Many economists have proclaimed that the ideology of neoliberalism is dead. The collapse of the markets has done for it what the fall of the Berlin Wall did for Marxism.
Although true believers remain, they will be able to persuade few people that, left to themselves, markets will work efficiently, that they can be trusted to regulate themselves, or that high executive salaries are a reward for competence rather than greed.
The unmasking of a once regnant ideology and of the damage that its followers did to the common good is good news. But it might make us also ask how we can recognise ideologies that have gone sour. For Christians this is a pressing task, because religions are often regarded as harmful ideologies.
Some critics, including theologians, see ideologies as always harmful. They are by definition bad views of the world. I prefer to describe them more neutrally. Ideologies are theories about the human world that command practical human responses. By this description, religions are ideologies because they offer a set of beliefs about the world that lead people, for example, to pray, to gather and to give alms. Marxism, National Socialism and Neoliberalism are also ideologies. The latter offers a view of human economic activity which dictates that government officials refrain from regulating it.
Because ideologies are based on beliefs about the human world, they necessarily include assumptions about what makes for human welfare and happiness and so about how we can expect people to act. Neoliberalism assumes that in the market the actors are individuals, not communities, and that they seek to increase their wealth. Wealth expands the life choices individuals can make, and so their happiness. Therefore they should be allowed to engage in the market free from constraint.
Ideologies are interesting as long as they are self-critical and are pushed to justify their presuppositions. They turn sour when they cease to reflect on the truth of the assumptions they make about human life. Their advocates will then regard these large questions as idle. They will focus on technical questions about how to organise and administer financial structures in ways that reflect the unconsidered assumptions they make about human life. The ideology is then vulnerable to whatever fantasies vitiate its assumptions. Marxism collapsed because the centralisation of power in the party, dictated by theory, contributed neither to human prosperity nor freedom. It fostered unhappiness .
Neoliberalism failed to take account