Narrative sozioökonomischer Ungleichheit zwischen Neoliberalismus und Neokonservatismus

Since the late 1990s endeavours in American discourse were undertaken to differentiate between genuinely conservative narratives explaining and/or justifying socioeconomic inequality from neoliberal patterns of explanation and make the case for the superiority of the former. Prominently, Lawrence Mead and Christopher Beem in ther Welfare Reform and Political Theory or Government Matter argue with regard to the results of the workfare reforms of the mid 1990s in the United States, that inequality cannot be adequately accounted for by a lack of equality of opportunity that could be ameliorated by social democratic recipies, nor could it be effectively curtailed by setting the right incentives, which would be the crucial neoliberal technique in tackling this problem. Rather, the origin of poverty and entrenched socioeconomic inequality in most cases lay in the fact that the poor simply lost control of their lives, lacking indispensable values such as motivation, discipline, responsibility etc. Effective social policy therefore would be ill-advised in appealing to the homo oeconomicus that neoliberal thought assumes to be found even in the most deprived members of the underclass. Instead it must opt for a paternalist approach of ‘tough love’ in order to restore basic value orientations and motivational patterns.

This diagnosis is the starting point and the working hypothesis of this essay focussing on the German contexts of the 1980s and 1990s in order to explore whether and to what extent there is a similar differentiation taking place, what the key characteristics of the neoconservative narrative are and how it relates to its neoliberal counterpart.

In a first step of the argument that diagnosis of Mead and Beem are discussed and located in the context of the neocoservative discourse in the United States. In a second step neoconservative perspectives in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s are discussed with reference to some of the key protagonists – not the least regarding their relation to neoliberal discourse. The conclusion will identify similarities and differences between the discursive formations on both sides of the Atlantic and offer various interpretations of these findings