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THE BAD
FAITH IN THE
FREE MARKET
The Radical Promise of
Existential Freedom
Peter Bloom
The Bad Faith in the Free Market
Peter Bloom
The Bad Faith in the

Free Market
The Radical Promise of Existential
Freedom
Peter Bloom
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-76501-3 ISBN 978-3-319-76502-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76502-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936141
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
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Cover Credit : Chaichan Ingkawaranon / Alamy Stock Vector
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International
Publishing AG part of Springer Nature
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Preface
Preliminary Intervention: Confronting Our

A
Bad Faith
It has taken less than two decades since the start of the new millennium
for the end of capitalist history to begin. The idea that liberal democracy
would reign supreme and free markets would rule the globe is crumbling
fast. In its place is a popular revolt that filled with both progressive light
and retrogressive shadows. Perhaps the most crucial question of this tran-
sitional era is whether we can once more have the courage to reimagine
our world in theory and practice. Or will we sacrifice the potential to
create a radically new society on the altar of old ideologies or impassioned
desires for destruction for its own sake?
At the heart of these urgent and fundamental questions is whether we
have the courage to move on from a bad faith in the free market. What
though is precisely meant by bad faith? For the famous existentialist
French philosopher Sartre—who coined the term—it stands for more
than simply believing in a false objective truth. It was the maintaining of
this belief despite our knowledge that it was indeed not worthy of such
idolatry (as nothing in fact is). It is a deep and often brushed aside form
of personal and collective self-deception, the embrace of a divine force to
direct our lives even after it has become all too readily apparent that this
v
vi Preface
God does not exist. It is a bad faith in that it is a continual rejection of

the faith in our freedom to choose the existence we desire, a forsaking of
our agency to transform our reality.
In the present era, there is the danger of our intensifying our faith in a
free market system that clearly does not deserve it. Despite decades of
experts publicly extolling its objectivity and inevitability, the 2008 near
global meltdown represented a profound existential crisis for capitalism.
It supposed inherent meaning, its infallible reflection of human nature,
was in an almost an instant torn asunder and revealed to be hollow. The
market emperor was shown firmly and finally to be wearing no clothes.
And yet our belief in it persists for so many, our embrace of austerity as a
cure-all ticket to economic recovery, our faith that with just a few tweaks
we could hold at bay our looming economic and social catastrophe.
This book is not a naïve call for us to merely stop believing in capital-
ism—as if the abstract rejection of the free market would be enough to
concretely give birth to a different and better society. By contrast, it is to
highlight the importance of recapturing our existential freedom to shape
our historical destiny. It asks why we continue to take the free market or
any system so “seriously”. In the words of Sartre (1956: 627), we must
repudiate the spirit of seriousness. The spirit of seriousness has two charac-
teristics: it considers values as transcendent givens independent of human
subjectivity, and it transfers the quality of “desirable” from the ontological
structure of things to their simple material constitution.
Instead of searching desperately for a permanent and universal truth,

rather than looking upwards for a God to save us, we should bask in our
freedom to create, to experiment, to explore the vast possibilities of our
individual and shared existences.
Milton Keynes, UK Peter Bloom

Contents
1 The Bad Faith in the Free Market: The Need for

Existential Freedom 1
2 Breaking Free from the Free Market: The Existential

Gap of Freedom 19
3 Capitalism’s Existential Crisis: Producing

4 The Facticities of Neoliberalism: Demanding

5 Capitalist Being and Nothingness: Enjoying

6 Subjected to the Free Market: The Subject of

vii
viii Contents
7 Deconstructing the Free Market: The Spectre of

8 Reinvesting in Good Faith: The Radical Promise

of Existential Freedom 171
Index 187
1
The Bad Faith in the Free Market:
The Need for Existential Freedom
It seems impossible to even conceive of a non-capitalist society. As the

social philosopher Jameson (2003: 76) famously declares, “it is easier to
imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Yet
the complete assumption of freedom as exclusively linked to capitalism is
being increasingly challenged. The 2008 financial crisis once again
brought into sharp relief the limits of market freedom. The dream of
meritocracy mixed with personal liberty had turned into a present-day
nightmare of rising inequality, economic insecurity, debt bondage, and
mass downward mobility. It also raised renewed questions of whether the
free market specifically and capitalism generally can provide for a fulfill-
ing personal and social existence.
Emerging from these challenges were fundamental existential con-
cerns. Notably, if the promise of the free market was hollow, then was
freedom even possible? Was this truly the “end of history”—a once opti-
mistic claim about capitalism and liberal democracy that had turned into
a resigned lament? To this end, the social liberty and personal aspirational
impulses previously central to the legitimization of neoliberalism has
transformed into an acceptance over its supposed inevitability and deeper
almost divine truths about human nature and its possible future. Hence,
in place of freedom, free marketers have offered the solace of religion.
© The Author(s) 2018 1

P. Bloom, The Bad Faith in the Free Market,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76502-0_1
2 P. Bloom
There was, of course, always an element of the objective and natural

about capitalism. It represented human nature at its most pure and essen-
tial. It was based on objective economic laws that defied any and all
attempts at human control. Yet as the actual rationale for modern capital-
ism began to falter, its reasonableness weakening in light of actual evidence,
the current free market ideology of neoliberalism became increasingly
supernatural. It now demanded dogmatic belief from its human followers.
Required was an inviolable religious faith in the free market orthodoxy.
A crucial question of our time then is whether we can give up our bad
faith in the free market. The degree to which individually and collectively
we can dramatically reimagine the meaning and practice of freedom. If
we no longer accept that capitalism represents the limit of social possibil-
ity, can we wake up from our dogmatic capitalist slumber to embrace and
explore new potentialities for our personal and shared existence?
Aim of the Book

This book boldly reconsiders the free market. Innovatively combining
existentialist philosophy with cutting-edge post-structuralist and psycho-
analytic perspectives, it argues that present-day capitalism has robbed us
of our individual and collective ability to imagine and implement alter-
native and more progressive economic and social systems. To this effect,
it has deprived us of our radical freedom to choose how we live and what
we can become. In place of this deeper liberty, the free market offers sub-
jects the opportunity to continually reinvest their personal and shared
hopes in its dogmatic ideology and policies. This embrace helps to tem-
porary alleviate rising feelings of anxiety and insecurity at the expense of
our fundamental human agency. This work exposes our present-day bad
faith in the free market and how we can break free from it.
Challenging Freedom
This work attempts to move beyond the existing social limits of market
freedom. The goal, in this respect, is to show the concrete limitations and
ideological narrowness of currently dominant understandings of liberty
The Bad Faith in the Free Market: The Need for Existential… 3
and agency associated with the so-called free market. Doing so, though,
requires a more complete understanding of what actually is market free-
dom. What type of liberty does it idealize, how does it seek to practically
emancipate us, and what more radical forms of freedom does it perhaps
unintentionally gesture towards?
Traditionally, capitalism has defined freedom as… the ability of indi-
viduals to, if we are to use the most technical terms, sell their goods and
labour freely in an open and competitive market. Using more everyday
says language, it is the right to choose one’s profession and lifestyle and
be fairly rewarded for their labour and enterprise. Quoting the early-
nineteenth-century French liberal economist Frederick Bastiat
Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, lib-
erty, or property of another individual, then the common force—for the
same reason—cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or
property of individuals or groups.
Echoing these sentiments in the contemporary era, prominent American

libertarian politician Ron Paul proclaims:
It must be remembered that a vast majority of mankind’s history has been

spent living under the rule of tyrants and authoritarians. The ideas of
Liberty are very new when you consider the big picture. By contrast, vari-
ous forms of socialism and fascism have been adopted over and over again.
Be wary of those who try to present these old and tired ideas as something
new and exciting. Liberty and free markets are the way forward if we truly
desire peace and prosperity.
Significantly, this freedom extends only to opportunity not outcome.

It is the right to freely aspire to be successful, according to one’s own
desires, in a market system. You may try and fail, of course. Yet this failure
does not diminish your freedom as it was based on your own lacking
qualities not due to any flaw in the market itself. According to influential
twentieth-century economist Murray Rothbard, “Free-market capitalism
is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work,
produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through
4 P. Bloom
prices voluntarily arrived at.” Further, no one coerced you into these
actions; all that you do or do not achieve is based on your own free will.
The contemporary free market economist Jeffery Tucker:
Even the richest person, provided the riches comes from mutually benefi-
cial exchange, does not need to give anything “back” to the community,
because this person took nothing out of the community. Indeed, the reverse
is true: Enterprises give to the community. Their owners take huge risks,
and front the money for investment, precisely with the goal of serving oth-
ers. Their riches are signs that they have achieved their aims.
There are, obviously, clear and rather obvious critiques to this narrow ver-
sion of market-based freedom. Perhaps most notably is that, in practice, this
freedom often leads to greater inequality and mass deprivation, conditions
that ultimately lessen rather than enhance autonomy. There is also a stron-
ger critique to be raised on purely freedom grounds. It is that wage labour is
inherently unfree as it is based on a relationship of economic dependency.
This was certainly the view, for instance, of a number of the “founding
fathers” of the American Revolution (Foner 1999). This point in and of
itself is damaging but not fatal to market freedom as the solution to this
dependency problem is economic ownership and entrepreneurism.
A perhaps more damning critique, in this respect, is that this freedom
is historical rather than inherent. To this end, it evolved over time to
reinforce specific power relations and imbalances. The US political scien-
tist Eric MacGilvray (2011: 1) explores this precise dynamic in his recent
book The Invention of Market Freedom:
So complete is this shift in usage that the phrase the “free market” sounds
almost redundant to our ears, and the “libertarian” the partisan of liberty is
generally understood to be a person who favours the extension of market
norms and practices into nearly all areas of life … These dramatic changes
in usage are of more than merely historical interest, because freedom over
the same period of time become one of the most potent words in our politi-
cal vocabulary, and the effort to expand the use of the market as a means of
realizing social outcomes has greatly intensified, especially in recent decades.
It also highlights a crucial tension for advocates of market freedom, one

with definite existential overtures—even if market freedom is the ultimate
freedom, can people be free if they are merely conforming to an inscrip-

tive historical discourse? Put differently, can one be socially overdeter-
mined as a free subject and still be considered free as such?
There are also quite serious philosophical challenges to market free-
dom. In particular, it is unclear whether it is primarily a means or an end?
Arguably, its most famous proponent Milton Friedman has argued that it
is most definitely the latter. For Friedman and other free-marketers, the
government is a necessary evil that must be limited along with efforts to
limit—even if well-intentioned—our “economic freedom”. He notes
“Whether blameworthy or not the use of the cloak of social responsibil-
ity, and the nonsense spoken in its name by influential and prestigious
businessmen, does clearly harm the foundations of a free society”
(Friedman 1970: 1). The creation of a competitive market with minimal
regulations or personal limitations, therefore, is the end goal.
In the literature, this view is epitomized by Ayn Rand where she
famously, or infamously depending on your perspective, writes of busi-
nessman heroes railing against the nefarious attempts of tyrannical gov-
ernments to restrict the entrepreneurial spirit of free individuals. On the
other side of the philosophical divide Sen proposes a capabilities theory
in which the market and market mechanisms are just one set of economic
freedoms that can serve a population’s overall welfare and development.
He describes agency in quite empowering and productive terms as “what
a person is free to do and achieve in pursuit of whatever goals or values he
or she regards as important” (Sen 1985: 2003). For this reason, his
approach has been referred to as “people-centred”,
…which puts human agency (rather than organizations such as markets or

governments) at the centre of the stage. The crucial role of social opportu-
nities is to expand the realm of human agency and freedom, both as an end
in itself and as a means of further expansion of freedom. The word ‘social’
in the expression ‘social opportunity’ … is a useful reminder not to view
individuals and their opportunities in isolated terms. The options that a
person has depend greatly on relations with others and on what the state
and other institutions do. We shall be particularly concerned with those
opportunities that are strongly influenced by social circumstances and pub-
lic policy… (Drèze and Sen 2002 page 6)
6 P. Bloom
These competing views do point to a deeper philosophical tension

plaguing market freedom. It is one that has been widely noted and for
good reason. Does one have the right to freely consent or even actively
choose to be unfree? Fundamentally, capitalism revolves around selling
your labour and indeed your freedom temporarily to the highest bidder.
There is thus an ironic dynamic at the heart of the free market—freedom
extends only so far as having the right to freely select your servitude. Or
more accurately to apply to the servitude that is most attractive to you.
Of course, there is an important additional dimension to this rather
ironic form of market freedom. The exchange for temporary unfreedom
is not merely the guarantee of material survival. It is also the liberty and
resources to pursue happiness outside of work. To this effect, capitalism
revolves around what can be referred to as a freedom transaction—the
selling of freedom for the concrete possibilities of greater future freedom.
Tellingly, this market transaction has recently increasingly spread to
employment itself—a job and a career now critical to the achievement of
personal fulfilment, not just professional satisfaction.
There is perhaps an immediate temptation to simply dismiss market
freedom as a crumbling façade. To throw it unceremoniously onto the
ash heap of history given its quite fatal philosophical and empirical fail-
ings. Yet, to do so ignores its gesturing towards a deeper existential free-
dom—the liberty to continually reinterpret and reshape one’s existence.
The freedom transaction is ultimately at its core an attempt to buy and
embody this radical agency, however, temporary and, in the last instance,
futile. Consequently, as will be explored the free market was always an
existential as much as it was an economic project—one that was similarly
hopeful and flawed on both accounts. The next section will examine the
snuffing out of the dream of this existential market freedom by the rise of
market fundamentalism.
Free Market Evangelists

One of the most striking, and to be fair mocked, figures of the late twen-
tieth and early twenty-first century is the free market evangelical. Almost
exclusively an American invention, they preach to their faithful every
Sunday in mega churches and television programmes the social gospel of

unrestrained capitalism. At first glance, this is the result of a modern-day
Faustian bargain between capitalist and social conservatives. Economic
and political elites are more than happy it seems to sell out social liberty
for a little soul if it will advance their overall interests.
Of course, there has always been a strong religious dimension to capi-
talism. Weber (2002) famously wrote about the inexorable relationship
of the rise of a market economy with Protestant ethics of frugality and
hard work (see also Furnham et al. 1993; Giorgi and Marsh 1990). Yet,
in the present age, this capitalist religiosity has taken on seemingly an
added fervour. More than simply religion—Christianity in particular—
being crucial to the spread of the free market, now capitalism has become
a modern religion all onto itself. In the words of Nobel Prize winning
economist Joseph Stiglitz (2009: 346), “From a historical point of view,
for a quarter of century the prevailing religion of the West has been mar-
ket fundamentalism. I say it is a religion because it was not based on
economic science or historical evidence.”
The above discussed growing market fundamentalism reveals how cap-
italism has entered into a new revivalist phase. Here, the free market is an
almost divine force for delivering economic prosperity and political
democracy. It alone holds the key to human well-being and individual
liberty. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, the market remains
heralded as absolutely critical to our ultimate personal and collective sal-
vation. It reflects an “ineluctability of market forces” based on a “mixture
of implicit and hidden assumptions, myths about the history of their
own countries’ economic development, and special interests camouflaged
in their rhetoric of general good” (Kozul-Wright and Rayment 2007: 14).
All that is required is a little faith in the free market’s saving grace.
Popular shows such as the provocative South Park have already satirically
lamented our worship of the “economy” as if it was godlike rather than
human controlled. Indeed the more seemingly arbitrary and depersonal-
ized the current financialized economy becomes, the more divinely
inspired it appears to be (see Jenkins 2001). All we can do, it seems, is
hope that the economy will recover and once again not smite us with the
scourge of greater recession.
8 P. Bloom
Personally, this market faith demands a recommitment to making one-

self worthy of capitalist salvation. Akin to the evangelical call to “get good
with God” through stronger belief and better living, the new market gos-
pel is personal improvement to appease our free market Lord. Hence
“neoliberal discourses”, according to Konings (2015: 11), are “more
attuned to the relational and affective dynamics of narcissism, demand-
ing not an attenuation of the subject’s attachment to money but precisely
an intensified and more authentic commitment, a spiritual purification
to the subject’s relation to the market.”
In this respect, the idea of self-care becomes inexorably linked to mate-
rial and spiritual consumption, as the ethos of “treat yourself became a
capitalist command”. Not surprisingly, in this respect, it is the age of
market-friendly “self-help” gurus and wisdom (Illouz 2007). It is also tell-
ing that popular culture is now almost obsessed with the capitalist anti-
hero, ranging from Tony Soprano to Heisenberg in Breaking Bad (see Tie
2004) to even Donald Trump as the irreverent US president. Together,
these trends reflect the fervent effort to achieve free market righteousness
and the salacious temptation of market-friendly sinfulness.
The religious transformation of capitalism is profoundly reconfiguring
the theory and practice of market freedom. It increasingly finds itself
identical to traditional understandings of Christian freedom. At stake is
the emancipation from sin through strict self-discipline. Present is the
liberty to practice your faith and the right to preserve orthodoxy in the
face of heretical challenges. It is freedom to submit to a salvationary god,
whether it be Jesus or the free market. Revealed, in turn, is the bad faith
in the free market and the growing need for a more existential form of
freedom.
An Existential Critique of the Market

The free market has been under increasing scrutiny and even outright
attack. It is often pointed to as a failed system representative of a corrupt
status quo. Its more radical critics lambast it as “voodoo economics”, a
mystical ideology that is out of touch with people’s living realities. The
demand from Liberals and progressives for the secularization of politics
includes the religiosity of the free market. Yet amidst these various recrim-
inations there is still little fundamental discussion of a need for a different
theoretical and empirical account of freedom alternative to the one put
forward by capitalism.
However, it is exactly, in this respect, that existentialism remains so
potent and radical. It holds the promise of reactivating human agency,
the ability of people—both individually and collectively—to reinterpret
their realities and freely choose different ones. Such freedom is not naïve,
blissfully ignoring of material conditions and psychic attachments.
Instead it is a profound form of radical, critical reflection and action,
challenging and even demanding subjects reject their idols and meaning-
fully engage with the shaping of their social condition.
Importantly, such existentialism transcends specific debates over the
attractiveness of one set of freedoms over another. Conversely, it high-
lights the eternally unfinished business of freedom. Any attempt to natu-
ralize freedom is questioned as necessarily precluding the deeper human
ability to choose one’s own destiny and way of life. Paradoxically, it is—as
will be shown throughout this book—the intrinsic presence of freedom
in our existence that undermines all attempts at making inherent any
singular expression of what freedom is.
The free market, in turn, is challenged exactly based on its assertion that
it has exhausted the possibilities of freedom. In doing so it runs up against
a fundamental existential freedom. It is the fact that people ultimately
have to choose this existence that its hegemony is only ever dependent on
people literally and figuratively buying into it. The constant refrain that
“There is no alternative” masks a contingent reality, where a historically
specific form of Being is never so stable or indeed permanent.
Nevertheless, the chains of the free market are not simply broken by
imagining them away. They are kept in place by our material and psychic
attachment to our existing freedoms. While we may dismiss, in principle,
capitalism, it is considered an incontrovertible fact that for us to experi-
ence any sense of agency we must abide by its prerogatives and expecta-
tions. To wit, one may not like wage labour, but there are few other viable
avenues to limitedly shape our personal circumstances then by making
oneself more employable in a competitive job market. It is all too easy,
therefore, to dismiss the existential free choice as blind to our material
10 P. Bloom
realities or condemn those who choose the freedom at hand over one that
does not yet exist. A chief aim of this book is to show how it is this gap
between desire and ability, the longing for a different freedom and a pres-
ent which makes it seemingly impossible to realize, that is fertile grounds
for reactivating this fundamental and radical existential freedom—both
in thought and action.
The existential critique of the market then is precisely on the grounds of
freedom. While certainly concerned with its glaring economic and social
problems, from inequality to global poverty, the thrust of its attack is that
the free market limits our possibilities for conceiving and engaging with a
diverse array of freedoms. Its critique is simultaneously eternal and always
historically specific. It calls upon us to take an existential leap of faith
beyond our current foundations, letting go of our limited freedoms, for
the possibilities of experimenting with new ones still to be discovered.
Living in a “Post-Freedom” World

If existentialism promotes freedom as the foundation of all human being
(and therefore beings), it also unsettles all existing freedoms. It is thus a
contradictory force—at once a destroyer and creator of freedom. It trou-
bles human existence as incomplete, universally pointing to that which it
is not—its “non-being”—as a catalyst for transcending what is. However,
it must then be asked, if human existence has no inherent meaning, is any
freedom worth pursuing and investing in? Or are we condemned to an
impossible freedom, more frustrating than liberating?
Market freedom would on the surface seem to offer an imperfect but
plausible way out of this existential conundrum. While clearly not suffi-
cient, it serves as a foundation for making “free choices” and pursuing a
diversity of different types of existences. Yet, as shown, it ultimately sub-
sumes all freedom to its economic and social demands, forcing them to
submit with the fervour of a true believer to its quasi-religious beliefs.
Consequently, it
blends the hardheaded approach to human capital of any successful firm

with a national-theological discourse of moralized sacrifice, a sacrifice
required for the health and survival of the whole. Moralized sacrifice
finesses the paradox of unrewarded conduct normatively prescribed by
neoliberalism. (Brown 2015: 4)
The answer lies, hence, not in the total investment in refounding free-
dom. By contrast, it is in the ironic acceptance and radical engagement
with our fundamental lack of any foundations. In the first instance, this
implies recognizing that life is in fact meaningful—that it is filled with
human created meanings that are available for reinterpretation. It also
requires an honest assessment and judgement as to which aspects of our
existence are we meaningfully prioritizing and in turn what sort of social
reality does this serve to reinforce and reproduce?
However, it also sets a new challenge for humans in relation to free-
dom. It is not so much whether we embody or have perfected a prevailing
version of freedom but instead our willingness and capacity to construct
new freedoms. This challenge is, of course, multifaceted. Specifically, it
calls upon us to set ourselves paradoxically free of freedoms—to recog-
nize which forms of agency are currently defining our existence and
choosing to subvert and potentially upend them. Yet, this admittedly
ironic theoretical troubling of freedom—regardless of how abstractly
radical—is itself insufficient. It is only the first step. The next is to assess
and instantiate new forms of freedom liberated from those of the past
(though not necessarily completely disregarding of them).
Doing so, obviously, is easier written about then done. What is required
is the commitment to a philosophical perspective that constructively
engages with our foundationless existence. While often dismissed as
overly esoteric or an untenable basis for practically theorizing freedom—
current post-structuralist thinking offers just such an opportunity. There
is a common critique that post-structuralism is a complete rejection of
social structures in general, the total relativization of meaning as such.
Nevertheless, this is only part of its philosophical story. It is also a theo-
retical call to critically reflect on what is meaningful, which structures
prevail, in order to better understand how they can be reinterpreted and
how existing culture can operate differently.
12 P. Bloom
Post-structuralism is thus an attempt, in all its broadness, to theoreti-

cally fulfil the existentialist insight that places existence before essence. It
is not a denial that freedom is present or that certain meanings have
value. Rather it is an acceptance that these will always be partial and con-
tingent, respectively. Furthermore, it is perhaps the most full philosophi-
cal expression of Sartre’s observation that we are “condemned to
freedom”—that we must make free choices in a world in which we are
rarely free to fully do so. Similarly, post-structuralism condemns us to
acknowledge and take seriously that we as humans are the ultimate mak-
ers of our meaning and the creators of our living reality.
If there is an underlying pessimism to existentialism, a frustration with
a freedom that is our birthright but rarely our living right, then there is a
rather strange optimism to post-structuralism—especially when it comes
to freedom. In recognizing and critically engaging with our own social
construction, we become free to recreate our existence. To this end, it
embraces existence by first deconstructing its perceived essence. Hence,
by questioning market freedom, not only on normative grounds but on
existential ones, interrogating its history, meanings, and associated con-
tingent practices, we become partially emancipated from its hold over us.
Consequently, freedom moves from being almost exclusively defined
by the market to a full-fledged creative enterprise. More precisely, through
de-essentializing freedom generally and in relation to capitalism particu-
larly, we become free, in turn, to creatively reimagine and materially
experiment with what it could be. In the contemporary age, there is often
a lament that we need more time and freedom to be creative. However,
existential offers a more radical proposition—that we can be creative with
our freedom, that existence is never pre-given and therefore always open
to be changed.
What is key is to embrace the possibilities of a post-freedom world.
Put differently, to critically view any freedom with a scepticism and as a
possibility for reinvention. Freedom, in this respect, becomes not values
to be enshrined and preserved—though undoubtedly their protection at
certain times can certainly be desirable and necessary—but a constant
existential jumping-off point to find out what lies beyond their limited
social horizons. It is a post-free world not in the rejection of freedom but
rather in the fact that through constant processes of interpretation its

potentialities are never exhausted and its exciting possibilities always con-
tained in Being to come.
Going Forward
This book attempts to do more than simply challenge market freedom.
Instead, it desires to critically explore the market freedom produced by
the free market and what opportunities they provide for the creation of
radically new freedoms. Specifically, it explores how we can use critical
theories from Marxism to ideology and discourse analysis to psychoana-
lytic fantasies to deconstruction in order to existentially reinterpret and
transcend capitalism and the free market. The goal, in this respect, is to
reject our bad faith in the free market and reinvest in a good faith over the
fresh possibilities of freedom and existence.
Following this introduction, Chap. 2 will explore the liberating poten-
tial held by existentialism for contemporary efforts to move beyond
restrictive and orthodox market freedoms. Drawing on Sartre’s seminal
early work “Existentialism and Freedom” it will highlight continuing
importance of the insight that “existence proceeds essence”, revealing the
dangers of reifying human inspired and historically specific ways of
understanding and living in the world. It will then trace out how the free
market evolved from a radical existential promise for enhancing human
freedom to a dogmatic discourse limiting its development and growth.
Significantly, it will introduce the concept of an “existential gap” referring
to the always existent chasm between our conscious capacity to choose
how we interpret the world and our often material and social inability to
substantially do so. Finally, it will highlight the positive existential gap
opened up by market freedom, revealing a contemporary “existential
challenge” to “break free from market freedoms” and construct “new
foundations of freedom” in its place.
Chapter 3 will show that the 2008 financial crisis more than chal-
lenged the faith in the free market; it represented a collective existential
crisis where people questioned whether capitalist society and life had
14 P. Bloom
meaning. Inspired by Sartre’s later work in “Search of a Method”, it will

examine the evolution of freedoms from an empowering philosophy for
remaking the world to a stifling discourse limiting such existential agency.
It will then reveal the insights Marxism provides in terms of the socio-
material production of freedom and the reframing of history as the revo-
lutionary reproduction of progressive human freedoms. The near global
financial meltdown thus posed the possibility for not only reforming or
even radical transforming the free market but also breaking free from the
“fundamentalism” that posited capitalism as the only possible option.
Chapter 4 explores how the “facts” of neoliberalism must be trans-
formed into “facticities”, conditions that are currently holding us back
from realizing our existential freedom. It first counterposes supposed
neoliberal “facts”—such as the need to be “fiscally responsible” or the
idea that massive “inequality” is acceptable and even desirable—with
Satre’s interpretation of “facticities”, the events, conditions, and capabili-
ties that impact on what one can and cannot do. This reading allows for
an understanding of how these dogmatic “facts” represent an ideological
hegemony that forecloses the opportunity to conceive and practically
explore alternative modes of freedom. This insight will be critically inves-
tigated, in particular, though using the theories of discursive hegemony
first introduced by Laclau and Mouffe. The relabeling of neoliberal “facts”
as “facticities” thus opens the potential for constructing a counter-
hegemonic politics aimed at expanding a dominant social horizon of free-
dom, in this case away from the narrow limits of the free market.
Chapter 5 expands on the previous one by interrogating the deeper
psychic relationship between capitalism and nothingness. Taking its cue
from Sartre’s famous philosophical text “Being and Nothingness”, it con-
tends that capitalist existence is built on positing a continual nothing-
ness—or sense of experienced lack—that only the market can fulfil. In
times of crisis, this turns apocalyptic with capitalism being posited as the
only thing that can prevent total nothingness. At the affective heart of the
embrace of this market “unfreedom” is the underlying fear that without
capitalism we would dissolve into nothingness, a worry captured in the
notion of the “real” first put forward by the renowned psychoanalytic
thinker Jacques Lacan—our fragmentary “true” nature that must be
masked by a comforting fantastic “reality”. It concludes by positing the
need for creating a radical fantasy of freedom that embraces this nothing-
ness as part of a fundamental drive to be eternally dissatisfied with hege-
monic forms of freedom such as those linked to capitalism and therefore
seeks out new ones.
Chapter 6 investigates how capitalism turns individuals into “subject-
objects”, combining our economic objectification to market demands with
the possibility to choose from a range of market-friendly identities. It
begins by highlighting Sartre’s belief presented in Part II of “Being and
Nothingness” that individuals are denied their existential freedom by turn-
ing themselves into socialized objects whose only purpose is to fulfil their
given cultural role. The French theorist Foucault, for his part, notes how
this subjection to being a mere object of capitalism (or any social system)
is offset and ultimately reinforced through processes of subjectification in
which we are made into conscious and intentional subjects. A new philoso-
phy of existential freedom would, hence, emphasize the overriding impor-
tance of reducing this alienation, providing us the material resources and
subjective tools to freely produce our own selves and society.
Chapter 7 explores how the personal freedom often associated with the
market and existentialism can be combined with a radical collective free-
dom. It continues from the previous chapter by highlighting how for
Sartre there is always a fraught tension between our radical existential
freedom and our “identity projection”, that which we assume ourselves to
be based our social roles and expectations. Thus, for Sartre, existential
freedom is most concretely experienced through individuals forming
their own continual “life project” that focuses not on what one is but has
not yet become. Capitalism, of course, hints at just this possibility in its
obsession with individual social mobility and the liberating potentials of
market rationality yet is limited by its orthodox commitment to market
values. However, existential holds out an eternal “promise”—drawing on
the ethico-political philosophy of Jacques Derrida—for enacting a never
perfected but also perfectable freedom. In this respect, existential free-
dom hangs like a spectre over any and all dogmatic systems—including
the present-day free market.
Chapter 8 will summarize the present dangers of our continued bad
faith in the free market. It would argue that all of the theorists covered,
16 P. Bloom
moreover, suffer from their own implicit bad faith. Marxism in its dog-
matic commitment to class struggle and revolution, Foucault to the
inherent “danger” in all movements and experiences of freedom, and
Lacan to the impossibility of ever truly overcoming our fundamental psy-
chic lack. Yet together they pose a compelling and inspiring vision of
freedom. It will end optimistically by showing how this combining of
existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis can open
up the radical possibilities of having good faith in our potential for sub-
jectively and materially becoming existentially free.
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2
Breaking Free from the Free Market:
The Existential Gap of Freedom
There is a growing belief that, despite its claims, the free market is in
point of fact not especially free. The clear evidence of its negative effects
such as rising inequality and economic insecurity makes this conclusion
seem even more obvious. Yet this combined empirical and normative
critique should be a catalyst for critically reflecting on contemporary
freedom more generally. In other words, it must lead to a positive rei-
magining of current conceptions and enactions of liberty and emancipa-
tion. More precisely, at its most radical and profound, these critiques can
serve as an opening for theoretically exploring the scope of present free-
dom as well as how these efforts are being practically impeded by con-
temporary capitalism.
As the first chapter explained in greater depth, a key claim for the
legitimacy of market freedom is that it is the exclusive or at least the best
pathway for the realization of individual freedom. Recent times have
witnessed this relatively straightforward equation completely reversed.
The market is posited by a growing many as a barrier to feeling free. It is
an oppressive force that blocks an individual or a community from ful-
filling their potential. It detracts from the supposedly inherent right to
“life, liberty, and the pursuit of the happiness”. On a purely material
© The Author(s) 2018 19

P. Bloom, The Bad Faith in the Free Market,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76502-0_2
20 P. Bloom
level, the precariousness of simply being able to materially persist makes

it a capitalist reality more of a struggle for survival than an exercise in
human flourishing and freedom.
Yet even when material survival is secured, the social privileged and
economically well paid, their lives are often defined by a slavish devotion
to profit and the trappings of success. However, they are also marked by
what Rachel Sherman (2017: 2) has recently referred to as the “anxieties
of affluence” in which elites face “conflicts about how to be both wealthy
and morally worthy, especially at a moment of extreme and increasingly
salient economic inequality”. Significantly, these elites have only a mini-
mal amount of ability—or incentive—to fundamentally alter the system
that they ostensibly benefit from than those that are so clearly oppressed
by it. The tyranny of the free market, hence, is simultaneously quantita-
tive and qualitative in nature.
The modern-day critiques of the free market bear a striking resem-
blance to the revolutionary anti-capitalist discourses of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century. Indeed there has been a veritable
reawakening of left-wing thought and politics. From the so-called “Arab
Spring” to the Momentum movement in the UK to “our Revolution” in
the US inspired by the surprising success of “democratic socialist” Bernie
Sanders’s presidential campaign. Each shares an explicit condemnation of
modern capitalism, raging against its growing economic inequality,
entrenched racism, and the global “race to the bottom”. Indeed
Support for anti-establishment parties in the developed world is at the

highest level since the 1930s-and growing … The reasons for this backlash
are rather obvious. The financial crises of 2007–2009 laid bare the scorched
earth left behind by neoliberalism, in which the elites had gone to great
lengths to conceal in both material (financialization) and ideological (“the
end of history”) terms. (Mitchell and Fazi 2017: 1)
However, these diverse movements also have in common a resurgent

radical desire for freedom. Here the very justification for capitalism and
the present-day promotion of is neoliberalism is almost completely
reversed. Now, it is the crucial task is to be free of the “free market”.
Emancipation for an increasingly desperate and indebted population is
Breaking Free from the Free Market: The Existential Gap… 21
found in breaking the socio-economic chains of a predatory financial

system and its elite profiteers. As even an article in the traditionally rather
Centrist New Statesman proclaimed in 2017,
The 2008 financial crisis led to an enduring loss of faith in economic elites.
Capitalism has since failed to deliver on its promise of rising living stan-
dards for the majority. And voters have grown ever more weary of public
spending cuts. (Eaton 2017: N.P.)
The desire for freedom has turned decidedly against the free market.
There is a gap, a break in history, where a once assured source of freedom
is transformed into its greatest nemesis. What this new freedom is, of
course, remains to be discovered. Yet even in such an infant state it haunts
the status quo as an invisible but unsettling ghost. In the movement of
the present there is a vibrant challenge to the current limits on liberty. A
political spark building upwards to a potential firestorm based on the
belief that the possibilities of freedom have not been exhausted and the
potential of the human spirit to shape its development has not been
extinguished. It is nothing less than the beginning of a mass existential
reawakening.
The Growth of the Unfree Market

The free market arose based on its romanticized promise of freedom.
Indeed the very utterance of its name—the free market—conjures up
images of being liberated from social constraints to live freely. Here the
enemy is big government, regulations, and the tyranny of bureaucracy.
Trust is placed in the market to cut through the red tape tying up and
holding down all our aspirations. In practice, the free market has evolved
into a similarly dogmatic and repressive social system.
The history of the free market is the conventional story of a revolution
corrupted. Marx famously wrote that history happens twice “the first
time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. So too is the case of modern
capitalism it would appear. It began as an economic ideology meant to
emancipate people from deprivation and mercantilistic economies that
22 P. Bloom
primarily benefited the socially privileged classes. The industrial revolution

has its roots in the eighteenth-century political and philosophical upheav-
als championing meritocracy and the rights of individuals to “life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness”. They reflected an “enlightenment narra-
tive” chronicling the historical
descent from classical antiquity into the ‘barbarism and religion’, and
the emergence from the latter set of conditions of a ‘Europe’ in which
civil society could defend itself against disruption by either. This history
had two themes: the emergence of a system of sovereign states … and
the emergence of a shared civilization of manners and commerce.
(Pocock 2001: 20)
These radical beginnings soon, however, gave way to the replacement

of one set of elites for another—as capitalists overtook aristocrats and
royals in both influence and increasingly political power. More to the
point, it transformed into a system whose logic was less concerned with
emancipation as it was with global conquest. Consequently,
the empires that mobilized this first European expansion … also obsti-
nately refused to imagine forms of social coexistence not ruled by the logic
of possession, consumption, commoditization, and violence. Colonizing
from its inception, this first modernity built itself upon a structure of polit-
ical, economic, and theological power that claimed universal applicability,
and rendered any expression of difference invisible or subaltern.
(Monasterios 2018: 553)
Crucially, capitalism has always represented an ideal as much as a reality.

Put differently, it exists as both a regulatory material system and a uto-
pian like dream of a better market world. It certainly, in this regard, cre-
ated an “active” worldview for making social sense of the world. However,
it has been just as powerful as an idealized critique against tyrannies,
advocating for the sanctity of human freedom generally. It championed
the ability of people to control their own destinies through their own
hard work and talents and innate talents. It followed a similar historical
logic to the supposedly autonomous and self-created rise of Europe to
economic and political dominance—one that masked its reliance on the

exploitation of others as well as the variety of contextual factors that made
their supposed “superiority” possible. Hence
the internalist story of an autonomous and endogenous ‘rise of the west’

constitutes the founding myth of Eurocentrism. By positing a strong
‘inside-out’ model of social causality (or methodological internalism)—
whereby European development is conceptualized as endogenous and self-
propelling—Europe is conceived as the permanent ‘core’ and ‘prime mover’
of history. (Anievas and Nişancıoğlu 2015: 7)
Nevertheless, by the end of nineteenth century, this supposedly liber-

ating ideology had evolved into a full-scale oppressive idealization. More
precisely, what once was an expansion of human agency had become a
restraining orthodoxy limiting its possibilities (see Appleby et al. 1996).
In this respect, “freedom meant prosperity; freedom meant progress; free-
dom meant having willing workers as opposed to unwilling ones”
(Temperley 1977: 109). It was the gilded age where the gold at the top
could not cover the mass material deprivation and inequality. It required,
therefore, “the expansion of bureaucratic states as power structures main-
taining police and military control over potentially rebellious popula-
tions and reproducing the conditions of capitalist accumulation” (Alford
and Friedland 2011: xiii). Further, previously promising democracies
were increasingly bought and sold to the highest bidder. The emergence
of Marxism and socialism as one of the defining philosophies of the
twentieth century was inexorably linked to its urgent critique of a capital-
ism that had run amok. In the famous words of Marx and Engels “A
spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism” (2016: 9).
A century later the tables had turned considerably. Following the car-
nage of WWII and the global misery of the great depression before that,
it was taken almost as a matter of course that the market needed substan-
tial regulation. The question was no longer if the state should intervene
in the economy but rather to what extent (see Kavanagh 1987; Leys
1997). The initial stirrings of the “free market” were themselves born out
of their own critical stance to this so-called post-war “liberal consensus”:
24 P. Bloom
With modernization discredited and no single overriding narrative of prog-

ress to replace it, neoliberals took the field with their own promises of
accelerated, benevolent change … Neoliberalism, in other words, prevailed
precisely because it revived a vision of the global mission of the United
States and made the same sort of transformative claims that modernization
had. (Latham 2010: 158)
Thus, it was in its own admittedly Conservative manner a revolutionary

challenge to a new world order defined by the struggle between Liberalism
and Communism.
Tellingly, the movement that would later be both academically and, to
an extent, popularly referred to as neoliberalism arose as a clarion call for
freedom. It championed the nurturing of a market freedom that was both
intrinsic and instrumental in character—equally inherent and practical
in its provision of human liberty. Its proponent, to this end, argued that
it reflected nothing less than the most pure expression of natural human
freedom (Bernstein 1971; Tipps 1973).
The establishment of the free market permitted the unrestrained pur-
suit of personal interest as well as the supposed most assured route to
avoid the bondage of the past. One of the most influential and renowned
neoliberal thinkers Hayek writes in his book The Road to Serfdom that
when economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it

creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery. It has
been well said that, in a country where the sole employer is the state, oppo-
sition means death by slow starvation.
It was deeply, therefore, existential in its attraction. The coming of the

free market promised people the potential to create their own meanings
and be firmly in control of their own individual existences. Its later mass
appeal as the catalyst for the creation of an “aspirational society” is hence
completely understandable (despite as would be borne out by experience
largely misguided).
There is an often all too common tendency when analysing neoliberal-
ism to reduce it to its crudest economic level—pure greed and self-interest.
Doing so ignores the profoundly emancipatory heart of neoliberalism,
the market as the supposed liberation of all people from the clutches of
government bureaucracy to follow their dreams. It was a symbolic stroke
against the threat of an all-controlling party or Big Brother, for a new free
market system in which individual possibility was in principle limitless.
Ironically, the rise of the free market was also one of the most sustained
and politically successful examples of a collective movement for greater
existential freedom. From its roots in the 1950s as a marginalized eco-
nomic critique to its development into a radical right-wing force in the
1960s to an increasingly mainstream populism in the 1970s, it grew into
power on a wave of fresh enthusiasm that together humans could dra-
matically transform their social condition. It was promoted as nothing
less than a full-scale “neoconservative revolution” declaring that “the state
must never govern society, dictate to free individuals how to dispose of
their private property, regulate a free market economy or interfere with
the God-given right to make profits and amass personal wealth” (Hall
2011). It demanded not mere change or tinkering around the edges of a
seemingly adrift and stagnating economic order but a full-scale alteration
of its principles and practices.
This sunny revolutionary optimism was most welcomed by many
within a population caught in the apparently inescapable battle between
of Liberalism that had lost its way and a really existing socialism that had
become the modern symbol of tyranny. Nevertheless, the destructive con-
sequences of this “new dawn” were quick to appear and ultimately long-
standing. Inequality skyrocketed, poverty increased, civil liberties were
curtailed as historically marginalized groups were further demonized and
repressed. Required fundamentally was expansive “police and legal struc-
tures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guar-
antee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets” (Harvey
2005: 2). Moreover, the two largest original proponents of neoliberal-
ism—the US and the UK—were propped up economically from massive
public defence spending and the discovery of Scottish oil, respectively.
In the face of mounting empirical evidence that its freedom was a
mirage, its supporters turned to touting its inherent necessity. These
sentiments followed in a tragic modernist tradition of cloaking contin-
gent political ideas in supposedly unassailable rationalist dogma. As such
26 P. Bloom
Neoliberalization has in effect swept across the world like a vast tidal wave
of institutional reform and discursive adjustment. While plenty of evidence
shows its uneven geographical development, no place can claim total
immunity (with the exception of a few states such as North Korea).
Furthermore, the rules of engagement now established through the WTO
(governing international trade) and by the IMF (governing international
finance) instantiate neoliberalism as a global set of rules. All states that sign
on to the WTO and the IMF (and who can afford not to?) agree to abide
(albeit with a “grace period” to permit smooth adjustment) by these rules
or face severe penalties. (Harvey 2005: 23)
The free market was proffered as absolutely essential for the development
of liberal democracy politically. Reasoning was in time evolved to reflect
the idea that these policies, whether or not popularly desired, were based
on iron-clad economic laws.
By the end of the twentieth century and start of the new millennium,
it was simply accepted that the free market was a necessary and unchange-
able reality that could not be fundamentally altered. At best it could be
politically negotiated with in regards to the terms and relative limits of its
overall social and economic domination. Human freedom was once again
reduced to small-scale battles over the fine print of an entrenched and
permanent form of existence.
Existentialism and Humanism

The rise and stagnation of the free market has, as shown, come at a
great potential cost to human freedom. In championing market free-
dom, it robbed individuals and communities of the ability to define for
themselves the world and act accordingly. Rather, it offered them a pre-
packed bill of goods selling not only the benefits but also the immuta-
bility of this capitalist agency. Thus ironically in promoting its own
freedom, it suppresses humanity’s more fundamental freedom. This
paradoxical championing and repression of freedom reflects the con-
tinuing philosophical and practical significance of existentialism for
our times.
While existentialism is by no means defined by any one thinker or set

of ideas, arguably the most notable and comprehensive of its proponents
was the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. One of the most renowned
and influential thinkers of the twentieth century, during his long, illustri-
ous, and at times controversial career a philosopher, playwright, novelist,
political theorist, and even biographer. His best-known works include the
philosophical tome “Being and Nothingness”, his novel Nausea, his plays
such as No Exist, and his later unfinished philosophical treatise seeking to
combine existentialism and Marxism Critique of Dialectical Reason. Both
a radical and widely admired thinker of his age, Sartre famously refused
the Nobel Prize for literature in the 1960s stating he did not want to be
“transformed” by the award and was pardoned from arrest for his role in
the 1968 Paris protests by none other than President Charles De Gaulle
who was quoted as saying “You do not arrest Voltaire”.
One of his earliest and most widely cited philosophical defences of
existentialism was in his 1946 published lecture “Existentialism and
Humanism”. Though he would later distance himself from many of its
key claims, it remains a compelling place to begin exploring the contem-
porary relevance of existentialism. In it, he reaffirms a central premise of
his longer earlier work “Being and Nothingness” that “existence precedes
essence”. Specifically, he refers to the fact that there is no creator guiding
our actions nor external force predetermining them. Therefore, we are
“condemned to freedom” as we are tasked with recognizing that we are
their progenitor and consequently must take full responsibility for them.
Quoting Sartre (1948: 33–34) at length,
existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God

does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding val-
ues in an intelligible heaven. …For if indeed existence precedes essence,
one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and
specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism—man is
free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we
provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior.
Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of
values, any means of justification or excuse. We are left alone, without
excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.
28 P. Bloom
Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at lib-

erty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is respon-
sible for everything he does…
While an ultimately optimistic and potentially liberating philosophi-

cal account of human existence, Sartre admits that this realization of our
fundamental freedom produces a sense of anguish. More precisely, it is an
emotional response at coming to face with their freedom and the respon-
sibilities this entails. According to Sartre (Ibid.: 32),
In making the decision, he cannot but feel a certain anguish. All leaders
know that anguish. It does not prevent their acting, on the contrary it is the
very condition of their action, for the action presupposes that there is a
plurality of possibilities, and in choosing 4 one of these, they realize that it
has value only because it is chosen. Now it is anguish of that kind which
existentialism describes, and moreover, as we shall see, makes explicit
through direct responsibility towards other men who are concerned. Far
from being a screen which could separate us from action, it is a condition
of action itself.
However, it is also exactly this anguish that in his view propels us to make
judgements as to how we would like to interpret and live in the world, a
judgement that extends not only to ourselves but to humanity generally.
In this spirit, he introduces his strangely hopeful concept of existential
despair. Far from its usual connotations of abjection, it is an acceptance
of oneself as the free shaper of their lives. He famously declares, in this
respect, “In fashioning myself, I fashion Man.” It is this despair that
serves as a catalyst for individuals to embrace their conscious existence as
a “being-for-itself ” rather than an unconscious and completely natural-
ized “being-in-itself ”. This explicit realization of their being allows them
to actively engage with their freedom, make free choices, and accept their
consequences. Thus
Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if
by despair one means—as the Christians do—any attitude of unbelief,
the despair of the existentialists is something different … Not that we
believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of
His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand
that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the
existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine
of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair
with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope. (Ibid.: 56)
Sartre does though acknowledge the darker aspects of this freedom. In

particular, he introduces the notion of abandonment to depict the loneli-
ness people experience when they must confront that we are alone in the
universe—without a god or preordained nature to guide our beliefs or
practices. Hence, “That is what ‘abandonment’ implies, that we ourselves
decide our being. And with this abandonment goes anguish” (Ibid.: 39).
We are thus consigned to a sense of divine abandonment and an accep-
tance that we are the ultimate determiners of our own fate. Whilst this
certainly can be emotionally difficult, it is also a necessary trauma to the
empowering embrace of our freedom.
“Existentialism and Humanism” therefore provides one of Sartre’s ear-
liest and most passionate testaments to the potentially liberating implica-
tions of existentialism. It proposes a human existence which at its essence
is defined by its freedom. Although propounded over half a century ago,
this account of radical freedom resonates with the current epoch still
steeped in our dogmatic acceptance of the free market. It stands as a con-
tinuing clarion call to reclaim our freedom by having the courage and
will to topple our false market idols.
The Gap of Freedom

Existentialism may appear to offer a rather straightforward account of
freedom. We are the makers of our own reality and thus must accept the
responsibility that this implies. It is not so much whether we want to be
free, in Sartre’s view. Rather it is that we are free and it is our choice
whether to accept it or not. However, this does raise critical complications
for the theory and practice of freedom. Specifically, it highlights an exis-
tence that is simultaneously already free and always striving to be freer.
30 P. Bloom
A common refrain from the past and present is the desire “to be free”.
This sentiment signifies the longing to shed oppressive norms and power
relations inhibiting individual agency. Despite being close to a cliché, it
would be seemingly hard to argue such aspirations. However, existential-
ism to an extent reverses this conventional formula—it asks how can we
be free of Being. To this end, a chief component of being free is precisely
the recognition that there is the possibility of existing beyond the present
order. That the possibilities of Being are never exhausted and as such
freedom requires thinking and moving beyond its current version.
Introduced then is a crucial paradox of freedom. On the one hand,
freedom is fundamental to human existence. There is no God or underly-
ing transcendental force dictating our actions or inherently structuring
our experience of reality. Our experiences are never predetermined or
predestined. They are ours to shape as we so choose. On the other, every
moment is a further realization that such freedom remains incomplete.
The very act of freedom is grounded in the consciousness that one is not
yet totally free.
Freedom thus resides in this tension between these competing modes
of being. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger—a major influ-
ence on Sartre—introduces the ontological difference distinguishing
between the general structure of Being and the actual existence of beings.
Being gives birth to beings but is never exhausted by them nor is Being
ever fully revealed by the actual experiences of being. Similarly, taking
inspiration from Sartre’s insights, it can be said that there is a freedom
difference, in so much that Being implies total freedom and yet being
and beings are only ever at best partially free. Freedom is then never a
finished product.
Consequently, freedom is at once a liberating promise and an inscrip-
tive reality. It is an eternally elusive birthright, the cornerstone of human
existence shadowing each and every one of our decisions. However, it
additionally exists as a concrete means for shaping our reality and avoid-
ing being completely defined by our environment. In this respect, free-
dom constantly runs the risk of being essentialized. We rarely if ever
experience pure freedom, it is always a limited version of it. Moreover, this
partial expression of freedom can easily become reified and all-pervasive—
put forward as the one and only way to experience a sense of agency full
stop. And as is the case with market freedoms, these socialized freedoms
are commonly justified as indicative of our deeper “human nature”.
There is therefore an existential gap at the core of our existence.
Namely, it is the chasm between our longing to be totally free and our
recognized actuality that we are not so. This gap is constantly being filled
by social discourses trumpeting specific types of freedoms. Hence, free-
dom evolves into the very thing which it is meant to destroy—an essen-
tialized force for determining human existence. It is by breaking free,
ironically, from existing freedoms that that gap of freedom is widened
enough to allow new freedoms to exist.
The Present Challenge of Existential Freedom

The global growth of the unfree market has largely defined the twenty-
first century. The intentional spread of neoliberalism to all corners of the
world reflect less a liberation for oppressed populations and more the
acceptance of a repressive system that can neither be stopped or funda-
mentally altered. As noted political theorist Colin Crouch (2012: N.P.)
observed,
Many fear that neoliberalism will never be defeated. They may be right if
their fears are that the interests sustaining the neoliberal system are too
powerful. When they claim neoliberalism will prevail because there are no
viable alternatives, however, they are quite wrong. The ideas are out there;
they are widely understood and coherent; there are even good examples of
them in action.
Its seemingly inevitable reach extended beyond geographic boundaries,

ceaselessly expanding with an unstoppable certainty into all areas of cul-
tural existence.
While there is increasing emphasis placed on the material effects of this
total marketization, its negative contribution to our shared freedom has
received considerably less attention. However, it is becoming increasingly
clear that neoliberalism poses perhaps above all else a profound modern-
day existential challenge. Thus
32 P. Bloom
The conceptual expansion of neoliberalism from economic policy to politi-

cal power is present more broadly in the literature as the idea of ‘capital
resurgent’: a reassertion of capitalist class power that seeks to disengineer
the post-war compromises of tripartite corporatism and expanded social
welfare. (Venugopal 2015: 168)
Highlighted in turn was a dramatic reversal to the public perception of

capitalism generally and the free market specifically. Traditionally their
desirability was intimately related to their providing a compelling sup-
posed answer to the fundamental human question of freedom. Hence all
non-market systems were customarily rejected on principle as being
inherently unfree. Consequently, even while acknowledging that it was
not working perfectly, British Prime Minister Theresa May publicly stated
that the free market remained the “only sustainable means of raising the
living standards of everyone in a country” (Elliott 2017: N.P.).
Theoretically, this points to post-foundationalist ideas of “problemati-
zation”. First popularized by Foucault, it refers to the ways a specific
social concern or issue comes to predominantly shape existent social
knowledge and practices. It denotes “[not] behaviours or ideas, not soci-
eties and their ‘ideologies’ but the problematization through being offers
itself to be, necessarily thought—and the practices on the basis of which
these problematizations are formed” (Foucault 1985: 11–12). This prob-
lematization takes on an existential quality in its focusing of individuals
on specific freedoms at the expense of others, thus limiting their overall
agency for reinterpreting and transforming their existence. Hence,
according to the renowned French Marxist Louis Althusser (1969: 164),
[T]o say that this is a problem implies that we are not dealing merely with
some imaginary difficulty, but with a really existing difficulty poses us in the
form of a problem, that is in a form governed by imperative conditions.
In this respect, the free market is exclusively focused on realizing mar-

ket freedoms, serving as discursive and practical barrier for the explora-
tion of alternative ways of seeing and being in the world.
The failure of neoliberalism to deliver on this promise of freedom,
however, has catalysed a new opportunity to redefine and engage with
freedom. An all too common lament of the contemporary age is that the
attacks against the reigning status quo with equal passion from the per-
ceived margins of both the Right and Left. For those from the privileged
“centre ground” they may appear to be nearly identical barbarians threat-
ening at the gates of their free market civilization. In the words of social
commentator Pankaj Mishra (2016: N.P.), “The seismic events of 2016
have revealed a world in chaos—and one that old ideas of liberal rational-
ism can no longer explain”. While such political myopia is an obvious
indication of elite blinders, the anti-establishment ethos growing across
the ideological spectrum, nevertheless, reflects a shared existential frustra-
tion. It gestures towards a rising mass desire for people not dogmatic
ideologies or social systems to determine their own social destiny.
At the heart of these movements is a beating desire for recapturing a
personal and collective sense of existential freedom—even if obviously
very few if any would articulate it in such explicit terms. The defining
feature of the free market is no longer its emancipatory possibilities—its
trumped-up claims of limitless individual mobility and liberation from a
tyrannical state. Rather it is found in its perceived inevitability. Indeed,
This populist backlash reminds us that the rewards of globalization are not
evenly distributed, and as a result there has been some questioning of the
idea that borders should be open to trade—as well as concerns about what
might happen instead. (Ghemawat 2017: N.P.)
The discourses surrounding globalization stand as a prime contemporary

example of this supposed inescapable limit imposed by the market on
human potential.
What is being witnessed, hence, is the reintroduction of existential
freedom as a driving political force. It has been reactivated as an urgent
demand for freedom upon the status quo. Theoretically, this can be
described as the transformation of the problem of freedom into the
challenge of freedom. Reflected is the shift in sentiment from trying to
merely perfect an existing form of freedom to demanding, even if initially
only as a form of critique, a renewal of human agency to shape the pres-
ent and future. Freedom, in turn, goes from a problem to be solved to an
intervening challenge calling for radical solutions.
34 P. Bloom
Breaking Free from the Unfree Market

The free market is increasingly assailed for its creation of present material
inequities and over fears that it will be responsible for our future material
destruction. Critically, it is condemned for its creeping corruption of our
democracy and civic society. To this end,
Both persons and states are construed on the model of the contemporary
firm, both persons and firms are expected to comport themselves in ways
that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future
value, and both persons and states do so through practices of entrepreneur-
ialism, self-investment, and/or attracting investors. (Brown 2017: 22)
Explicitly relevant to questions of freedom, scholars are progressively

linking the rise of marketization with the strengthening of political
authoritarianism and civic illiberalism (see Bloom 2016). However, the
free market also is open to profound criticism on existential grounds.
A critical aspect of this system, in this regard, is its universal promotion
of market freedom as necessary and desirable in all areas of human exis-
tence. This spread of marketization extends, as mentioned above, from the
political realm all the way to our interpersonal relationships. Significantly,
its appeal rests in its social framing as the best means for experiencing
freedom regardless of one’s aspirations. It stands as the very “foundation of
freedom” according to Eamonn Butler (2013: 13) as “Freedom creates
prosperity. It unleashes human talent, invention and innovation, creating
wealth where none existed before. Societies that have embraced freedom
have made themselves rich. Those that have not have remained poor.” It is
sold to the public as an essentialized freedom, an inherent means for per-
sonally shaping their reality to reflect their diverse desires. Tellingly, it
has become incorporated into the common sense way many of us interpret,
live in, and understand the world. The creation of this neoliberal system
has entailed much ‘creative destruction’, not only of prior institutional
frameworks and powers … but also of divisions of labour, social relations,
welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, repro-
ductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart. (Harvey
2005: 3)
Nevertheless, this legitimization of the free market has recently taken a

rather noticeable existential turn. In the wake of a financial crisis, the
religiosity surrounding market freedom has somewhat waned. As such
Once the failure of free trade, deregulation, and monetarism came to be

seen as leading to a “new normal” of permanent austerity and diminished
expectations, rather than just to a temporary banking crisis, the inequali-
ties, job losses, and cultural dislocations of the pre-crisis period could no
longer be legitimized—just as the extortionate taxes of the 1950s and
1960s lost their legitimacy in the stagflation of the 1970s. If we are witness-
ing this kind of transformation, then piecemeal reformers who try to
address specific grievances about immigration, trade, or income inequality
will lose out to radical politicians who challenge the entire system. And, in
some ways, the radicals will be right. (Kaletsky 2017)
In its place have come renewed philosophical questions as to whether

it in does represent “human nature” and practically whether it is the only
way forward. Revealed is a growing anguish with neoliberalism, a dis-
tancing of ourselves from its dogmatic embrace and a realization that we
are free to determine which norms and practices should guide our
existence.
This awareness of our fundamental freedom separate from and pro-
gressively counter to that of the free market has thus opened up new
avenues for socially conceiving and practically engaging with freedom. To
this effect, it has produced a palatable optimism that the system can be
changed and that we as humans can be the driver of this transformation.
This optimism ranges from large-scale political movements on both the
Left and the Right seeking a “revolution” for upending a once sacred
status quo to small-scale efforts to reconfigure social relations away from
those dictated by the market such as the sharing economy. Emerging,
hence, in existential terms is a despairing capitalism, its hopeful destruc-
tion as essentialized way of viewing and acting in the world and the
reawakening of our existential freedom to choose alternative modes of
existence in its place.
Such radical optimism is itself confronted with widespread feelings of
existential anger and abandonment associated with the loss of our previ-
36 P. Bloom
ous inviolable faith in market salvation. There is a definite wrathful anger

and anxiety that comes from realizing that our idols are false and beliefs
hollow. Indeed, the acknowledgement that “God is Dead” is usually as
mournful as it is gleeful. It is exactly in this mourning for a divine force
that is slipping away in which bad faith grows and prospers. Many con-
tinue to believe that the free market can deliver us from our economic
and social evils. If only we asked it for to forgive us for our heresy and
recommitted to it with a renewed fervour, our sins could be atoned.
The perhaps most pressing and profound challenge of our times, then,
is to break free from the free market, to dispose of its essentialized market
freedom and be willing to seek out new ones emancipated from any
pseudo-religious blinders. It is to take responsibility for the shared condi-
tion of our existence and commit to refashioning society according to
different principles. It is a stark but also optimistic that the choice of his-
tory remains open and more importantly is ours still to make and remake.
Significantly, it also points to the need to existentially acknowledge that
we are not only condemned to be free but also to decide upon the type of
freedom that we will temporarily live with.
The New Foundations of Freedom

The challenge of freedom, one that always lies dormant in wait, never
obviously occurs in a vacuum. They may appear as moments or often
sudden radical breaks, or they may be fueled by the general decline in the
“truth” and promises of existent social order. The current existential
desires to be free from the free market are no different. While its struc-
tural roots are certainly found in the unregulated greed of a financial
system run amok, its seeds spring from an attempt to exist in a world
seeking to transcend current realities for new ones. To this effect, post-
structuralism has the potential to be a key theoretical perspective for
understanding and guiding these novel attempts at freedom.
On the surface, the relationship between freedom and post-structuralism
is if not completely inimical then at the very least not immediately appar-
ently complementary. Indeed an oft-repeated critique of this admittedly
broad theoretical perspective is its pronounced lack of robust conception
or defence of any sort of inherent liberty. It is argued that
…the denial of an autonomous subject leads to the denial of any meaning-

ful concept of freedom, which again leads to the impossibility of any eman-
cipatory politics. When there is no authentic subjectivity to liberate, and
power as the principle of constitution has no outside, the idea of freedom
becomes meaningless. Since we are always products of codes and disci-
plines, the overthrow of constraints will not free us to become natural
human beings. Henceall that we can do is produce new codes and disci-
plines. (Oksala 2009: 1–2; note that the author does not endorse this view
but is only presenting it)
Its basis in social constructionism leaves it vulnerable to attacks of

political relativism and a less than full-throttled belief in the sanctity of
freedom of any kind. As renowned philosopher Todd May (1994: 6)
observes (before morally defending post-structuralism on consequential-
ist grounds as having a theory of power that is both “creative and perva-
sive”) “Critics of the post-structuralist approach to political philosophy,
especially those associated with Critical Theorists … have seen the lack of
moral grounding for post-structuralist claims as one of the most prob-
lematic areas of its thought”.
These critiques, while overly broad and commonly polemic, have nev-
ertheless some credence. Putting aside the shared mistakes of many on the
Left in confusing revolution with dictatorship, it is telling that so much of
post-structuralism’s main proponents normatively revert back into what
may appear to be a relatively conventional account of liberal or republican
forms of democratic freedom and tolerance. However, it also provides the
philosophical tools for deepening our critical engagement with existential
freedom. A central value of post-structuralism is that it frees us from the
tyranny of inscriptive and essentialized structures and meanings. In place
of inherent freedom, it offers a more emancipating relative freedom. Put
differently, in its constant unsettling of truth and innate ideas of human
nature, it affords us greater opportunities to embrace a conscious exis-
tence as what can be termed as “beings-for-ourselves”.
Importantly, to assert that we are free from structures and meanings
does not imply that we completely dispose of them. Conversely, it
demands that we treat them as socially constructed—and therefore utterly
changeable—frameworks that shape our existence. Post-structuralism, in
this spirit, provides individuals and communities the critical perspective
38 P. Bloom
to begin undoing our perceived essences and uncovering existing gaps of

freedom. While such gaps are always with us, post-structuralism permits
us to encounter them existentially as opposed to essentially. We do not
seek to overcome through any innate or intrinsic form of freedom. By
contrast, we view them as an opportunity to discover new freedoms and
fresh modes of existence.
Moreover, this is no mere abstract concern. To once again paraphrase
Sartre, we are “condemned to contingency”. No matter how much we
seek to escape the mutability of the world, to naturalize and essentialize
it, we will always ultimately be confronted with an existence that defies
any complete predetermination or teleology. Yet this also proves true in
the reverse, as that which is deemed necessity must continually contend
with the forces of contingency, seeking always to explain its incomplete-
ness and cover over constantly emerging existential gaps.
What post-structuralism does, in turn, is to reveal that the only true
necessity is contingency and the existential freedom that this implies. If
this realization can be overwhelming and dispiriting it can also be liberat-
ing and invigorating. It grants us novel opportunities to build alternative
social foundations in the space of these gaps. Oliver Marchant speaks,
hence, of a “foundational difference”, referring to the persistent and para-
doxically productive tension that exists between the inability of any
structure or truth to be total or final and our just as certain inability to
ever live completely free from them. It is from such dynamic roots, hence,
that we are able to perpetually refashion our existence and forge ever
newer foundations of freedom.
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The Bad Faith in The Free Market 1St Ed Edition Peter Bloom Full Chapter PDF

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The Bad Faith in the Free Market 1st ed.

Edition Peter Bloom

Religious Ethics in the Market Economy 1st ed. Edition

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and

Children, Young People and the Press in a Transitioning

Good Faith in Contractual Performance in Australia 1st

The Socialist Market Economy in Asia: Development in

The Tickler's Jam Murders 1st eBook Ed. Edition Peter

Activism, Change and Sectarianism in the Free Patriotic

Housing Market Dynamics in Africa 1st ed. Edition El-

The Bad Faith in the

ISBN 978-3-319-76501-3 ISBN 978-3-319-76502-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936141

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover Credit : Chaichan Ingkawaranon / Alamy Stock Vector

Printed on acid-free paper

 Preliminary Intervention: Confronting Our

God does not exist. It is a bad faith in that it is a continual rejection of

Instead of searching desperately for a permanent and universal truth,

Milton Keynes, UK Peter Bloom

1 The Bad Faith in the Free Market: The Need for

2 Breaking Free from the Free Market: The Existential

3 Capitalism’s Existential Crisis: Producing

4 The Facticities of Neoliberalism: Demanding

5 Capitalist Being and Nothingness: Enjoying

6 Subjected to the Free Market: The Subject of

7 Deconstructing the Free Market: The Spectre of

8 Reinvesting in Good Faith: The Radical Promise

It seems impossible to even conceive of a non-capitalist society. As the

© The Author(s) 2018 1

There was, of course, always an element of the objective and natural

Aim of the Book

Echoing these sentiments in the contemporary era, prominent American

It must be remembered that a vast majority of mankind’s history has been

Significantly, this freedom extends only to opportunity not outcome.

It also highlights a crucial tension for advocates of market freedom, one

freedom, can people be free if they are merely conforming to an inscrip-

…which puts human agency (rather than organizations such as markets or

These competing views do point to a deeper philosophical tension

Free Market Evangelists

Sunday in mega churches and television programmes the social gospel of

Personally, this market faith demands a recommitment to making one-

An Existential Critique of the Market

Living in a “Post-Freedom” World

blends the hardheaded approach to human capital of any successful firm

Post-structuralism is thus an attempt, in all its broadness, to theoreti-

rather in the fact that through constant processes of interpretation its

meaning. Inspired by Sartre’s later work in “Search of a Method”, it will

© The Author(s) 2018 19

level, the precariousness of simply being able to materially persist makes

Support for anti-establishment parties in the developed world is at the

However, these diverse movements also have in common a resurgent

found in breaking the socio-economic chains of a predatory financial

The Growth of the Unfree Market

primarily benefited the socially privileged classes. The industrial ­revolution

These radical beginnings soon, however, gave way to the replacement

Crucially, capitalism has always represented an ideal as much as a reality.

economic and political dominance—one that masked its reliance on the

the internalist story of an autonomous and endogenous ‘rise of the west’

Preliminary Intervention: Confronting Our

Milton Keynes, UK Peter Bloom

1 The Bad Faith in the Free Market: The Need for

2 Breaking Free from the Free Market: The Existential

3 Capitalism’s Existential Crisis: Producing

4 The Facticities of Neoliberalism: Demanding

5 Capitalist Being and Nothingness: Enjoying

6 Subjected to the Free Market: The Subject of

7 Deconstructing the Free Market: The Spectre of

8 Reinvesting in Good Faith: The Radical Promise

Aim of the Book

Free Market Evangelists

An Existential Critique of the Market

Living in a “Post-Freedom” World

The Growth of the Unfree Market

primarily benefited the socially privileged classes. The industrial revolution

Existentialism and Humanism

The Gap of Freedom

The Present Challenge of Existential Freedom

Breaking Free from the Unfree Market

The New Foundations of Freedom