Invisible Hand-in-Glove? The Uneasy Intersections of Friedrich Hayek’s Neoliberalism and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Bahá’í Economics

Abstract

The theological rendering of economics in the Bahá’í Faith—particularly from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá—advocated progressive taxation, a strong welfare state, the abolition of trusts, and the redistribution of wealth. These orientations directly diverge from “neoliberal” economic theory, especially as articulated by Frederick Hayek: concerns that social justice exacerbates poverty and claims that progressive taxation is “discrimination.” Despite these seemingly antithetical orientations, there has been a slow and tentative, if not uneasy, meeting of Bahá’í and neoliberal ideals in global organizations and scholarship. Through a comparative analysis of the writings of both ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Friedrich Hayek, I first illuminate the fundamental disagreements on economy and society between Bahá’í theology and neoliberalism. Second, I cover recent scholarship on the moralization of markets and the sacralization of financial actors in order to contextualize the historical and contemporary unions of theology and economy. Third, I outline how ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s theological vision and Hayek’s neoliberal theories accrete around four mutual worldviews, which can tempt hermeneutic deemphases of the fundamental divergences in Bahá’í and neoliberal logics: (1) the duality of human nature, (2) the limits of materialist reason, (3) the apotheosis of the market and self-love, and (4) sacrificial submission to transcendent authority.

“[It is] better to invest one’s fortune in instruments making it possible to produce more at smaller costs than to distribute it among the poor.”—Friedrich Hayek

“You must assist the poor as much as possible, even by sacrifice of yourself. No deed of man is greater before God than helping the poor.”—‘Abdu’l-Bahá

1. Introduction

The two epigraphs make it difficult to imagine two more antagonistic renderings of poverty and self-interest. The first comes from Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Hayek 1982, p. 144), one of the last publications of the economist Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992). Secular, selfish, and shameless, the quotation epitomizes how many now interpret “neoliberalism”—a term coined in 1938 but which for some has become “a signifier for a new breed of ‘market-worshipping, nihilistic sociopaths’” (Peck 2010, p. 2).1 The second was spoken in Persian in 1912 and was translated into English and first published in 1922–1924 within The Promulgation of Universal Peace (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1922–1924] 2007, p. 216), a key scriptural text authored by the Bahá’í leader, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (1844–1921). Religious, remitting, and righteous, the words are an injunction that people of faith, and Bahá’ís especially, should embody “necessary spiritual values such as love, justice, and unity” (Keene 1967, p. 223).

Despite these antithetical orientations, recent years bear witness to the slow and cautious, if not uneasy, meeting of Bahá’í theology and neoliberal praxis. These are neither superficial parallels nor trite similarities. For instance, a bevy of Bahá’í economists work for the World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), and International Monetary Fund (IMF)2 which cohere “around neoclassical economic theory and neoliberal policy prescriptions” (Saad-Filho 2004, p. 113). Such organizations advocate for increased socio-economic competition, greater privatization to spur “development,” and a reduced role for state “interference” in economic markets (Ilcan 2009; Ostry et al. 2016; Tomas 2020).

Beyond individual initiatives, Bahá’í institutions have increasingly cited a “moral consensus” and cooperative relationship with World Bank development endeavors, such as the Baha’i International Community’s Principal Representative to the United Nation’s endorsement of the 2015 World Bank publication “Ending Extreme Poverty: A Moral and Spiritual Imperative” (Bahá’í World News Service 2015).3 So also, writing in The Lab, The Temple, and The Market, notable Bahá’í Farzam Arbab recounted how the World Bank liaised with the Columbian Bahá’í community’s social and economic work: “World Bank, under the leadership of Robert McNamara, was promoting growth with equity, attention to basic needs, and integrated rural development … With their help our theoretical elaboration became increasingly more sophisticated; we discovered new factors, refined our definitions, saw new relationships” (Arbab 2000, p. 152). Mirroring this affinity, World Bank publications have increasingly cited Bahá’í social and economic initiatives, such as Faith in Conservation (Palmer and Finlay 2003) or Asian Interfaith Dialogue (Alatas et al. 2003). And the 2007 World Bank publication Development and Faith glowingly depicts a “Bahá’í women’s program in Barli, India … a training institute that sets out to transform the lives of young women—and succeeds in doing so” (Marshall and Van Saanen 2007, p. 248).

In academic circles, scholarship examining Bahá’í orthopraxy and neoliberal arrangements is sparse but growing (e.g., Heist and Cnaan 2016; Noghiu 2020; Oxley and Morris 2013; Tennberg et al. 2020; VanderDussen Toukan 2018). Complimentary appraisals of neoliberal economic theorists and theories sporadically appear in journals under the aegis of Bahá’í administrative bodies, such as the Journal of Bahá’í Studies4 and Bahá’í Studies Review5 (e.g., G. C. Dahl 1991, 2018; Fish 1997; Graham 1997; Hatcher 1989, 2007; Rassekh 2001). For instance, Augusto Lopez-Claros, a Bahá’í who worked for the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum, and most recently the World Bank, defended such institutions from critics in the Journal of Bahá’í Studies:

… critics call into question the very approach to development taken by such institutions as the World Bank, the IMF, and aid agencies of the large donor countries, which also happen to be the largest shareholders of these two development organizations. Often calls are made for “a new development model,” although it is not spelled out what that development model should consist of and, equally importantly, whether such calls have any practical, conceptual, and political underpinnings. For a particularly incisive, well-thought-out, non-dogmatic, and unusually pragmatic analysis of the problems of the fifty-eight poorest countries in the world and what the international community can do about them, see Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.

(Lopez-Claros 2012, p. 32, note 4)6

One must grant that approaches within, and understandings of, both neoliberal economic policy and Bahá’í theology are heterogenous and polysemous. Neither neoliberalism nor Bahá’í theology can be distilled to just the writings or worldviews of Hayek and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Moreover, institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO have in recent years become more self-aware and even critical of the exacerbation of inequality under “neoliberal agendas” and the writings of Hayek, Friedman, and others of the Mont Pèlerin school of thought.7 Still, such a meeting ground between Bahá’í and neoliberal institutions remains a curiosity and much more than an academic exercise.8 Even a passing glance at neoliberal texts and Bahá’í scripture—the texts of Friedrich Hayek and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in specific—reveals a great deal of difference, if not diametric opposition, across an array of issues regarding extremes of wealth and poverty, taxation, the welfare state, the redistribution of wealth, and more. Hence, the simultaneous alliance and antagonism of Hayek’s neoliberalism and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s theology gesture toward the pressing need to answer questions about underlying similarities as well as how shared discourse about socio-economic matters might attach to different moral, ethical, or religiously backed economic projects.

In this article, I analyze key writings of both ‘Abdu’l-Bahá9 and Friedrich Hayek10 to accomplish a three-fold endeavor. First, I illuminate a few of the most glaring disagreements on economy and society between Bahá’í theology and neoliberalism. Second, I cover recent scholarship on the moralization of markets and the sacralization of financial actors so to contextualize the historical and contemporary meeting grounds of theology and economy. Third, I outline how ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s theological vision and Hayek’s neoliberal theories accrete around four mutual worldviews, which can tempt hermeneutic deemphases of the fundamental divergences in Bahá’í and neoliberal logics: (1) the duality of human nature, (2) the limits of materialist reason, (3) the apotheosis of the market and self-love, and (4) sacrificial submission to transcendent authority.

2. Divergences Across Bahá’í Theology and Neoliberal Theory

This article is far from the first to examine the relationship between Bahá’í theology and economics. A modest body of scholarship at this intersection can be sorted into three broad camps.11 First, some emphasize the Bahá’í imperative to moralize economic markets by injecting spiritual and ethical guidelines (cf. Ashraf et al. 2014; Badee 2015; G. C. Dahl 2018; Hatcher 1989). For instance, G. C. Dahl (1975, 1991) draws upon Bahá’í notions of a material world and an underlying spiritual reality, as does Hatcher (1974/5, p. 14) in his argument that “our economic system is simply an external and concrete reflection of our collective inner life.” Some thus argue that Bahá’í economic participation should be marked by opposition to “selfishness, greed, competitiveness, and apathy” (Mohtadi 1996, p. 163). “One way this link is nurtured in the Bahá’í Faith,” Graham (2002, p. 207) writes, “is through the ‘spiritualization’ of work. Work is a ‘calling’ and a divine injunction.” For Bahá’ís, such a Calvinist-like approach draws from Bahá’í scripture equating work with worship,12 and has been variously applied to neoliberalism. For instance, in a send-up of neoliberal economic theory, A. L. Dahl (2023) writes,

… governments themselves have been sidelined by the growing power of the actors in the neoliberal economic system that have escaped from national regulation and taxation. Through this system, powerful multinational corporations and financial institutions now control the main levers of power and information at the global level, preventing any efforts to interfere with their projects of economic exploitation to maximize their profits. This both feeds and feeds on corruption, since the materialist value system is driven by greed, lust, indolence, pride and violence, and only pays lip service to higher ethical principles.

But others have sympathies with neoliberal economic theory, often citing Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as a source for a “code of honor” (e.g., Graham 2002) that “spiritualizes” work.

A second camp emphasizes specific modes of economic participation. Most attention centers on wages and production, appealing again to classical theories that tie efficiency and social welfare overall to wages set by labor productivity. Many thus cite ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s claim that wages should be unequal because they may reflect a just and meritocratic system (Adkin 1987; Cole 2005; Huddleston 1975; Teichgraeber 1986). However, scholars add that a cooperative, rather than a competitive, ethos between owner and labor is necessary (e.g., Fieldhouse 2005; Warburg 1993). Moreover, without measures to limit human suffering, this too could become exploitative: “cooperation should not be confused with oligopolistic and collusive behavior” (Sabetan 1997, p. 64).

Third, some advocate for greater and more critical intersections of Bahá’í theology with economic theories, regardless of their affiliation or reputation (Fish 1997; Frischmann 2005; Hanson 1993; Rassekh 2001). Some contend that Bahá’í scholars are well-positioned to engage in holistic and well-rounded economic analyses, thereby avoiding partisan and reductionist debates. “Bahá’ís can thereby hope to avoid narrow orthodoxy,” writes G. C. Dahl (1991, p. 2), “which has been a stifling influence on so many intellectual disciplines.” Additionally, Graham (1997, p. 30) chides Bahá’ís for their larger failure to take seriously the work of economists on both the left and right, such as “Hayek and Friedman to the recent work of Krugman … Bahá’ís have a great deal to learn … and to take a dismissive posture … is not conducive towards creating the necessary dialogue.” Those in this third camp often argue that the relationship between capitalism and Bahá’í theology is complex, simultaneously compatible and contrary, and thus necessitates avoidance of reductionism and conflation as witnessed in Graham’s argument that the “crude equations of markets = capitalism = consumerism are inaccurate and unconstructive” (Graham 1997, p. 33). Despite the aforementioned, few have directly compared and contrasted specific economic and religious figures and their texts for (mis)alignment.

Do Bahá’í theology and neoliberalism fit [invisible] hand-in-glove? While ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Hayek both produced heterogenous and polysemous texts, even a cursory glance would seemingly indicate a rather imperfect coupling, if not serious departures and antagonisms. For example, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá advocated the eradication of extremes of wealth and poverty,13 whereas Hayek argued that economic inequality was fundamental to social progress.14 Relatedly, both the voluntary and state-mandated redistribution of wealth are ascribed to Bahá’í theology and by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in specific.15 Hayek, however, believed that some people held entitled attitudes that facilitated untenable, ambitions and unfair claims toward others’ wealth as their “right,” which, Hayek believed, they would eventually gain due to their power to extort others:

a great part of the people of the world are today dissatisfied as never before and are determined to take what they regard as their rights. They believe as much and as mistakenly as the poor in anyone country that their goal can be achieved by a redistribution of already existing wealth, and they have been confirmed in this belief by Western teaching. As their strength grows, they will become able to extort such a redistribution if the increase in wealth that progress produces is not fast enough

(Hayek [1960] 2011, p. 52).

Another fundamental difference concerns ‘Abdu’l-Bahá support, and specific plan for, a strong “welfare state”16 in which every community would elect a governing board that oversees “a general storehouse” that would in turn not only collect seven revenues from “Tithes, taxes on animals, property without an heir, all lost objects found whose owners cannot be traced, one third of all treasure-trove, one third of the produce of all mines, and voluntary contributions” but would also disperse capital to seven sources: (1) the running of the storehouse, (2) tithes to government, (3) taxes on animals, (4) running an “orphanage”, (5) running a home for incapacitated, (6) running a school, and (7) “Payment of subsidies to provide needed support of the poor” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1945] 1971a, pp. 83–85). Hayek opposed such systems, whether in the form of specific systems such as U.S. “social security”—which he described as unethical and a “substitute for old-fashioned socialism” (Hayek [1960] 2011, p. 289)—or in his general prophetic evaluation that the

… main ambition that inspires the welfare state … requires a kind of discrimination between, and an unequal treatment of different people which is irreconcilable with a free society. This is the kind of welfare state that aims at “social justice” and becomes “primarily a redistributor of income.” It is bound to lead back to socialism and its coercive and essentially arbitrary methods

(Hayek [1960] 2011, pp. 259–60).

In another marked difference, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá advocated a system of progressive taxation.17 But akin to the welfare state, Hayek understood progressive taxation as a form of “discrimination against the wealthy” (Hayek [1960] 2011, p. 313) and that “progressive taxation necessarily offends against what is probably the only universally recognized principle of economic justice, that of ‘equal pay for equal work’” (Hayek [1960] 2011, pp. 316–17).

The differences between ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Hayek’s economic worldviews are rather stark. Despite those disagreements, both figures present renderings of economic markets and financial actors in strangely similar ways, with both evoking questions of ethical—if not spiritual—purpose, inspiration, and guidance.18

3. Making Moral Markets and Shaping Sacred Selves

Recent scholarship now illumines how supposedly secular understandings of both markets and economic actors, particularly within neoliberal theory, are increasingly reliant on moral, spiritual, and religious language and assumptions. But before digging into this intersection, it is necessary to first provide some background on Bahá’í theology, especially in regard to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s understanding of the spiritual underpinnings of economics, and second, to explain the meanings of “neoliberalism” vis-à-vis Friedrich Hayek’s evocation of theological and moral considerations.

Bahá’í canonical texts are authored by four individuals and one institution.19 ‘Abbás Effendi (1844–1921), known as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (meaning “Servant of Glory”), is one of those individuals. He holds a special position in Bahá’í theology; He was the “perfect exemplar” for Bahá’ís and was anointed as the infallible interpreter of His Father, Bahá’u’lláh (meaning “Glory of God”), the prophet-founder of the Bahá’í Faith.20 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote and spoke in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. The majority of His writings have not been authenticated, translated, or made publicly available. However, a great deal of His writings have, over the 20th century, become readily available to the English-speaking world.

Within the newly expanded scriptural corpus were ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s thoughts on economics, which “include teachings that have a bearing, indeed sometimes a critical bearing, on our conceptions of what constitutes an ideal economic system or the Divine Economy” (Graham 2002, p. 207). These arrived to a ‘70s and ‘80s readership in the midst of recessions, stagflation, and the North American and Western European ascendance of neoliberalism (popularly described as “Reaganomics” and “Thatcherism,” respectively). National resources were privatized, the welfare state was rolled back, the poor were criminalized, and varied forms of “governance” and “responsibility” were advocated as necessary corrections to the wrongs of the Keynesian policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and the post-war expansion of Britain’s welfare state.21 By the 1990s, Bahá’ís were beginning to apply ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s writings to economic debates and conditions, as Graham (1997, p. 15) recounts,

for most of the [20th] century the Bahá’í community, while utilizing the social teachings of the Faith in its proclamation and teaching activities, has done little to develop and articulate them … The phrase “spiritual solutions to economic problems” is included in most Bahá’í “principles” lists … yet many Bahá’ís would have difficulty articulating the exact nature of these “spiritual solutions” … Fortunately this pattern of negligence is eroding.

At the same time, Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992), known as F. A. Hayek, was at the twilight of his career. However, his work dawned on a new generation of neoliberal policymakers. An Austrian-British economist and Nobel laureate now regarded as “the single most important neoliberal economist” (Gaffney 2017, p. 124), Hayek wrote on economic, social, and political theory. Some treat his writings as holding “prophetic value” (Paqué 1990, p. 292; cf. O’Hear 2006, p. 146) and consider him “the prophet of the rugged, independent individual” (Caldwell and Klausinger 2022, p. 13). Despite once being lumped into the “lunatic fringe” of economists (Girvetz 1963, p. 242), his work has newfound attention since the 1980s (there was a 1200% increase in publications mentioning Hayek from 1980 to 2024, while his 1945 paper “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is cited over 24,000 times).22

Neoliberalism has varied forms, yet Hayek and his colleagues within the Mont Pèlerin Society (e.g., Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and others) hold the position of the key architects of “the neoliberal agenda” (Harvey 2021, [2005] 2007; Plehwe et al. 2020). Economist Michael Peters (2016, p. 1) argues that Hayek “is probably the single most influential individual economist or political philosopher to shape what is now understood as neoliberalism.” As a version of secular political economics, Hayek’s views have been well studied. Recently, however, more have come to explore the moral, ethical, and religious underpinnings and implications of Hayek’s work (e.g., Gick 2003; Koopman 2009; Kusunoki 2016; Rudnyckyj 2024). “Recent affinities between religion and economics,” writes the sociologist Mathew Guest (2022), “evoke the thinking of Friedrich von Hayek, the father of neoliberal economics.” Mavelli (2020, p. 59) writes that Hayek’s work “blurs the divide between science and faith, facts and beliefs, the secular and the religious.” For example, as recently as July 2021, the Heritage Foundation claimed,

… it is ever more urgent for those who support free markets to double down on educating young Americans in the economic and moral [italics in original] case for capitalism. It means taking them through the writings of the very best free-market thinkers—people such as Adam Smith, Wilhelm Röpke, F. A. Hayek, and Michael Novak—who didn’t hesitate to defend markets on economic and moral grounds

(Gregg 2021).

Increasing numbers of “free-market” Christians and religious think tanks now connect the social values of their faith to the supposed morality of Hayek’s ideas (McDaniel 2016; Montes 2011).23 Sociologists of religion assert that modern religious practices have achieved high levels of unpredictability and flexibility—what James Beckford (1989, p. 172) calls the “deregulation of religion”—which has freed religionists to forge novel relationships. In this milieu, Hayek has become a new standard-bearer for an admixture of faith, frankness, and free enterprise once thought irreconcilable. But what enables the recent overlap between, on the one hand, Hayekian neoliberalism’s merger with religious sentiment and, on the other, Bahá’í discussions of materialist economic matters?

Foucault famously asserted, “Economics is an atheistic discipline; economics is a discipline without God” (Foucault 2008, p. 282). Matters of the soul, morality, and divinity are often thought anathema to gross domestic products, labor supplies, and capital. As a supposedly secular construct, “neoliberalism” is often described as a variant of free-market capitalism that promotes the self-regulating market, the rights-bearing individual, state-backed privatization and deregulation, and the intrusion of market logics in all areas of social life (Bloom 2017; Harvey [2005] 2007; Lofton 2017). Yet, in both building upon and past Weber’s ([1905] 1930) “Protestant work ethic” thesis on the affinities between the economic and the ecumenical, Lofton (2017, p. 207) contends that people have long believed markets are “ethically fine, and utterly reconcilable with religious experience.” Recent scholarship indicates how neoliberal advocates argue for the production of moral dispositions and can even rationalize inequality as an ethical arrangement in and of itself (e.g., Block and Somers 2014; Brown 2016; Nelms 2012; Peck 2010; Stiglitz 2009). Harvey thus argues that neoliberalism is “a utopian project” (Harvey [2005] 2007, p. 19) that affords a “sense of moral purpose” (Harvey [2005] 2007, p. 83) while Brown (2016, p. 12) remarks that neoliberalism functions “as a life-sustaining sacred power.”24 Thus, in the context of neoliberalism, Bahá’í theology, and their intersection, there exist some shared assumptions. Namely, the belief in sacred selves and moral markets.

First, the notion that people are inherently spiritual or divine in nature is a central Bahá’í principle. Humanity’s larger ontological purpose, and the development of their spiritual virtues qua soul, are realized via service and occupational labor.25 “The best of men are they that earn a livelihood by their calling and spend upon themselves and upon their kindred for the love of God, the Lord of all worlds” (Bahá’u’lláh [1858] 2002, “Persian No. 82”). Moreover, the act of laboring as a “profession and trade” is directly and unequivocally sacralized by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:

the fact that a profession and trade and agriculture are the worship of God, that a farmer who engages in tilling and cultivating his farm with the utmost effort is like unto a worshipper who devotes himself to the worship of God with the utmost humility and supplication in a temple of worship and that a laborer who works with justice and sincerity is as though engaged in prayer

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá 1919, p. 226).

The effort, intention, and intensity one puts into labor is also emphasized by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, whereby employees should “strive with his soul in the work” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1911] 1972, p. 44). Economic participation is thus a matter of ethical or moral responsibility; the Universal House of Justice (2010) clarified that whether an owner or laborer, both are “bound by the laws and conventions that regulate their work, and each is expected to carry out his or her responsibilities with honesty and integrity”.

Neoliberalism contains similar assumptions about how humanity can be elevated to a higher purpose via labor. Under neoliberal logic, strong moral governance by the state has material consequences but results in behavior with no “clear end in market value … [which thus] fails economically and morally” (Povinelli 2011, p. 23). Neoliberalism, thus, with a “fusion of political and business practices”, displaces ethical “questions of right with questions of effectiveness” (Brown 2016, pp. 5–6). Key to this arrangement are religiously inflected economic appeals to “sacrifice and sacrificial love” (Povinelli 2011, p. 165), whereby people are called to work and promote the health of the market. Through appeals to economic-based faith, whereby one’s larger purpose is realized through economic participation, “people are categorized, classified, named and rendered legible” (Burchardt 2017, p. 190). Then consecrated homo economicus, people become worthy of state support and recognition. Moreover, with occupational labor now spiritually supercharged, labor is more easily interpreted as a soteriological practice (cf. Zigon 2011). Those who fail to ransom their labor and livelihood are also more easily deemed bad actors who have failed to contribute their efforts to the socio-economic contract. Even worse, they are more easily construed as immoral, cursed, or worthy of social abandonment, what Povinelli calls “self-righteous neglect” (Povinelli 2011, p. 118). Such discourse can become deeply internalized through “responsibilization,” or the establishment of an enterprising selfhood in which atomized, competitive self-reliance becomes valorized as virtuous ideals and behaviors. Such a “good” economic citizen is thus morally “obliged” (Brown 2016) to render unto the market (à la Caesar) what is the market’s: the pursuit of growth and profit as a moral end unto itself.26 While Bahá’í theological and neoliberal conceptualizations of market participants are rather distant, both approaches similarly apply ethical and moral beliefs to economic identities and selfhood.27

Second, and relatedly, both Bahá’í and neoliberal texts have critiqued the inadequacy of scientific materialism, which invites theological or otherworldly interpretations. Regardless of theological assumptions or economic ideology, the moralization of markets opens wide the door for trafficking in economic mysticism (cf. Buyandelger 2013). Such “market fundamentalism” (Stiglitz 2009, p. 345) occurs when prevailing economic ideas appeal not to rationality but to an abstract “quasi-religious certainty” (Mavelli 2020, p. 58) that the market will “self-regulate,” a belief system that Bolaño ([2004] 2008, p. 228) sarcastically summarizes as “supply + demand + magic”.

Accordingly, Hayek’s understanding of the economy is, as Christiaens (2019, p. 71) remarks, “a secularization of providential theology.” Such an approach allows for the sanctification of labor exploitation. As Rudnyckyj (2010) illumines, corporations can appropriate religious sentiment and scripture, such as varied Abrahamic faith tenets that equate work with worship, thereby making competitive production a moral, if not covenanted, act. By speaking of economic growth as spiritualized, pro-market prerogatives are cloaked in “an aura of sacredness” (Mavelli 2020, p. 57) and can more easily seduce working people to accept moral dividends over capital and unwittingly exacerbate extremes of wealth and poverty. The effect is a “fundamental condition of unknowability” that blurs the sacred and profane so that the market is a transcendent mystery to which one must submit in order to experience a fully moral life with work qua worship at its center.

Similarly, albeit not without the major departures discussed earlier, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá ([1922] 1982) places the divine adoration in the center, and as the animating heart, of economic matters: “When the love of God is established, everything else will be realized. This is the true foundation of all economics. Reflect upon it. Endeavor to become the cause of the attraction of souls rather than to enforce minds. Manifest true economics to the people.” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá ([1922] 1982, p. 334) also stated,

The fundamentals of the whole economic condition are divine in nature and are associated with the world of the heart and spirit. This is fully explained in the Bahá’í teaching, and without knowledge of its principles no improvement in the economic state can be realized.… Hearts must be so cemented together, love must become so dominant that the rich shall most willingly extend assistance to the poor and take steps to establish these economic adjustments permanently.

Neoliberal principles and Bahá’í theology promote the production of moral markets and rationalize sacrificial work as ethical propositions for the development of virtuous selfhood. In consort with the sacralization of selfhood in which personhood is always-already imperfect, easily corruptible, and in need of external guidance, the potential of humanity is realized via occupational labor (Elzinga and Givens 2009).

4. The Shared Concerns of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Friedrich Hayek

I above addressed how spiritual, moral, and theological assumptions easily dovetail with, if not energize and drive, general understandings of capitalist markets and their participants. I now turn to the specific similarities between Bahá’í theology and neoliberalism. Namely, I outline where ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s theological vision and Hayek’s neoliberal ideas accrete around four mutual moral concerns. Specifically, there are somewhat shared understandings of (1) the duality of human nature, (2) the limits of materialist reason, (3) the apotheosis of the market and self-love, and (4) sacrificial submission to both God and neoliberal governance. I discuss each in turn below.

4.1. The Duality of Human Nature

Both Hayek and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá held dualistic views of human nature whereby selfhood is composed of both a “higher” and “lower” dimension. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá asserts there is both a

… spiritual or higher nature and material or lower nature. In one he approaches God, in the other he lives for the world alone … In his material aspect he expresses untruth, cruelty and injustice; all these are the outcome of his lower nature. The attributes of his Divine nature are shown forth in love, mercy, kindness, truth and justice, one and all being expressions of his higher nature

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1911] 1972, p. 60).

In this rendering, the rational and material aspects of humanity are inferior to the virtuous qualities of the “divine nature” or “higher nature.” Juan Cole extrapolated on ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s image of human nature as having inherited “a conception of the individual as theomorphic, as in the image of God” (Cole 2005, p. 62). Hence, these divine potentials within each individual become manifest, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá argued, in social organization: “among the results of the manifestation of spiritual forces will be that the human world will adapt itself to a new social form … the justice of God will become manifest throughout human affairs” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1922] 1982, p. 132). ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s approach resonates with Cartesian dualism, in which humanity possesses a material body with carnal inclinations and needs but also possesses a mind or a spiritual reality sometimes referred to as a “soul.”28

For Hayek, while people do possess a “lower” and a “higher” side, he broke with the fundamental assumption of Cartesian philosophy: esprit géométrique. “Descartes contended that all the useful human institutions were and ought to be [a] deliberate creation of conscious reason … a capacity of the mind to arrive at the truth by a deductive process from a few obvious and undoubtable premises” (Hayek 1967, p. 85). Instead, Hayek specified that an individual’s mental and rational capacities based on sensory perception were the “lower” side of human nature. Hayek believed these capacities were severely limited by not only the individual’s ability to comprehend but also by the expansiveness of knowledge that was beyond the scope of any one individual to capture and understand. “Our necessary ignorance of so much means that we have to deal largely with probabilities and chances” (Hayek [1960] 2011, p. 29). His approach was akin to an anti-Enlightenment project; human rationality is bounded by ignorance and uncertainty.29 Conversely, the “higher” side of human nature was reached through an evolutionary process of transcending the limits of perception and individual rationality through creating, producing, and exchanging—i.e., market participation. As people share information about wants, desires, recourses, and supplies, humanity “learns by the disappointment of expectations” (Hayek [1960] 2011, p. 30) these become norms, traditions, morals, and laws that function to coordinate human cognition and behavior (they become internalized as an aspect of the “higher” self). This social aspect of the self is therefore not a product of imperfect and atomistic forms of rationality but of evolutionary social processes of exchange.

While ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Hayek conceptualize the “higher” and “lower” sides of humanity differently, they share in the assumption that the lower self is imperfect and limited and thus requires governance via external knowledge believed to be either divine (‘Abdu’l-Bahá) or social (Hayek). Given this shared understanding of the need to guide the lower self with the higher self, it is relatively easy to conflate the “new social form” of which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke with the neoliberal market that Hayek promoted; neoliberal praxis easily elides with those sympathetic to Bahá’í conceptions of human nature. This conflation can become more tightly knit when considering the shared view between Hayek and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on materialism and knowledge. For both figures, an unerring source of knowledge must keep the “lower” aspects of humanity in check, a step that promotes both individual and collective prosperity.

4.2. The Limits of Materialist Knowledge

In Bahá’í theology, the debased elements of humanity’s lower nature must be held in check via divine education. That is, through both the direct teachings of God’s word and the knowledge of arts and sciences (which in Bahá’í theology are also divinely inspired). Without such an external source (divinity) to guide and develop the spiritual side of humanity as the dominant aspect of the self, one becomes a debased, “animal”-like person. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote,

Man is the ultimate degree of materiality and the beginning of spirituality … He has both an animal side and an angelic side and the role of the educator is to so train human souls that the angelic side may overcome the animal. Thus, should the divine powers, which are identical with perfection, overcome in man the satanic powers, he becomes the noblest of all creatures, but should the converse take place, he becomes the vilest of all beings.

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá 1990a, p. 64)

Similarly, Hayek contended that the lower nature of humanity “is like a dangerous explosive … if handled incautiously may blow up a civilization” (Hayek [1960] 2011, p. 38). Above we covered Hayek’s opposition to what he called “naive rationalism” (Hayek 1982, pp. 8–34) or “erroneous rationalism” (Hayek [1944] 2005, p. 210),30 but Hayek rated “rather low the place which reason plays in human affairs” (Hayek [1944] 2005, p. 108) and was less interested in the duality of human nature than he was interested in how knowledge was created and acquired (cf. Innset 2017, p. 693). Hayek thus embraced an “evolutionary” approach to knowledge production (Hayek [1960] 2011). Knowledge deemed valuable enough to be taught as specific educational disciplines or codified into law are not those intentionally conceived to achieve a specific end, but those observed social traditions, norms, and informal rules that “naturally” (via a suprarational trial-and-error process of cultural evolution) functioned to protect market exchange, after which they were labeled “natural” or “divine” in origin:

… all early “law-giving” consisted in efforts to record and make known a law that was conceived as unalterably given. A “legislator” might endeavor to purge the law of supposed corruptions, or to restore it to its pristine purity, but it was not thought that he could make new law… But if nobody had the power or intention to change the law… this does not mean that law did not continue to develop.

(Hayek 1982, p. 81).

This knowledge, continually given to us from the evolving market, is, for Hayek, indispensable to the formation and maintenance of the social order. “[T]he superiority of the market lies in its ability to coordinate blind, self-interested human actions and distribute knowledge without the need for central oversight” (Whyte 2019, p. 159). This is a sociological move that invites theological interpretation.

Consider that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá argued what distinguishes humanity from animals is the possession of “a rational soul, the human intelligence” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1911] 1972, p. 31) and that “rational arguments … are what the people of the world require in this day” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá 1990a, p. 3). Yet, similar to Hayek, he clarified that these are inadequate and must be improved upon by an external source. For Bahá’ís, as with other Abrahamic faiths, that improving “source” is God. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote that “the breaths and promptings of the Holy Spirit … [is] knowledge Itself. Through it the human mind is quickened and fortified unto true conclusions and perfect knowledge” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1922] 1982, p. 22). While ‘Abdu’l-Bahá placed high value on reason, He underlined supra-rational ways of knowing and decision-making.31 The religious appeal of this move was clear to Hayek, as evidenced in his address to the inaugural meeting of the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947: “I am convinced that unless this breach between true liberalism and religious convictions can be healed, there is no hope for a revival of liberal forces” (in Mellink 2021, p. 99). This breach is sutured in three areas.

First, Hayek critiqued scientific materialism. In an assessment of socialist and planned economies entitled “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Hayek argued that “scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge” (Hayek 1945, p. 521). According to Hayek, true and dependable knowledge emerges from the synthesis of people’s market transactions.32 Undependable, if not harmful, knowledge comes from rationality and the “arbitrary power of other men” (Hayek [1944] 2005, p. 26), such as “communist dictators, socialist planners, leftist redistributionists, and central Bankers” (Mavelli 2020, p. 66). Hayek thus elevated a form of knowledge we cannot rationally understand as superior to epistemology born from scientific materialism. Hayek ([1944] 2005, p. 210) wrote:

The refusal to yield to forces that we neither understand nor can recognize as the conscious decisions of an intelligent being is the product of an incomplete and therefore erroneous rationalism. It is incomplete because it fails to comprehend that coordination of the multifarious individual efforts in a complex society must take account of facts no individual can completely survey.

Simply put, there is knowledge external to humanity, which is recognizable only in the form of observable laws, traditions, and habits. For Hayek, such knowledge has a decidedly mysterious, if not sacred, character and is thus worthy of respect.

The neoliberal appeal to a belief in the divine nature of knowledge—whether of the Logos or of progressive revelation—should be apparent. Bahá’í conceptions of divine knowledge, as well as a skepticism for material rationality, can easily dovetail with Hayekian neoliberalism. For example, in a discussion of the “[i]nventions, scientific knowledge, ethical reforms and regulations established for the welfare of humanity,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá contended that we “must investigate the divine source of these heavenly bestowals and adhere unto them steadfastly. For if we remain fettered and restricted by human inventions and dogmas, day by day the world of mankind will be degraded” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1922] 1982, p. 86). Elsewhere ‘Abdu’l-Bahá stated that “without the Holy Spirit” humanity would be “unable to acquire his scientific knowledge by which his great influence over the rest of creation is gained” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1911] 1972, p. 19).

Second, Hayek appealed to the direct investigation of truth. Hayek chided mainstream economists for abstract and highbrow theorizing. He asserted that economists should empirically examine markets as evolutionary products of tradition and habit, simply cataloging how they behave. That is, the “scientistic attitude” (Hayek 1989, p. 3) of most economists betrayed simple principles of the investigation of phenomena and truth. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Hayek thus wrote that the “failure of the economists … is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences—an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error” (Hayek 1989, p. 3). Hayek’s points resonate with pro-capitalist Bahá’í hermeneutics, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá frequently decried imitation and hailed the “independent investigation of truth.” In one instance, He wrote that “Imitation destroys the foundation of religion” and apropos the first point on materialism above, imitation is also “the cause of the victory of materialism and infidelity over religion” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1922] 1982, p. 96). In another instance, and after being asked to “state the tenets of your faith,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá replied, “First, investigate reality. Man must leave imitation and seek reality” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá 1990a, p. 33) and later added, “Happy are those who spend their days in the pursuit of knowledge, in the discovery of the secrets of the universe, and in the meticulous investigation of truth!” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá 1990a, p. 34).

Third, Hayek offered overt moral arguments toward the limits of scientific knowledge. He argued that the “recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility” (Hayek 1989, p. 7). Especially within The Fatal Conceit (Hayek 1988), Hayek opined that political intervention into the market is a dangerous act of intellectual hubris and scientific egotism that could ruin the supposed purity of the spontaneously derived economic order. In this vein, humility and the submersion of ego are paramount virtues for Bahá’í living, which merge seamlessly with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s command that one should “under no circumstances whatsoever … assume any attitude except that of gentleness and humility” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1922] 1982, p. 77) or that true scholars should “embody the quintessence of humility” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1922] 1982, p. 82).

Hayek’s neoliberalism can appeal directly to people of faith and may be interpreted in ways that hold an uncanny resonance with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s injunctions to be distrustful of scientific materialism, of abstract and non-empirical claims, and of those exercising hubris. These postures can certainly cohere with Bahá’í exegetics, as they knock scientific materialism off its perch and equalize alternative, if not theological, epistemologies not generally validated as legitimate forms of knowing. Moreover, this rendering is self-protective of the neoliberalist project; the portrayal of the market as a “natural” phenomenon that can be judged only empirically, rather than theoretically, exiles critical analysis of neoliberalism’s supposedly inherent contradictions and functions to justify inequality. For example, even as the 2008 financial crisis led some to predict a “post-neoliberal age” (cf. Mavelli 2020), such a moment did not emerge, which further underlines neoliberalism’s resilience and its underlying similarity with religious thought: both make truth claims that are independent of standard forms of verification in the sciences. Lastly, the humility advocated by Hayekian neoliberalism interpellates a virtuous, “open-minded,” and neoliberal/Bahá’í subject, whose supposed detachment from the elitism of academe, science, and reason does not foreclose sources of economic inspiration, and thus allows for—if not invites—the entrance of potent theodicies to justify inequality as fundamentally unknowable (in terms of causality) and thus outside of rational (and legitimate) analysis.

4.3. The Apotheosis of the Market and Self-Love

Hayek distinguished between “economies” and “catallaxies.” The former is based on humanity’s prior-mentioned “low” nature and on “rational” planning. The latter stems from humanity’s “high” nature, inclusive of critiques of materialism, rejection of imitation, and dedication to humility. “A catallaxy is thus the special kind of spontaneous order produced by the market” (Hayek 1982, p. 109). But there is no divine creator in Hayek’s secular theory to jump-start the supposed spontaneity of the economic and social order. His theory requires a causal mechanism. For Hayek, when individuals transact in ways that protect their own interests, a sui generis socio-economic order, bigger than the sum of its parts, emerges. Hayek’s pivotal moment of creation thus derives from “self-love” (Hayek 1948, p. 13) or an “individual selfishness” that hinges on the atomized pursuit of the satisfaction of need: “individual selfishness will in most instances lead the individual to act in a manner conducive to the preservation of the spontaneous order of society” (Hayek 1982, p. 90). Such self-interested behavior is the prime animator of neoliberal relations. Hayek understood self-love not as “egotism in the narrow sense of concern with only the immediate needs of one’s proper person” (Hayek 1980, p. 13) but included close family and friends. Apropos his earlier contention regarding rationality and knowledge, Hayek’s agnotological theory of society allows one to only have regard for oneself and a small circle of experiences around the self: “This is the constitutional limitation of man’s knowledge and interests, the fact that he cannot [emphasis in original] know more than a tiny part of the whole of society and that therefore all that can enter into his motives are the immediate effects which his actions will have in the sphere he knows” (Hayek 1980, p. 14).

This move opens the door for reconfiguring individual economic egotism into sacred and collective proscriptions for righteous living. Anointed as the sole guiding mechanism of not only economic but also social reproduction, self-interested egotism can easily invite varied theological exegeses to transform it into a moral or ethical principle. In regard to Bahá’í views on economics, such a merger readily occurs in two places.

First, Hayek’s appraisal of neoliberal markets as extemporaneously emergent echoes an Abrahamic “Genesis” narrative. His rendering affords a moment of creation in which markets, fashioned from clay, have life breathed into them by the holy quality of self-interest. As such, material “selfishness” is reconceived as “self-love” and is transformed from crass, materialist desire into a reflection of humanity’s spiritual reality and a divine, animating virtue. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá offers a few examples that seemingly resonate with Hayek’s notion of a market organized by “self-love” (Hayek 1948, p. 13). For example, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá agreed that self-love was a natural impulse that motivated economic participation and labor: “For self-love is kneaded into the very clay of man, and it is not possible that, without any hope of a substantial reward, he should neglect his own present material good” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1875] 1990b, pp. 96–97).33

Second, Hayek remarked that the mysterious operations of the catallaxy-market were a “marvel” (Hayek 1948, p. 87) that he could not adequately explain.34 The formally unknowable “marvel” of the economy transmogrifies into a divine agent.35 As Christiaens (2019, p. 84) writes of Hayek’s neoliberalism, “The market moves in mysterious ways.” Accordingly, the modern neoliberal market has been afforded “a degree of autonomy from ‘real production’ unmatched in the annals of political economy” (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, p. 10).36 Emergent processes become rationalized not in terms of an external goal to which they are oriented but become self-justifying because they are viewed as intrinsically more desirable and more efficient, due in part to their denotative religious character (Collini 2012). Referencing Adam Smith’s famous anthropomorphism of the market as an “invisible hand,” Hayek wrote,

Adam Smith was the first to perceive that we have stumbled upon methods of ordering human economic cooperation that exceed the limits of our knowledge and perception. His “invisible hand” had perhaps better have been described as an invisible or unsurveyable pattern. We are led—for example by the pricing system in market exchange—to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware.

(Hayek 1988, p. 14).37

Not only does Hayek’s understanding of the “invisible hand” frame the market as possessing the sentience to lead and direct social activity, but it also reflects, again driven by a sanctified form of economic egotism, an overarching and benevolent power to help others: “He is led by the invisible hand of the market to bring the succor of modern conveniences to the poorest homes he does not even know” (Hayek 1989, p. 145). Select proof-texting from the writings and utterances of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá lends to this marriage of neoliberalism and Bahá’í theology—from His allegorical instruction that when humanity held “fast to the cord of resignation”, then “a hand emerged from the invisible Realm” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá 2021, p. 41) to His explicit sacralization of the market dynamics: “demand and supply is the law, and undoubtedly all virtues have a center and source. That source is God, from Whom all these bounties emanate” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1922] 1982, p. 50).38 Hence, some Bahá’í economists promote neoliberal Bahá’í exegetics, such as the noted Bahá’í Nathan Rutstein’s The Invisible Hand: Shaping the New World Order, which framed the “cessation of the Cold War to the intervention of an ‘Invisible Hand’” (Rutstein 1992, p. 30) and that “free trade relationships” were “evidence of international economic, political, and social cooperation” and that “momentum toward world unity was quickening” (Rutstein 1992, p. 32).

4.4. Sacrificial Submission to Transcendent Authority

The apotheosis of the market through both “self-love” and the “invisible hand” invokes questions of governance, submission, and sacrifice. As Amable (2011, p. 27) contends, “The idea that neo-liberal capitalism is amoral or even immoral and that it is averse to regulation is erroneous.” Indeed, both the Hayekian subject and the Bahá’í believer must abide by rules and regulations, which is made all the easier through the inculcation of submission and “flexibilization” (compressing the unit cost of labor and reducing workers’ rights (see Wacquant 2009, p. 55)) as virtuous. Hayek bemoaned the public’s “economophobia,” wherein increasing numbers of people simply refused to submit to “the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces” (Hayek 1948, p. 24) of the market, which Hayek elsewhere said “exist and operate without being explicitly known to those who obey them” (Hayek 1948, p. 43). That is, governance is not reducible to overt laws but manifests as submission to implicit moral logics. Given that Hayek’s secular neoliberalism is subject to disruption, it requires either, first, the existence not of laissez-faire but of state laws to preclude “interference” with the market, or second, the promotion of a providential God to sanction faith in neoliberal market dynamics. Bahá’í theology has been interpreted to provide support for both, which I discuss below.

Submission to both the “Will of God” and government is inviolable within Bahá’í theology, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá made clear: “better for thee to bow down thy head in submission, and put thy trust in the All-Merciful Lord” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1922] 1982, p. 51) and “each and every one is required to show obedience, submission and loyalty towards his own government” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1922] 1982, p. 293). When the state adopts a neoliberal political economy, there is little sanctioned recourse for Bahá’ís other than submission, which is both legitimated as a divine commandment and rationalized through the hermeneutic of divine providence in the state-sanctioned market. Under such “governmentality” (Foucault 2008), neoliberalism becomes theological; people are viewed as divinely hard-wired for submission to political economy. People are thus understood at their most moral when working and submitting to demands for “efficiency, productivity, flexibility and the complete exploitation of so-called ‘human capital’” (Ramsey 2015, p. 3). Similar to how modern neoliberal Indonesian companies have used Qur’ánic scripture and Islamic pieties to transform “work into religious worship” (Rudnyckyj 2010, p. 141),39 so can Bahá’í scripture’s exaltation of “some form of occupation … to the rank of worship unto God” (Bahá’u’lláh 1988, p. 26) become fodder for the neoliberal imperative to dominate labor, ostensibly for working people’s own good via attainment of virtue. For ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, as with Hayek, market governance serves as a soteriological achievement—submission to a neoliberal labor governance becomes salvation from humanity’s own frailties and failings.

The submission to God qua governance is for Bahá’ís, as within neoliberalism, rationalized as a moral sacrifice of one’s own “peace and profit.” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá thus wrote,

That individual, however, who puts his faith in God and believes in the words of God—because he is promised and certain of a plentiful reward in the next life, and because worldly benefits as compared to the abiding joy and glory of future planes of existence are nothing to him—will for the sake of God abandon his own peace and profit and will freely consecrate his heart and soul to the common good. “A man, too, there is who selleth his very self out of desire to please God” [quotation from The Qur’án 2, 207],

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1875] 1990b, p. 97).

While Brown (2016, p. 11) refers to people who become “oblatory vis á vis the project of economic growth” as “sacrificial citizenship,” one could reconceptualize Bahá’í neoliberal exegetics as promoting economic martyrdom. Moralized economic participation becomes not simply the sacrifice of material goods and acceptance of a precarious life but requires spiritual self-immolation: a complete abdication of mental or ethical resistance to the neoliberal state. From this perspective, one can easily translate ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s contention that “[t]he fundamentals of the whole economic condition are divine in nature and are associated with the world of the heart and spirit” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá [1922] 1982, p. 142) as a deemphasis, if not a negation, of external, structural, and social forces. Rather, poverty, exploitation, and suffering can become individuated as personal failings of either disobedience to God and country, as a lack of sufficient “self-love,” or as a misunderstanding of one’s “nature” as driven by self-interest.

5. Conclusions

Do Bahá’í theology and neoliberalism fit [invisible] hand-in-glove? Certainly not. But even as many of the principles and core assumptions between neoliberal economic theory and Bahá’í teachings are incommensurate, I have labored to illuminate the hermeneutic logics and textual sources employed to conjure textual agreement between neoliberalism via Hayek and Bahá’í theology via ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. These connections, and perhaps even conceptual slippages and conflations, continue to be articulated given recent expansions of the Bahá’í Faith, especially in the “Global South,” and within various socio-economic initiatives spearheaded by cooperation between Bahá’í individuals and institutions with neoliberal tendencies like the IMF, WTO, and World Bank (cf. note 3).

Both the Bahá’í Faith and neoliberalism offer totalizing narratives about the inherent morality of humanity and the economy. These story-visions are utopian and aspirational and promise individual freedom, social justice, and non-exclusive global prosperity. With millennialist allure, both define and explain all social realities through their own overarching ethical worldviews of what could be. And both tell a story that the global economic market is, or will one day be, governed by a kind of divine or mystical efficiency and justice that satisfies individuals as indicated by their true nature and ontological needs.

Neoliberal organizations are increasingly self-aware of their reputation and the dominant critiques of their practices and have progressively engaged in cooperation with specific religious traditions while continually evoking religious sentiment and assumptions (as Hayek’s original writings did). Hence, neoliberal policy grows in authority to such an extent that asking moral questions about the consequences of neoliberal policies and practices is somehow irrelevant, borne of ignorance, or beyond the pale. Today, aspects of both Bahá’í theology and neoliberal policy have made their “claim to truth independent of the kind of empirical verification that is expected in the social sciences” (Block and Somers 2014, p. 3). Such qualities, especially when these systems dovetail in particular cooperative registers, protect both from challenge. While religionists logically defend their theology’s divinity (even infallibility) and immunity from critique, any economic system that gains such a similar unimpeachable status should give one pause.

There remains both a scholarly and applied imperative to examine what specific social conditions, lived experiences, and moral worldviews constrain or enable these meeting grounds. Understanding why and how these different worldviews might become conflated and synthesized, especially throughout the Global South, remains a pressing matter related to not only socio-economic equality but also the attainment of basic human rights. Given that, we know less about why and how some individual Bahá’ís or Bahá’í initiatives are drawn toward Hayekian economic frameworks and others are repulsed. Moreover, many supposed neoliberal institutions utilize diverse and sometimes contradictory versions of neoliberal economic policy, many of which diverge from Hayek’s and the Mont Pèlerin Society’s plans. Mapping these variations, alongside their antecedents and effects, is imperative. And so also, illuminating the specific social processes of scriptural and socio-economic interpretation amidst Bahá’í community life remains an area pregnant both with scholarly significance and with pragmatic implications for how economic inequality becomes recognized, defined, and addressed by Bahá’ís today.40