What is 'Neoliberalism', and How Does It Relate to Globalization? (original) (raw)
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Neoliberalism (in The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of globalization)
Neoliberalism has had an interesting trajectory. It was initially formulated as an intellectual-cum-political project in 1938; enjoyed growing acceptance as an economic and political strategy in the 1970s; witnessed panic-stricken meetings in New York and Washington a generation later at the height of the global financial crisis; and, most recently, seems to be undergoing a return to business as usual. There have been many efforts over these long decades to promote (or defend) ‘neoliberal’ institutions and practices as the best basis for economic, legal, political, social, and moral order in complex social formations. There is an even wider range of commentaries and criticisms concerned with neoliberalism, its core features, social bases of support, and its impact on various sites and scales from the local to the global. This contribution addresses some of these issues. It has five main aims: to offer a baseline definition of neoliberalism; to discuss different social scientific approaches to neoliberalism; to distinguish four main types of neoliberalism from a critical political economy viewpoint and relate them to the world market, geopolitics, and global governance; to review the contradictory aspects of neoliberalism in actually existing capitalism; and to assess its prospects after the first global financial crisis and first great recession of the 21st century.
NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION AND ITS POLITICS
During the 1990s, globalization was one of the hotly discussed concepts of social sciences. Previously associated with liberalism, it acquired a neoliberal character with the dawn of the 21 st century. Nevertheless, the meaning of neoliberalism and its relation with liberalism still needs to be clarified. Mainly, it is asserted that neoliberal globalization thoroughly disengaged from liberal globalization as the former requires and nourishes strong states rather than the weak states of the latter era. Internationally, it is said to be transformed into a new type of imperialism and witness the emergence of an empire. Domestically, neoliberal globalization is strengthening authoritarian policies and practices both in anti-democratic states and established democracies. On the one hand, these two developments go hand-in-hand and trigger each other. On the other hand, they share a common point: strong states are both internally and externally dedicated to liberalization of markets, and support liberal market values. This situation refutes conventional liberal theories on globalization, according to which internationalization of capitalism and market relations would boost the development of democracy in nation states. In this framework, this paper will focus on the domestic politics of neoliberal globalization. First, it will introduce the conceptual richness that describes neoliberal politics, such as electoral authoritarianism and competitive authoritarianism. It will assert that neoliberalism reinvigorates archaic political regime types, which are unbounded by the constitutions, and only sporadically respect rights and liberties.
The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary International Political Economy, 2019
Neoliberalism has become a common, if contested, frame of reference for IPE to understand the governance of the global economy. In examining such complex terrain, this chapter begins by offering four prominent starting points for the analysis of neoliberalism: (1) as a history of intellectual ideas; (2) as a system of enhanced capitalist power; (3) as a cultural examination of everyday conduct; and (4) as a more generic, post-Marxist expression to denote the current zeitgeist. The discussion proceeds to dissect neoliberalism via three major 'acts': (1) from the late 1970s to the early 1990s; (2) from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s; and (3) from the late 2000s to the present. Significant contributions from IPE are discussed in relation to the wider empirical context.
Peak neoliberalism? Revisiting and rethinking the concept of neoliberalism
The aim of this special issue is to revisit and rethink neoliberalism as an abstract concept and as an empirical object. We invite contributors to critically evaluate dominant conceptions of neoliberalism, to examine how we use neoliberalism as an analytical and methodological framework, and to offer new ideas about how to productively (re)conceptualize neoliberalism. Below we outline some broad questions that contributors might like to engage with, although others are welcome: • How conceptually useful is neoliberalism in different disciplines? • How has the concept of neoliberalism evolved over time? • Does neoliberalism represent a useful or critical way of understanding the current state of the world? • What are the limitations to our use of neoliberalism? • Does neoliberalism need updating as a critical concept in ways that take us beyond hybridity and variegation? • What is missing from debates on neoliberalism in contemporary scholarship? • What makes neoliberalism such a popular analytical framework? call for papers | 2 • Are there alternative ways to conceptualize neoliberalism? • Are we in need of finding alternative conceptions that break with the language of ‘neoliberalism’ altogether? • What might new visions beyond neoliberalism yield in terms of our collective political future?
Thesis Eleven Six theories of neoliberalism
This article takes as its starting point the observation that neoliberalism is a concept that is 'oft-invoked but ill-defined'. It provides a taxonomy of uses of the term neoliberalism to include: (1) an all-purpose denunciatory category; (2) 'the way things are'; (3) an institutional framework characterizing particular forms of national capitalism, most notably the Anglo-American ones; (4) a dominant ideology of global capitalism; (5) a form of governmentality and hegemony; and (6) a variant within the broad framework of liberalism as both theory and policy discourse. It is argued that this sprawling set of definitions are not mutually compatible, and that uses of the term need to be dramatically narrowed from its current association with anything and everything that a particular author may find objectionable. In particular, it is argued that the uses of the term by Michel Foucault in his 1978-9 lectures, found in The Birth of Biopolitics, are not particularly compatible with its more recent status as a variant of dominant ideology or hegemony theories. It instead proposes understanding neoliberalism in terms of historical institutionalism, with Foucault's account of historical change complementing Max Weber's work identifying the distinctive economic sociology of national capitalisms.
The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: The Collapse of an Economic Order?
About the Book The recent, devastating and ongoing economic crisis has exposed the faultlines in the dominant neoliberal economic order, opening debate for the first time in years on alternative visions that do not subscribe to a 'free' market ethic. In particular, the core contradiction at the heart of neoliberalism – that states are necessary for the functioning of free markets – provides us with the opportunity to think again about how we want to organise our economies and societies. The Rise and Fall of Neloberalism presents critical perspectives of neoliberal policies, questions the ideas underpinning neoliberalism, and explores diverse response to it from around the world. In bringing together the work of distinguished scholars and dedicated activists to question neoliberal hegemony, the book exposes the often fractured and multifarious manifestations of neoliberalism which will have to be challenged to bring about meaningful social change. Table of Contents 1. Introduction: A World Turned Right-Way Up - Kean Birch and Vlad Mykhnenko Part 1: The Rise of Neoliberalism 2. How Neoliberalism Got Where It Is: Elite Planning, Corporate Lobbying and the Release of the Free Market - David Miller 3. Making Neoliberal Order in the United States - Kean Birch and Adam Tickell 4. Neoliberalism, Intellectual Property and the Global Knowledge Economy - David Tyfield 5. Neoliberalism and the Calculable World: The Rise of Carbon Trading - Larry Lohmann 6. Tightening the Web: The World Bank and Enforced Policy Reform - Elisa van Waeyenberge 7. The Corruption Industry and Transition: Neoliberalising Post-Soviet Space? - Adam Swain, Vlad Mykhnenko and Shaun French 8. Remaking the Welfare State: From Safety Net to Trampoline - Julie MacLeavy Part 2: The Fall of Neoliberalism 9. Zombieconomics: The Living Death of the Dismal Science - Ben Fine 10. From Hegemony to Crisis? The Continuing Ecological Dominance of Neo-Liberalism - Bob Jessop 11. Do It Yourself: A Politics for Changing Our World - Paul Chatterton 12. Dreaming the Real: A Politics of Ethical Spectacles - Paul Routledge 13. Transnational Companies and Transnational Civil Society - Leonith Hinojosa and Anthony Bebbington 14. Defeating Neo-liberalism: A Marxist Internationalist Perspective and Programme - Jean Shaoul 15. Conclusion: The End of an Economic Order? - Vlad Mykhnenko and Kean Birch
Why "Neoliberalism?" On Critique and Method [Workshop Agenda and Concept Note]
Over the last thirty years a growing body of scholarship across the social sciences has deployed and developed the concept and terminology of neoliberalism. Since exploding in the early 1990s, its usage has not only surpassed related terms (“libertarian” “Washington Consensus” “financialization”) in academic research but has enjoyed exceptional success in public discourses as well (Venugopal 2015) The term has been identified with a variety of large-scale processes and seemingly contradictory trends. As a policy agenda of liberalization and regulatory retrenchment, its implementation over the last thirty years has entailed a massive increase in the volume and complexity of legal rules (Vogel 1996, Braithwaite 2008). As a discourse rooted in the valorization of individual freedom, it has facilitated the consolidation of collective power and, in some contexts, justified the expansion of incarceration and surveillance (Brown 2015, Harcourt 2011) As a political project associated most often with Reagan and Thatcher's efforts to lower taxes and weaken labour power (Harvey 2005), its advance has coincided with a paradoxical combination of rising national inequality measures and a flattening of the global inequality distribution (Milanovic 2012). What initially appeared as disagreements about the origins and causes of the neoliberal ascendance have now come into view as more fundamental divides over the nature of the concept itself. For some, neoliberalism is a set of economic policies enacted all over the world since the 1970s; for Marxists, the result of the resurgent power of global financial elites; for readers of Foucault, it names transformations of political rationality and subjectivity corresponding to an economization of all social life. (Flew 2014) These conceptualizations are nonetheless united by an implied periodization. Neoliberalism promises to mark off the present from the past, emphasizes the underlying continuity of capitalism, and evokes nostalgia for a post-WWII Golden Age. Given this unifying thread, differences in usage may reflect deeper differences about the salient aspects of social order, the nature of social change and proper governance of political order. Thus, debates over “neoliberalism” may serve as a proxy for more fundamental divisions over theory and norm, method and discipline. Recent years have witnessed a number of countervailing trends. A growing genre of research has developed critiques of the concept's theoretical fungibility and drawn on the multiplicity of its valences in practice to seriously question its explanatory value. (Venugopal 2015, Boas & Gan-Morse 2009) Research depending on the concept has nonetheless continued to intensify, and to jump further across disciplinary lines, becoming a centre point of symposia and special collections in a number of fields (Grewal Purdy 2014, Birch Springer 2016) Finally, scholars have increasingly reached into the past, long before the crisis of the 1970s, to find institutional, philosophical and conceptual precursors of today's neoliberal practices. (Gane 2012, Kipnis 2008) In the context of these trends, this workshop offers a momentary opportunity for methodological reflexivity. In an interdisciplinary group that includes historians and sociologists, legal scholars and moral philosophers, political scientists and others, participants will be invited to present, reframe and contextualize their own work in a way that reflects on the analytical, normative and critical value of “neoliberalism.” What insights does the term bring to sites of research left undertheorized by other concepts? Beyond naming and identifying aspects of the world, concepts draw things together and keep other things from view. What analytical connections does “neoliberalism” facilitate, and what processes does it obscure? What new spaces of understanding does the concept open up, and how? On the other hand, what are the risks and pitfalls of leaning too heavily on the term? When might it be time, to borrow a phrase, “to take a break from neoliberalism?” (c.f. Halley 2006). By providing a setting to compare approaches across methodological differences, we hope to not only map the uses of neoliberalism (Ferguson 2010), but to learn something about the origins of the present and, more broadly, about the promises of critically engaged social science.
The concept of " neoliberalism " has, during the past twenty years or so, become quite widespread in some political and academic debates. Several authors have even suggested that neoliberalism is " the dominant ideology shaping our world today " , and that we live in an " age of neoliberalism ". The overshadowing importance accorded by some to the phenomenon of neoliberalism does not signify, however, that it is a clearly defined concept. We suggest in this article that while the concept itself has become an imprecise exhortation in much of the literature, often describing any tendency deemed to be undesirable, it might still be given a more precise definition, which we attempt below. If this is done, then the concept could become a useful analytical device in order to describe some recent economic and political trends, even if it is an ever so slight overstatement to say that we live in a neoliberal age or a neoliberal society.