by Peter Gratton
This is the second installment in a series of essays on Adam Kotsko’s work, which came out of the roundtable ‘Close Encounter: Adam Kotsko’ from the 2025 conference of the Association for Philosophy and Literature. Read Peter Gratton’s introduction here, essays by Nils Richber and Jay Martin, and a response from Adam Kotsko.
‘If our present political moment teaches us anything, then it teaches us that neoliberalism is not sustainable’, Adam Kotsko writes in Neoliberalism’s Demons in a striking political-theological analogue of Marxian claims about capitalism’s inevitable collapse because of its inherent contradictions. ‘This is not because it is economically inefficient (though it is), nor is it because it embraces an inherently fragile political strategy (though it does)’.[1] Rather, he writes, ‘The very strategies that it uses to justify itself and its outcomes inevitably create subjects who are anxious, ashamed, resentful and exhausted’. In this way, he notes, ‘the root problem’ it has ‘is at the level of political theology: its approach to self-legitimation is self-undermining’ (ND, 125).
In this essay, I take up Kotsko’s account of neoliberalism at what is and isn’t a very different moment in our political era from when he wrote these words during the first Trump administration. Thus, I’ll also be examining what is and isn’t a differently situated hope for neoliberalism’s end. Like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, neoliberalism gained its widest academic and critical renown perhaps after it was already taking flight, with a somehow even darker period coming afterward. For my part, I think the term has outlasted its usefulness, that it’s better to cache out what’s so different in today’s moment, not least because of the farther-reaching nihilism of the present—say what you will about the devils of neoliberalism, to paraphrase The Big Lebowski, at least they had an ethos (if not actual morals). In what follows, I am less interested in whether we call our present a parody, mutation, intensification of, or even break from neoliberalism than in the way Kotsko’s work still illuminates where we find ourselves today. Where Kotsko suggested that neoliberalism couldn’t survive because it couldn’t sustain belief in its own legitimacy, he was right that this belief collapsed. However, what replaced neoliberalism—if that indeed has occurred—was a grift society where cynical participation in acknowledged fraud has become the only game in town, a hell that sustains itself precisely by admitting it’s hellish.
Political Theology as Method
Neoliberalism’s Demons is not merely a book about economic policy or a catalogue of neoliberalism’s horrors but about how regimes, through their political theology, legitimate themselves. Here’s how Kotsko defines the term:
Political theology is a holistic, genealogical inquiry into the structures and sources of legitimacy in a particular historical moment. Political theology in this sense is political because it investigates institutions and practices of governance (whether they are defined as state-based or economic, public or private), and it is theological because it deals with questions of meaning and value (regardless of the form the answers take). (ND, 128)
With this method in the background, Kotsko’s Neoliberalism’s Demons has become a key text for those looking to understand the fate of both political theology and neoliberalism. At its core is a straightforward but unsettling claim: neoliberalism is not just an economic system but a moral-theological regime, one that binds us through a devilish combination of freedom and guilt. Where the neoliberal subject is formally free to choose, she is also perpetually guilty, compelled to internalize systemic constraints and failings as personal responsibility.
Before Kotsko’s book, the depiction of neoliberalism as producing moral failings that it then punished you for, if you were not in the one percent, was widely known,[2] but less so was how it derived from its genealogy in Christian theology. Kotsko draws here on Agamben’s analysis of oikonomia—the theological paradigm of divine governance and providence—to argue that neoliberalism operates as a kind of secularized providence. What looks like the neutral functioning of the market is, in fact, the disciplining force of a political theology that reaches into every corner of our lives. From the beginning, Christian theology wrestled with a structural conundrum: if the one God is both good and omnipotent, whence evil—and how does it persist? Early Christian and medieval thinkers answered by situating evil not as a rival substance, but as a privation that nonetheless acts through personal agents: fallen angels. In Augustine, the angelic fall fixes the demons’ wills in a perverse love of disorder, yet even that perversity becomes folded back into providence: God permits their acts to chastise and test, as if God created them only to, within moments, punish them for their ‘wrong’ choices in a world without any content but the demand to glorify him (ND, 81-4).
By the high medieval period, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo displaces ‘ransom to the devil’ myths with a satisfaction account, yet the devil remains juridically significant as the one whose usurped claims are voided by Christ’s supererogatory satisfaction. Aquinas radicalizes the metaphysics: demons are not co-eternal principles, but created intellects whose wills, once confirmed in evil, cannot repent. God does not need demons, yet uses them as reluctant instruments of justice: they cannot act unless permitted; their malice is bent, against their intention, toward divine judgement.
That eschatological wrinkle matters, Kotsko argues. After Christ’s victory and the Last Judgement, why should ‘government’ continue at all? The tradition’s unnerving answer is that, with respect to the damned, it does. Separated from the city of God, they endure an eternal ‘administration’ of punishment. In Aquinas’s language, the demons persist as ministers of a penal order—agents of a governance that never ends because the end (conversion, restoration) has been foreclosed. We will see how this applies both under neoliberalism and what I’ll discuss under the heading of the ‘grift society’.
The Oikonomia of Neoliberalism
It is precisely this theological knot that Kotsko retrieves to illuminate neoliberalism—evil as privation, demons as damned for the only choice they ever had, and a punitive governmentality that outlives the end of history. Reading Agamben’s genealogy of oikonomia, Kotsko shows that Christianity developed a two-track account of divine rule: a sovereign law that culminates in judgement, and an economy of providential governance that manages creation through time. Modernity, Agamben argues, has ‘abolish[ed] eschatology and infinitely prolong[ed] the history and government of the world’, which is to say, it keeps administration going with no consummation (ND, 56).
At this point in Neoliberal Demons, Kotsko makes his most arresting move. In classical Christian thought, the claim that governance will end after judgement, after the end of history, has one glaring exception. Here is Kotsko working around quotations from Agamben:
‘The principle according to which the government of the world will cease with the Last Judgement has only one important exception in Christian theology. It is the case of hell’. If heaven is filled with angels who, retired from their administrative functions, have nothing to do but praise God, hell is the abode of their fallen comrades, the demons, who can never consciously praise God and yet ‘will carry out their judicial function as executors of the infernal punishments for all eternity’. This means that ‘hell is that place in which the divine government of the world survives for all eternity, even if only in a penitentiary form’. (ND, 56)
This becomes the structure for neoliberalism itself—not just a set of market mechanisms, but a political-theological order that survives through punishment. The promise of freedom remains, but the affect that binds is guilt; the institutional technology is debt and one’s fate is from a judgement already passed. As Kotsko quotes Maurizio Lazzarato:
Debt […] is a technique of government aimed at reducing the uncertainty of behaviour. By training the governed to ‘promise’ (to honour their debt), capitalism exercises control over the future. […] The effects of the power of debt on subjectivity (guilt and responsibility) allow capitalism to bridge the gap between present and future. (ND, 123)
If the classical demon is a condemned executor—unable to praise, yet compelled to carry out endless punishment—the neoliberal subject is refigured on the same scaffold: formally ‘free’, yet conscripted into administering their own subjection. As Kotsko suggests, this is more than apt for what William Davies called the ‘punitive neoliberalism’ that was neoliberalism’s avatar after 2008.[3] As Kotsko glosses it:
In the wake of the [Great Financial Crisis] […] punitive neoliberalism marks the moment when the bill comes due […] with an ethos of heavily moralized punishment. […] The moment of judgement has already passed, and questions of value or guilt are no longer open to deliberation. (ND, 99)
This is more than an analogy. Christianity answered the ‘problem of evil’ by subordinating demonic action to providence: the demons’ agency persisted only as a warped ministry of justice. Likewise, neoliberalism after its crises takes on an infernal form. It has lost the theodicy that once justified its rule (efficiency, equilibrium, growth), yet its government continues—precisely as punishment.
Two consequences follow. First, the paradox of freedom and guilt is not a byproduct but the theological mechanism that keeps the order running. The subject, trained to promise, interiorizes failure as sin and participates, demon-like, in carrying out the sentence against herself. Second, any genuine rupture with neoliberalism must break the infernal logic of endless administration or endless punishment. That is why Kotsko insists on a counter-theology of economy:
Any political-theological paradigm that desires a real break with neoliberalism must be willing to break with the foundational role of the market. It must be willing to take responsibility for consciously and collectively directing the production and distribution of economic goods. (ND, 142)
On this reading, neoliberalism ‘demonizes’ us not just metaphorically but structurally: we are positioned as condemned executors in an order that does not end. We are, in a word, condemned to be free—or at least free enough to be punished for even the most outrageous market transactions. To end this, then, we need to build lives that find meaning elsewhere.
Kotsko’s point is not just about economics but about legitimacy since he argues political theology tracks the historical ways regimes justify their rule. Neoliberalism’s legitimacy did not rest on efficiency or democracy but on its ability to bind subjects affectively, turning systemic precarity into personal responsibility, making punishment appear just. As such, through guilt, neoliberalism made punishment seem deserved. Through providence, it cast the market as a neutral arbiter of justice. And through his genealogy of demons, Kotsko shows that neoliberalism continues to govern even when its justifications collapse.
From Neoliberalism to the Grift Society
What is striking, in retrospect, is that even neoliberalism—in all its cruelty—required legitimation. To damn us, it still needed to stage a moral drama of providence, guilt and cosmic order. To be demonized was at least to be part of a theology. By contrast, the Trumpian grift era offers no such ethos. Its arbitrariness no longer pretends to justice; its punishments do not aspire to order but to spectacle. Here, legitimacy is permanently in crisis, yet the scam continues to function, with rents to be collected, as our every social and political encounter is pervaded by ever-present grifts and cons. Perhaps, in this way, we are in the final legitimation crisis Jean-François Lyotard wrote about nearly 50 years ago.[4] It’s not just the utter relativism of conservatives who once waxed on about the left’s inability to discern eternal truths that have brought on the fullness of today’s postmodern condition.
If neoliberalism was haunted by our common demonization—demanding our freedom while binding us with guilt—then the grift society that has (perhaps) followed no longer needs that theological disguise. In the grift society, scams and cons are not hidden deviations from the rules but the very form of rule itself. Whereas neoliberalism depended on the performance of impartiality—the fiction of the invisible hand as neutral arbiter—the grift economy thrives on arbitrariness, spectacle and impunity. Here, legitimacy is fragile, recursive and performative. It does not rest on concealing the con and the violence of the take but on our knowing participation in it. If neoliberalism once championed the market as the ultimate arbiter of value—efficiency, competition and price discovery as the new objectivity—then the grift economy would be what comes after that belief has collapsed. It does not pretend that markets are fair, efficient, or good. It simply asserts that everything is a market—everything’s for sale—and your only options are to play, to get played, or to play the player. It does not matter what is sold—meme coins, ideology, political access, charisma, fear—so long as it moves.[5]
The result is a society where almost any claim can be monetized so long as it garners attention, where value is indistinguishable from visibility, and where savviness replaces substance as the ultimate form of power. To be ‘in on it’ is the highest moral achievement; to be caught taking things too seriously is to mark yourself a fool, a ‘mark’, a loser in a game that never ends.
This shift is moral, cultural and infrastructural, that is, political theological as Kotsko defines it. New technologies enable and accelerate the circulation of speculative belief. AI voice scams that convincingly impersonate loved ones. Gamified trading platforms that convert the stock market into a digital slot machine. Crypto exchanges that collapse under the weight of their own fraud while still inspiring the next generation of pump-and-dump evangelists. Platforms algorithmically promote the outrageous and the false because engagement is indistinguishable from truth.
This is a far cry from capitalism as it once imagined itself: a system of production, innovation, and risk allocated according to merit or efficiency. Even neoliberalism, with all its cruel optimism and systemic inequality, still relied on a claim to legitimacy, as Kotsko argues. It told a story in which free markets would deliver collective benefit. But today’s grift economy no longer needs even that pretence. Where Kotsko shows how neoliberalism ‘demonized’ us, positioning subjects as fallen angels condemned to perpetuate their own punishment, the grift society positions us as players in an endless con. The scam is not hidden but advertised, and exposure does not collapse it but fuels it. Every con artist comes back again, with the lesson that the only way any of us can succeed in all this, to be born again after neoliberalism, is to get in on the grift, too. First we were demonized; now we act like the devils neoliberalism made of us.
I’m not arguing that the grift society is everywhere or so totalizing as to offer no glimmer of a hope beyond it. Just as the Victorian novel and postwar television serial captured their eras’ anxieties, our streaming age has become obsessed with fraud narratives—documentaries dissecting fake heiresses, fraudulent startups, cryptocurrency schemes and festival scams. What’s striking is how closely these exposés mirror their supposed opposite: the celebratory CEO biopics that have proliferated over the past decade. Traditional heist films featured con artistry, certainly—think of any spy thriller where the hero dons a disguise to infiltrate enemy territory. But audiences cheered for those protagonists because they served some greater purpose; today’s grift narratives have abandoned any such pretence.
Consider the arc in films ranging from The Social Network (2010) through Steve Jobs (2015) and The Founder (2016) to Blackberry (2023): each centres on moments of betrayal and deception undertaken purely for personal gain or stock performance. When audiences watch Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes—the latter deliberately mimicking the former’s speech patterns and signature turtleneck—the implicit lesson is that the distance between lionized innovator and convicted criminal depends largely on staying ahead of prosecutors. The battle isn’t against villains but against fraud statutes.
These cultural shifts reflect more profound structural transformations. Neoliberalism positioned individuals as entrepreneurs managing their human capital within rule-bound markets; our current environment recasts everyone as either swindler or victim. Monetarist policy shifted focus from historical employment data to speculative inflation forecasts; now we have platforms like Robinhood where users literally gamble on those forecasts as actual economies deteriorate. Neoliberals treated price stability as the paramount economic concern, far outweighing employment; cryptocurrencies are now championed explicitly for their volatility and speculative potential. Efficient market theory helped expand market participation to over half of Americans through index funds; behavioural economics’ ‘nudges’ now drive extractive gamification and addiction mechanics in investment and gambling platforms, for those who can any longer tell the difference. Neoliberalism held contractual formality and intellectual property as foundational; the Trumpist approach deploys endless litigation and delay tactics, embodying the adage that justice delayed is justice denied. And while neoliberalism promised prosperity through free trade and capital mobility (even as much of that capital pooled in tax havens), the current tariff regime offers no such aspirations—only preferential treatment, cash transfers on demand and gatekeeping.
Trump’s appeal to his base, then, wasn’t about restoring neutral rules but about securing better positions within these networks—or at least watching various ‘enemies’ suffer under them. These punitive and racialized dimensions were present in neoliberalism too, as Kotsko demonstrates. Quinn Slobodian’s work, including Hayek’s Bastards (2025),[6] reveals that Trumpism and similar movements aren’t reactions against neoliberalism but hybrid forms that fuse market doctrine with biologistic racism, hierarchical thinking and authoritarian impulses. Rather than abandoning neoliberalism, the far right has combined competitive markets with genetic essentialism, racial hierarchy and gold-standard nostalgia, recasting stratification as naturally ordained.
At the heart of Kotsko’s argument is the claim that neoliberalism functioned as a moral order in which the invisible hand of the market took the place of divine providence. To live under neoliberalism was not just to obey rules but to believe in this order. And I think many accounts, perhaps including my own, of a transition beyond neoliberalism have still not accounted for this well. That is, if neoliberalism is less an economic regime than a political theology, then the shifts I mentioned above might be more surface-level than what subtends neoliberalism as a form of governmentality.
Still, my wager is that, by contrast, the grift society thrives not on belief and surely not on divine providence (God is dead) but on something like a belief-beyond-belief. Everyone is said to know there’s a con at work; everyone sees the scam. Exposing fraud does not disrupt circulation but rather fuels it. Here, belief is no longer assent to a providential order but participation in a recursive game. To ‘believe’ is to stay in play—to buy the coin, click the link, retweet the scandal—even while knowing it’s hollowing you and everyone else out.
This is why scams today often succeed despite not hiding their fraudulence. Dogecoin became valuable not despite being a joke but because everyone knew that’s what it was. Trump gains credibility not in spite of being a fraud but because he performs fraudulence as authenticity. Google is stealing the intellectual property of others and putting it right above those articles in your search results via its AI Overviews—they’re not hiding their perfidy. To be savvy is not to step outside belief but to double it, to hold belief and disbelief simultaneously, to prove you’re ‘in on it’.
From a political-theological perspective, this is devastating. Monotheistic traditions anchored law in faith. Even neoliberalism, with its demonic economy, required belief in the justice of the invisible hand. But in the grift society, that anchor has collapsed. Belief persists, but always as something to be mocked or taken advantage of. It’s no wonder a growing area of legal studies calls the lawlessness of companies like Uber ‘law creating’[7] in that they outrun the authorities long enough to make their legality a fait accompli. This is a fundamental shift in the view of the law: not just the rich ensuring laws passed relieve them of communal responsibilities, but rather the point now is to make a play so that you’re company gets so big, it was as if the law allowing Uber, Airbnb, Google’s massive plagiarism operation, etc., will have been the law.
Obviously, this only works for the precious few. Still, if neoliberalism’s legitimacy was providential or pre-ordained, ours is speculative, with gambling now ubiquitous in the U.S. and in our financial markets. If the grift economy demonstrates ‘innovation’ anywhere, it’s in conscripting the entire population into frauds of one sort or another. The novice crypto trader attempting to profit from a pump-and-dump scheme he’s supposedly in on before the collapse, the professional forced to parse legitimate job listings from elaborate phishing operations, or the older adult trying to distinguish real customer service from sophisticated impersonation scams—each subject position demands adopting either the posture of exploiter or exploited. This mandatory apprenticeship in a radicalized hermeneutics of suspicion extends neoliberalism’s atomization into new territory, producing a milieu where even a modicum of baseline trust has evaporated and every exchange carries with a presumption of enmity—even your friends can be scamming you. Consider the daily barrage: robocalls mimicking familiar area codes, subscription traps buried in terms of service, insurance claims designed for rejection, pharmaceutical advertisements for conditions you didn’t know existed but now can’t ignore. The hours spent fortifying ourselves against the onslaught increasingly eclipse the moments of actual human connexion. And when those moments do arrive, cynicism whispers that perhaps this too is transactional, that sincerity itself has become another con we can’t quite afford to believe in—you’re just setting yourself up for the fall.
When Kotsko wrote Neoliberalism’s Demons, he emphasized neoliberalism’s inherent fragility. It could never fully justify itself because its own strategies of legitimation were self-undermining: each appeal to freedom generated guilt, each promise of prosperity produced exhaustion. If that was true of neoliberalism at its height, our present regime is, somehow, even more fragile. The grift economy is not just unsustainable in principle; it lives from moment to moment on the fumes of speculation. It is like a system that can only keep moving by constantly amping up the bets, moving to the next con. And yet, against all odds, it keeps going. That, perhaps, is the most unsettling lesson: we know we’re in hell, but many are finding it workable for them and supportable at the ballot box just as long as its torments are focused, too, on various hated groups already on the margins. But if there’s hope in any of this, it’s that no one believes in any of the meritocratic claims that subtended neoliberalism. If there’s something to believe in, it’s there that salvation lies. We’ll all be damned if it isn’t.
Continue reading with the introduction to this series, essays by Nils Richber and Jay Martin, and a response from Adam Kotsko.
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Adam Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2018), 125. Henceforth cited as ND. ↑
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See, for example, Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York, Zone Books, 2015), and Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, Duke University Press, 2009). ↑
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See, for example, William Davies, ‘The New Neoliberalism’, New Left Review (Sept/Oct 2016). Available at https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii101/articles/william-davies-the-new-neoliberalism. Consulted 27 October 2025. ↑
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See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by G. Bennington (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984). ↑
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I made and developed further these arguments in Peter Gratton, ‘The Grift Society’, Liberal Currents (April 28, 2025). Available at https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-grift-society/. Consulted 27 October 2025. ↑
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Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (New York, Zone Books, 2025). ↑
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Michael Kang, ‘Lawbreaking as Lawmaking’, The University of Chicago Business Law Review 3:2 (2024). Available at https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=ucblr. Consulted 27 October 2025. ↑
