The Neoliberal Rationality of Secularism

This chapter explores how the principles of neoliberalism have shaped the ideological landscape of secularism and religion. In contrast to comparative approaches that treat the secular via its iterations in different national contexts, we show how neoliberalism has become the governing logic of secularism and performed a colonialism internal to the western episteme. In this “self-colonialism,” neoliberalism has progressively transcended the economic domain and colonized all other spheres of human existence. By rewriting other imaginaries and systems of value, we suggest, neoliberalism has become a kind of religion. Through a close comparative reading of the work of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, we explore how the two prominent neoliberal economists (and Hayek in particular) laid the foundation for this worldview.