The anthropology of neoliberalism has become polarized between a hegemonic economic model anchored by variants of market rule and an insurgent approach fueled by derivations of the Foucaultian notion of governmentality. Both conceptions obscure what is "neo" about neoliberalism: the reengineering and redeployment of the state as the agency that sets the rules and fabricates the subjectivities, social relations, and collective representations suited to realizing markets. I develop Bourdieu's concept of "bureaucratic field" to propose a via media between these two approaches that construes neoliberalism as an articulation of state, market, and citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third. This conception repatriates penality at the core of the production of a Centaur-state that practices laissez-faire at the top of the class structure and punitive paternalism at the bottom.
Neoliberalism; Governmentality; Bureaucratic field; Penal state; Workfare; Bourdieu