Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

Executive Summary

Robert Chapman’s Empire of Normality offers a groundbreaking Marxist analysis of how capitalism constructed the very concept of “normal” minds to rank, control, and exploit populations. The book traces the historical shift from ancient equilibrium-based models of health—where neurological difference was accommodated within communities—to the invention of statistical normality designed to serve capitalist production needs. Chapman argues that neurodivergent oppression is not an accidental byproduct of capitalism but foundational to its logic, creating what he terms the “Empire of Normality”: a complex system of scientific paradigms, legal frameworks, and institutions that frames neurological ranking as natural while serving economic exploitation.

The book’s most distinctive contribution is its development of “neurodivergent Marxism”—a framework integrating historical materialism with neurodiversity theory to explain capitalism’s paradoxical relationship with cognitive difference. Capitalism simultaneously requires neurodiversity for collective functioning while systematically abandoning neurodivergent people through discrimination, incarceration, and segregation. This “extractive abandonment” creates contradictions that can form the basis of collective resistance and liberation movements.

Chapman challenges the dominant neurodiversity movement’s liberal, rights-based approach as insufficient, arguing that genuine neurodivergent liberation requires building post-capitalist alternatives that allow cognitive pluralism without demanding productivity or normalization. The framework emphasizes intersectional organizing connecting neurodivergent liberation with environmental conservation, anti-patriarchy struggle, global decolonization, disability justice, and prison abolition.

Historical Foundations: The Invention of Normality

Ancient Equilibrium Models

Before capitalism’s emergence, cultures worldwide understood health as balance or equilibrium—either within bodily systems or between individuals and their environments. The Hippocratic model of four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile) exemplified this approach that persisted for thousands of years across Greek, Ayurvedic, and Traditional Chinese Medicine traditions.

These ancient frameworks accommodated wider ranges of neurological functioning because work was flexible, community-based, and self-determined. Different constitutions required different approaches to maintain balance, and social structures adapted to individual differences rather than forcing people into narrow standards. People with various neurological patterns could find meaningful roles within community structures.

The transformation from equilibrium-based to normality-based concepts of health represents ideological change serving emerging economic interests, not scientific progress. The shift to “normality as a measuring standard” enabled systematic ranking and control of populations just as industrial capitalism demanded standardized, productive workers.

The Scientific Construction of Normality

Descartes and the Body-As-Machine Metaphor

René Descartes’ revolutionary metaphor of the body as a complex machine made of working or broken parts—like a clock that could be repaired—initially appeared heretical and dangerous to religious authority. However, this mechanistic model eventually triumphed not through superior science but because it aligned with industrial capitalism’s need to view workers as interchangeable mechanical resources whose productivity could be measured, optimized, and exploited.

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 because it justified treating human workers as productive units rather than complex beings. This reductionism of human complexity to productive capacity enabled modern capitalist labor discipline.

Adolphe Quetelet and Statistical Normality

Adolphe Quetelet 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 “l’homme moyen” (the 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 the BMI formula (still used today despite limitations), concepts of “normal” heart rate and lung capacity, and the statistical conflation of normality with perfection and health. 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 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 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. He 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.”

His innovations included psychometrics and standardized testing, biometric testing for classification, psychological questionnaires for measurement, twin studies to separate nature from nurture, fingerprinting for criminal control, and public attractiveness rating systems using hidden clickers. Galton’s statistical innovations reflected “the practice and experience of the intellectual aristocracy read onto nature,” naturalizing 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.”

Legal and Institutional Implementation

The Legal Invention of “Mean Understanding”

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.

This demonstrates that pathologization of neurodivergence was fundamentally about resource control and class reproduction, not health concerns. 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.

Phrenology and Scientific Racism

Phrenology 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. It introduced the “average” concept to the masses, allowed white middle-class people to statistically position themselves as naturally superior, and merged cognitive hierarchy with capitalist and colonial ideology.

Phrenology positioned Black and colonized peoples as mentally inferior—“somewhere between humans and beasts.” This 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 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 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 “preventive psychological medicine” and “mass normalisation”—using psychiatric science to identify and manage populations deemed abnormal, long before they became clinical problems. 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.

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: up to 269,500 people with schizophrenia were sterilized or murdered between 1939-1945, along with systematic killing of disabled children labeled “useless eaters.” Autism as a diagnosis was coined during this period (Hans Asperger, 1930s-1940s) specifically to identify boys who failed to express “soldier mentality.”

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. He upheld biological normality as objective while attacking mental normality as subjective, relied on Cartesian mind-body dualism, and embodied libertarian ideology that pathologized patients as “malingerers” avoiding responsibility.

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, yet 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.

Workers were required to manage emotions for customer satisfaction while facing sensory and informational bombardment designed to capture attention for profit. The collapse of distinctions between work and leisure, combined with algorithms regulating desire and attention, resulted in widespread depression, anxiety, and panic attacks 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.” Applied Behavior Analysis became a multi-billion-dollar industry, while prenatal testing for Down syndrome leads to termination. Private sperm banks reject donors with autism or dyslexia, and physician-assisted suicide increasingly used by disabled people unable to survive on meager benefits.

This represents what Chapman terms “neuro-Thatcherism”—capitalist co-optation of resistance movements. The liberatory potential of neurodiversity movements is “being strangled just as it gains power” through “diversity consulting” that charges corporations to identify neurodivergent employees as “resources to be mined for productivity,” rebranding neurodivergent people as “neurodiverse talent” while maintaining coercive normalization practices.

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 the pathology paradigm—which views neurodivergence as deficit/defect and divides humans into “normal” (superior) and “other than normal” (inferior)—to the neurodiversity paradigm, which views neurodivergence as an axis of human diversity subject to the same social power dynamics as other forms of diversity and frames pathologization as systemic oppression.

Liberal Activism Limitations

Liberal, rights-based neurodiversity activism has achieved real gains: increased autism-friendly accommodations, improved cultural representation, and new legislation. 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, and Autistic people in Denmark are three times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. 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, and racialized neurodivergents experience compounded pathologization.

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: from medieval flexibility about madness, to Enlightenment statistical ranking, to Fordist behavioral standardization, to neoliberal cognitive capitalism where even thoughts and 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.

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.

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 that including one ADHD person in a group increases creative problem-solving, and cognitive diversity at group level improves adaptation to changing environments. Yet capitalism devalues and excludes the neurodivergent people whose thinking it requires.

This contradiction creates the basis for collective organizing and resistance. 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.

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 neurodivergent workers organizing in unions and cooperatives, surplus class members organizing collectively for resources and power, abolishing coercion in psychiatric systems while protecting recognition of disability/illness, decolonizing neurodiversity research and theory, building abolitionist approaches to incarceration, and recognizing neurodivergent liberation as inseparable from environmental conservation, anti-patriarchy struggle, and global decolonization.

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 late 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, and 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.

Future Directions

Post-Capitalist Alternatives

Genuine neurodivergent liberation requires building post-capitalist alternatives that allow cognitive pluralism without demanding productivity, mutual aid networks outside market logic, cooperative economics that distribute value equitably, abolitionist approaches to incarceration and coercive psychiatry, and ecological sustainability aligned with diverse cognitive needs.

Intersectional Organizing

Neurodivergent liberation is inseparable from environmental conservation and climate justice, anti-patriarchy struggle and gender liberation, global decolonization and anti-imperialism, disability justice and broader anti-capitalist movements, and prison abolition and anti-carceral organizing.

Research and Knowledge Production

Future research must center multiply marginalized neurodivergent experiences, develop neurodiversity-grounded knowledge across disciplines, challenge pathology paradigms in education, therapy, and workplace design, and build decolonized methodologies for understanding cognitive difference.

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.