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Empire Of Normality'neurodiversity And Capitalism

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Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

Historical Foundations: the Invention of Normality

The concept of a “normal” mind is not a timeless biological truth but a recent Capitalist invention designed to rank, control, and exploit populations. Before the emergence of capitalism, health was universally understood across cultures as balance or equilibrium—either within the body or between individual and environment. The Hippocratic model based on four Humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile) exemplified this equilibrium approach that persisted for thousands of years.

This fundamental transformation from equilibrium-based to normality-based concepts of health represents ideological change, not scientific progress. Ancient societies including Ayurvedic and Traditional Chinese Medicine traditions accommodated wider ranges of Neurological functioning because work was Flexible, community-based, and self-determined. Disability segregation and systemic discrimination intensified only with industrial capitalism’s demand for standardized, productive workers.

Ancient Equilibrium Models

Across diverse cultures—from Greek to Ayurvedic to Chinese traditions—health was conceptualized as harmony rather than conformity to statistical norms. These frameworks understood:

  • Balance as health: When bodily systems or environmental relationships were in equilibrium, health prevailed
  • Individual variation: Different constitutions required different approaches to maintain balance
  • Community integration: People with various Neurological patterns could find meaningful roles within community structures
  • Flexible accommodation: Social structures adapted to individual differences rather than forcing individuals into narrow standards

The shift from this equilibrium-based understanding to normality as a measuring standard served specific emerging economic interests rather than representing medical progress.

The Scientific Construction of Normality

Descartes and the Body-As-Machine Metaphor

René Descartes (1596-1650) proposed the revolutionary Metaphor of the body as a complex machine made of working or broken parts—like a clock that could be repaired. While initially considered heretical and dangerous to religious authority, this mechanistic model eventually triumphed not because of superior science, but because it aligned with industrial capitalism’s need to view workers as productive units.

The technological developments of steam engines, spinning jennies, and other machines normalized mechanical metaphors in daily life, making the body-as-machine concept socially acceptable. Industrialists and capitalists adopted this framework not for medical advancement but because it justified treating human workers as Interchangeable mechanical resources whose productivity could be measured, optimized, and exploited. This reductionism of human complexity to productive capacity enabled modern capitalist labor discipline.

Adolphe Quetelet and Statistical Normality

Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874), a Belgian statistician, developed the first science of human normality by applying statistical methods—specifically the bell curve or “error curve” originally used to predict planetary movement—to human populations. His concept of “Average man” proposed that human characteristics could be averaged across populations to establish the “normal” person.

While framed as democratic—each individual having equal weight in statistical calculations—Quetelet’s average man simultaneously justified bourgeois hegemony and racial nationalism. The “normal” person became defined as white, middle-class, cognitively able, and European. Those deviating from this norm—disabled people, Working-class people, colonized peoples—were classified as “monstrous” and in need of fixing.

Quetelet’s contributions include:

These standards persist today as apparently neutral medical benchmarks while serving their original purpose of naturalizing Hierarchies.

Francis Galton: Evolution, Statistics, and Eugenics

Francis Galton (1822-1911), grandson of Erasmus Darwin and half-cousin of Charles Darwin, synthesized Darwin’s evolutionary theory with Quetelet’s statistical methods to create a ranking system for human mental and physical traits. His 1869 work Hereditary Genius ranked individuals and races from most to least “fit,” naturally placing white upper-class Europeans at the top and Black Africans and indigenous Australians at the bottom.

Galton’s innovations included:

He pioneered the explicit shift from Quetelet’s ideal of the “average” to a ranking system prioritizing the “highest” abilities—a crucial ideological move that reframed diversity as hierarchy. Galton coined the term “eugenics” and defined it as “the science of improving stock […] to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing.”

Historian Donald MacKenzie demonstrated that Galton’s statistical innovations reflected “the practice and experience of the intellectual aristocracy read onto nature,” naturalizing the class hierarchy where professionals represented “the pick of the nation’s brains,” skilled workers were “useful but increasingly dull-brained,” and the unemployed and unskilled were “typically stupid or worse.”

In seventeenth-century England, the legal concept of “mean understanding” emerged not for medical purposes but to exclude people with cognitive disabilities from inheriting and controlling property. By establishing a “normal” level of understanding as a legal standard, the cognitively able could monopolize property and wealth while framing this dispossession as natural law.

Early assessments of soundness of mind were informal and conducted by lawyers, but post-Quetelet, statistical methods were applied to formalize and legitimize these exclusions. This demonstrates that pathologization of neurodivergence was fundamentally about resource control and class reproduction, not health concerns.

Phrenology and Scientific Racism

Phrenology, developed by Franz Gall (1796) and popularized during industrialization, claimed head shape and brain size determined mental ability, character, and criminality. Though Pseudoscientific, phrenology proved crucial in shifting cultural understanding of race, cognition, and class.

Supported by figures from Herbert Spencer to Queen Victoria, phrenology:

  • Introduced the “average” concept to the masses
  • Allowed white middle-class people to statistically position themselves as naturally superior
  • Merged cognitive hierarchy with capitalist and colonial ideology
  • Positioned Black and colonized peoples as mentally inferior—“somewhere between humans and beasts”

Phrenology demonstrates how pathology paradigms function ideologically: pseudoscience designed to naturalize exploitative hierarchies as evolutionary facts.

Institutionalization and Control Systems

The Great Confinement

As capitalism intensified and populations grew denser, mad people and those deemed cognitively disabled shifted from being partially integrated (sometimes with privilege) into communities to systematic segregation in asylums, workhouses, and prisons. Michel Foucault termed this the “great confinement.”

Under capitalism, madness and idleness became threats requiring institutional control. The New Poor Law of 1834 mandated workhouses, formalizing segregation of the able poor, the criminalized, and the mad. This was not humanitarian progress—it was about managing populations as productive resources and eliminating those deemed economically useless.

Colonial Psychiatry and Racialization

Colonial psychiatrists extended these systems globally, racializing madness by claiming colonized peoples exhibited mental characteristics similar to insane Europeans. The shift from community accommodation to institutional segregation directly parallels capitalism’s tightening neuronormative requirements.

Psychiatric Professionalization

Emil Kraepelin and Modern Psychiatry

Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), the most prominent German psychiatrist of the nineteenth century, explicitly built psychiatry on Galton’s paradigm. Though typically credited as the “father of modern psychiatry” for developing classificatory, biocentric approaches, Kraepelin’s real innovation was expanding Galton’s ranking system from intelligence to all aspects of the mind.

In his 1919 essay “Ends and Means of Psychiatric Research,” Kraepelin proposed “mass psychiatry” that would determine “the range of normal variation” to create standards for measuring “morbid deviations”—standards applicable to “estimating school capacity, military fitness, business talent, and responsibility.”

He envisioned psychiatry as a tool for systematically measuring and categorizing all mental “insufficiencies and aberrances.” Crucially, Kraepelin’s vision explicitly aimed at:

This established the paradigm still dominant in psychiatry: classifying mental divergence as pathology to be treated or controlled in service of capitalist productivity and social order. Rather than treating individual suffering, psychiatric classification aimed at “bio-cultural normalisation” by ranking mental abilities hierarchically according to economic utility.

Eugenics and State Control

Eugenic ideology spread globally across political spectrums—from right-wing libertarians like John Maynard Keynes to socialists like Sidney Webb and Bertrand Russell. All endorsed forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded.”

In Nazi Germany, this reached its horrific endpoint:

This historical context reveals that psychiatric categories were deliberately constructed to serve economic and eugenic purposes, not to identify naturally occurring conditions.

Critical Movements and Their Limitations

Anti-Psychiatry’s Failed Critique

Thomas Szasz argued that “mental illness” was a metaphor psychiatry had forgotten was metaphorical—that psychiatric diagnoses functioned as social control masquerading as medicine. His critique gained enormous cultural influence through the anti-psychiatry movement, popular films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and radical movements.

However, Szasz’s analysis contained fatal flaws:

His work inadvertently enabled governments to close asylums not for liberation but to cut costs, shifting mentally ill people into prisons and nursing homes where conditions were often worse. Anti-psychiatry paradoxically strengthened psychiatric power by providing justification for deinstitutionalization without providing resources.

The Biomedical Failure

The DSM-III (1980) returned to Kraepelinian biological psychiatry by defining disorder as “dysfunction” relative to statistical norms. Despite President Bush’s 1990 “Decade of the Brain” proclamation and $20 billion in funding, mental health outcomes worsened:

  • Psychiatric medication prescribed to ~25% of UK population by 2018, ~16.5% of US by 2020
  • Disability rates for mental illness doubled from 1987 to 2007
  • Thomas Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, admitted in 2017 that 13 years and billions in investment failed to reduce suicide, hospitalization, or improve recovery

The biomedical model treated symptoms mechanically without addressing underlying social causes—proof that the pathology paradigm fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between neurodivergence and suffering.

Contemporary Capitalism and Mental Health

Post-Fordism and Emotional Labor

The shift from Keynesian welfare capitalism to neoliberalism (Thatcher/Reagan era, ~1979 onward) dramatically worsened mental health through specific material mechanisms. Drawing on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s concept of “emotional labor” and Franco Berardi’s analysis of cognitive capitalism, this era required workers in service economies to suppress authentic emotional responses to maintain efficiency.

Key developments:

The result: widespread depression, anxiety, and panic across the general population. Stress accounted for 37% of work-related absences in 2015-16 UK. Rising inequality directly correlated with mental illness: 73% of people in lowest income brackets experienced lifetime mental health problems versus 59% in highest brackets.

Neoliberal Normalization

Neoliberalism shifted from state-mandated eugenic control to market-driven “technocorrections”:

This represents what Chapman terms “neuro-Thatcherism”—capitalist co-optation of resistance movements.

The Neurodiversity Paradigm

Origins and Theory

The neurodiversity movement emerged from disability studies’ social model of disability and early Autistic activist resistance to pathologization. Judy Singer, influenced by her Jewish diaspora heritage and her own Autism Diagnosis, synthesized disability theory with emerging online Autistic communities advocating “neurological pluralism.”

She proposed Neurodiversity as a new civil rights category and called for “ecological societies” that would accommodate and conserve Autistic ways of being—similar to how conservationists view biodiversity.

Nick Walker clarified that Neurodiversity theory represents a paradigm shift from:

  • Pathology paradigm: Views neurodivergence as deficit/defect; divides humans into “normal” (superior) and “other than normal” (inferior)
  • Neurodiversity paradigm: Views neurodivergence as an axis of human diversity (like ethnicity or sexual orientation); subject to same social power dynamics as other forms of diversity; frames pathologization as systemic oppression

Liberal Activism Limitations

Chapman traces his own journey from discovering Neurodiversity theory to recognizing its limitations. Liberal, rights-based Neurodiversity activism has achieved real gains:

However, these gains have been partial and unequal. Applied Behavior Analysis continues despite Neurodiversity critiques of it as conversion therapy. Psychiatrists and psychologists rebrand as “neurodiversity experts” while leaving the pathology paradigm intact—what Chapman calls “neurodiversity-lite.”

Most importantly, Neurodivergent oppression persists:

  • Roughly 25% of UK prison inmates have ADHD
  • People with intellectual disabilities face routine segregation
  • Autistic people in Denmark are three times more likely to die by suicide than the general population

Neurodivergent Marxism

Capitalism’s Neuronormative Structure

Chapman argues capitalism is inherently disposed toward tight neuronormative standards—tighter than any previous economic system. Under feudalism, work was flexible, community-based, and accommodated wider Neurological variation. Each era of capitalism has narrowed what counts as “normal” cognition/behavior:

  1. Medieval flexibility about madness
  2. Enlightenment statistical ranking
  3. Fordist behavioral standardization
  4. Neoliberal cognitive capitalism where even thoughts/emotions must be monetizable

The apparatus Chapman calls the “Empire of Normality” is not accidental but foundational to capitalism: a complex nexus of scientific paradigms, legal systems, institutions, and administrative practices that rank populations neurologically while framing this ranking as natural and timeless.

Extractive Abandonment

Capitalism simultaneously requires Neurodiversity for collective functioning while systematically abandoning Neurodivergent people through discrimination, incarceration, and segregation—a contradiction Chapman terms “extractive abandonment.”

Studies show:

This contradiction creates the basis for collective organizing and resistance.

Anti-Capitalist Liberation

Chapman proposes “Neurodivergent Marxism” as a framework integrating Marx’s historical materialism with Neurodiversity theory. Marx’s vision of communism—“from each according to ability to each according to need”—contains seeds of Neurodivergent liberation but requires explicit development.

Concrete steps include:

Practical Applications and Resistance

Reframing Diagnosis as Relational Disablement

Rather than accepting psychiatric diagnoses as revelations of individual brain pathology, Chapman advocates recognizing “serial collectives”—groups of people disabled by specific material conditions. When multiple people are diagnosed with ADHD, Autism, or depression in correlation with economic intensification, this indicates relational disablement, not random individual defects.

Practical approach: When facing a Diagnosis, ask not “what is wrong with my brain?” but “what structures am I navigating that disable my particular neurocognition?”

Collective Organization

The text identifies extractive abandonment as the basis for collective Neurodivergent power. Practical applications include:

  • Forming Neurodivergent worker collectives that collectively refuse to normalize their cognition
  • Building disability justice cooperatives that pool resources and knowledge
  • Establishing peer support networks that recognize mental illness and disability as real while organizing collectively

Resisting Co-Optation

As capitalism co-opts Neurodiversity language, Chapman warns against allowing liberation frameworks to be subsumed into productivity enhancement. Question whether proposed “neurodiversity initiatives” genuinely improve material conditions or merely increase profit extraction.

Build alternatives to capitalist workplaces—cooperatives, mutual aid networks—that can distribute value more equitably and accommodate cognitive diversity without demanding normalization.

Key Concepts and Frameworks

Neuronormative Double-Bind

Chapman identifies a “neuronormative double-bind”: even when traditional class mobility increases, neuronormative domination increases proportionally. Capitalism cannot accommodate Neurodiversity equitably while maintaining hierarchical control and exploitation.

Serial Collectives

The concept of “serial collectives” refers to groups of people who share similar patterns of relational disablement under specific material conditions. This framework enables collective analysis and organizing rather than individual pathologization.

Ecological Societies

Judy Singer’s concept of “ecological societies” envisions social structures that accommodate and conserve diverse Neurological ways of being, similar to how conservationists approach biodiversity.

Turn Illness Into a Weapon

The Socialist Patients Collective’s approach—“Turn Illness into a Weapon”—offers a model for recognizing genuine suffering while organizing collectively for resources rather than accepting pathologization or denial.

Contemporary Challenges

Neuro-Thatcherism

Chapman warns that the liberatory potential of Neurodiversity movements is “being strangled just as it gains power” through:

Multiply Marginalized Neurodivergents

The Neurodiversity movement has primarily benefited already-privileged Neurodivergent people (white, middle-class) while:

  • Incarcerated neurodivergents remain trapped in carceral systems
  • Poor neurodivergents face homelessness and poverty
  • Racialized neurodivergents experience compounded pathologization
  • Non-western Neurodiversity remains invisibilized

True liberation requires centering those most oppressed and building explicitly decolonial neurodiversity praxis.

Future Directions

Post-Capitalist Alternatives

Genuine Neurodivergent liberation requires building post-capitalist alternatives that allow:

Intersectional Organizing

Neurodivergent liberation is inseparable from:

Research and Knowledge Production

Future research must:

Conclusion

Empire of Normality demonstrates that Neurodivergent oppression is not a bug in capitalism but a feature of its core logic. The concept of normality was deliberately constructed to serve capitalist control, and neuronormative domination intensifies as capitalism develops.

Genuine liberation requires not just accommodation within capitalism but the construction of post-capitalist alternatives that allow genuine cognitive pluralism. By understanding the historical construction of normality and the economic functions of pathologization, Neurodivergent people can build collective power and resistance rather than accepting individual diagnoses as evidence of personal brokenness.

The framework of Neurodivergent Marxism offers tools for understanding how capitalism simultaneously requires and abandons Neurodivergent cognition, creating contradictions that can be the basis for organizing and transformation. Through collective action, mutual aid, and the building of alternative institutions, Neurodivergent liberation can contribute to broader anti-capitalist struggle and the creation of more just, equitable societies.