Too-Late Liberalism: From Promised Prosperity to Permanent Austerity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this chapter, we introduce the concept of too-late liberalism to describe both the illiberal potential inherent to liberalism and the most recent form of liberalism, understood not merely as a technique of government but as a truth regime and discursive formation providing the conditions of possibility for a total form of human life. Building on Foucault’s genealogy of liberal governmentality, we explore the relations between truth, power and subjectivity under liberalism to show how its promise of freedom and prosperity gives way, always potentially and now actually, to a reality of insecurity and austerity and how its truth regime of probabilistic veridiction succumbs to plausibilistic verisimilitude as its “political culture of danger” turns into one of fear. We argue that Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism in the late 1970s implicitly anticipated liberalism’s too-late quality as the changes in liberal government, notably in its humanitarian and securitarian impulses, since then have demonstrated. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".