ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will argue that an essential part of the neoliberal imaginary can be traced to an intense period of industrial development in Western Europe (1840–1914), and that this gave rise to an ideology of happiness and autonomy that is essentially opposed to the idealization of human commons. Nineteenth century painting and photography depicted the struggle between this emergent form of individualism and proletarian socialism as the defining social and economic struggle of the time. So, for example, Menzel’s The Iron Rolling Mill presents the factory floor as a place of close cooperation between men and machines, where the individual becomes part of the economic life of the nation. Hine’s photographs of child labour, on the other hand, expose the moral indifference of capital to its sources of labour, and the damage it has done to the vitality of human beings. The chapter will set out the formation of the neoliberal imaginary through its progressive absorption of both socialist and Marxist visions of communal existence, and through its intensification of the Utilitarian principle of happiness through constantly increasing productivity.
