Robert Chapman calls the “Empire of Normality” the set of scientific, institutional, cultural, and legal impositions that define what is considered pathological and what is deemed normal, based on its alignment with the mandate of productivity.
Today, cognitive capitalism has transformed the world into an increasingly uninhabitable place for both neurodivergent and neurotypical people. This is due to phenomena such as the intensification of stimuli competing for our attention, the privatization of stress described by Mark Fisher, and the growing emotional demands of service economies.
This widespread sense of distress creates the conditions for the emergence of a radical politics of neurodiversity—one that goes beyond liberal reformism and the mere expansion of rights. Only through an intersectional approach that also considers race, class, gender, and physical disability can we begin to challenge the foundations of the Empire of Normality, offering a crucial contribution to collective emancipation.
The rise of capitalism – through its colonial roots and then imperial stages – thus finally brought the modern notion that the mad need to be treated, to ease their suffering and return the idle to the workforce. It was in this new context of viewing the population as a malleable economic resource that we see the emergence of new professional roles that paved the way for early pre-paradigmatic psychiatry and related disciplines such as psychology and psychometrics to emerge. And the new mechanistic understanding of the body and mind, coupled with new conceptions of normality, brought a new way of grounding these projects. As we will see in the next chapter, this would then be combined with the emerging statistical notions of normal functioning to ground not just the rise of eugenics but also the psychiatric paradigm that still exists today – the pathology paradigm.
Chapman, Robert. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (pp. 43-44).
Traditionally – across the globe – both mental and bodily health were typically conceptualised as a matter of balance or equilibrium. This was either within the body or between body and environment. But the capitalist mode of production and the Industrial Revolution began to bring a new conception of health and ability. The body and mind were increasingly seen as machines, and the new concept of normality began to be used to determine whether these machines were working or broken. And far from being a merely technical medical concept, the idea of normality began to bring a profound shift in how different individuals and classes of people came to see themselves. It also came with new forms of administration of populations. This provided white, cognitively abled, middle-class people to justify the various hierarchies that had emerged given the rise of capitalism as well as colonialism and imperialism. It also allowed cognitively abled people to begin establishing a monopoly on property and the means of production. As such, the normality concept mirrored contingent social hierarchies while at the same time framing these hierarchies as natural.
Here, then, we see the beginning of what I call the Empire of Normality. This new apparatus, made up of a complex nexus of different carceral systems, legal precedents, institutions, concepts, and practices, led to populations beginning to be systematically ranked in terms of mental and neurological ability, while positing this as part of a timeless natural order. This was not an accident, but was rather built into the logics of capitalism from the beginning. And it was in this context, as we will come to next, that a British polymath named Francis Galton developed the pathology paradigm – the precise paradigm the neurodiversity movement would later arise to name and resist.
Chapman, Robert. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (pp. 44-45).
This is the first book that provides a history of capitalism that places neurodiversity, rather than class, at its centre. While I do take an intersectional approach that considers class, race, gender, sexuality, and bodily disability, my focus on neurodiversity allows me to trace the emergence of what I call the Empire of Normality. This refers to an apparatus of material relations, social practices, scientific research programmes, bureaucratic mechanisms, economic compulsions, and administrative procedures that emerge from fundamental dispositions of the capitalist system, at least once it reaches a certain stage of development. Together, these bring a much more restricted bodily, cognitive, and emotional normal range than those seen in any previous society. Simultaneously, the framing of this as an empire helps me to emphasise the connection between neurodivergent oppression, colonialism, and imperialism. This in turn should allow us to examine the prospects for developing a politics of neurodiversity that equally helps work towards collective liberation.
Chapman, Robert. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (p. 15).
This shines a light on how the ideological biases determined by the material relations of capitalism and imperial Britain – channelled through Galton – have since guided scientific knowledge production, public understanding, policy, and clinical practice relating to neurodiversity to this very day. This has been so even while the old imperial order has crumbled in other important ways. It is this new apparatus of scientific, administrative, cultural, and legal impositions that constitute the Empire of Normality. Long after the British Empire has crumbled, I show, many of its hierarchies and power relations have been maintained, reproduced, and expanded through this apparatus, which has not only survived but grown ever-more hegemonic as capitalism has continued to intensify. Thus, for me, the key problem is not the pathology paradigm alone, but how capitalist logics and the pathology paradigm mutually reinforce each other, leaving no possibility of neurodivergent liberation without deep systemic change.
Chapman, Robert. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (p. 17).
My aim is not to develop a set of policy proposals or a political strategy. Rather, it is to help clarify an underlying problem that I see as a deeper, older, and more insidious than the pathology paradigm. Clarifying this problem is just the first step towards what will need to be a much more prolonged, collective effort to combat the Empire of Normality, that is, the apparatus that sits behind and necessitates the pathology paradigm. Only by understanding how the paradigm relates to this broader apparatus and in turn to fundamental dispositions of the capitalist mode of production will we be able to clearly comprehend what neurodivergent liberation would require.
Chapman, Robert. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (p. 17).
By contrast, in tracing the rise of the neurodiversity movement, I synthesise the work of seminal neurodiversity theorists Judy Singer and Nick Walker with my Marxian approach. This is important as it allows me to clarify as-yet unidentified contradictions of capitalism that show the futility of neuro-Thatcherism. The most important of these regards a tendency towards a neuronormative double-bind that increasingly traps each of us, regardless of whether we are closer or further from the neurotypical ideal. Those aspects of our species-wide neuro-cognitive diversity that it cannot currently use are disenabled, devalued, and discriminated against; while those it can use are ruthlessly exploited and thus made unwell. Either way, I argue, all human minds and selves are estranged from one another through the psychic hierarchies this produces. This leads to a situation where we all become sick or disabled, or at the very least where wellbeing is elusive for most of us. On this view, then, it is not the neurotypical who oppresses the neurodivergent, but capitalist domination that, in a certain sense, creates and harms both neurotypicals and neurodivergents, albeit in slightly different ways depending on any given individual’s proximity to the norm.
Indeed, as already alluded to, part of what I seek to show is that while capitalist societies have allowed some degree of mobility regarding social class, this has only meant that domination shifts more towards neurodivergence rather than diminishing overall. This, I argue, undermines the last promise of capitalism, which purports to help us approach a meritocracy where free individuals are valued not by their inherited status but by their virtues and how hard they work.
Chapman, Robert. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (pp. 18-19).
