lost its political legitimacy and it's lost to all kinds of other things, even
though it's just done that. And this is how I see things going on in the United States right now.