Geohistory of "neoliberalism" Rethinking the meanings of a malleable and shifting intellectual label (original) (raw)

Neoliberalism and geography: expansions, variegations, formations

Geography Compass, 2010

The pervasiveness of neoliberalism within the field of human geography is remarkable, especially when we consider its virtual absence from the literature less than a decade ago. While the growing attention afforded to neoliberalism among geographers is new, the phenomenon of neoliberalism is not. This paper traces the intellectual history of neoliberalism and its expansions across various institutional frameworks and geographical settings. I review the primary contributions geographers have made to the literature, and specifically their recognition for neoliberalism’s variegations within existing political economic matrixes and institutional frameworks. Contra the prevailing view of neoliberalism as a pure and static end-state, geographical inquiry illuminates neoliberalism as a dynamic and unfolding process. The concept of ‘neoliberalization’ is thus seen as more appropriate to geographical theorizations insofar as it recognizes neoliberalism’s hybridized and mutated forms as it travels around our world. I also consider some of the most salient ways that neoliberalism has been theorized among human geographers. In particular, I highlight understandings of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, as a policy-based approach to state reform, and as a particular logic of governmentality, arguing that while there are significant differences between these various formations, it may also be important to work beyond methodological, epistemological, and ontological divides in the larger interest of social justice.

Introduction: Geographies of Neoliberalism

Although as a political and economic project neoliberalism operates across global space, this is not, of course, the only scale at which its practices are manifested and felt, for whilst there are many constants to neoliberalism across the planet (such as how its ascendance is linked to working-class political defeats; Carroll 2005), there are also important differences in how neoliberalism is operationalized in different places (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Castree 2005). Put another way, neoliberalism is a spatial project that is spatially projected because, despite the rhetoric of how neoliberal globalization is purportedly producing a flat and borderless world Ohmae 1990) in which distance and geography no longer matter, the sway of place still shapes how political praxis is imagined and articulated in these neoliberal times-the histories of social struggles and their institutional memories are very much tied up in the spatialities of the global economy and greatly influence how neoliberalism is being implemented locally and nationally (Brenner and Theodore in Keil 2002:582).

"Neoliberalism revisited," for The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology, New York: Wiley.

Sheppard E. et al (eds) The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology, New York: Wiley. , 2023

Thinking neoliberalism, thinking geography

Book Review, Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers, Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, Eric S. Sheppard (eds). The Guilford Press, New York and London, 2007, 340 pp., ISBN 1593853213, US$30 (pbk), ISBN 1593853211, US$55 (hbk).

The Discourse of Neoliberalism: An Anatomy of a Powerful Idea

2016

'The Discourse of Neoliberalism: An Anatomy of a Powerful Idea' explores the internal workings of capitalism’s most infamous contemporary offspring by dissecting the diverse interpretations of neoliberalism that have been advanced in academia. Using a critical geographical approach to pierce the heart of neoliberal theory, the book arrives at a discursive understanding wherein political economic approaches to neoliberalism are sutured together with poststructuralist interpretations in an attempt to overcome the ongoing ideological impasse that prevents the articulation of a more vibrant solidarity on the political left. Reading neoliberalism as a discourse better equips us to understand the power of this variegated economic formation as an expansive process of social-spatial transformation that is intimately bound up with the production of poverty, inequality, and violence across the globe. In examining how imaginative geographies are employed to discursively bind neoliberalism’s attendant violence to particular places and thereby blame its victims, this vivisection of neoliberalism reveals the concealment of an inherently bloodthirsty character to an ever-mutating process of socio-spatial transformation that simply refuses to die.

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.

Neoliberalizing Space

Antipode, 2002

This paper revisits the question of the political and theoretical status of neoliberalism, making the case for a process-based analysis of "neoliberalization." Drawing on the experience of the heartlands of neoliberal discursive production, North America and Western Europe, it is argued that the transformative and adaptive capacity of this farreaching political-economic project has been repeatedly underestimated. Amongst other things, this calls for a close reading of the historical and geographical (re)constitution of the process of neoliberalization and of the variable ways in which different "local neoliberalisms" are embedded within wider networks and structures of neoliberalism. The paper's contribution to this project is to establish a stylized distinction between the destructive and creative moments of the process of neoliberalism-which are characterized in terms of "roll-back" and "roll-out" neoliberalism, respectivelyand then to explore some of the ways in which neoliberalism, in its changing forms, is playing a part in the reconstruction of extralocal relations, pressures, and disciplines.

NEOLIBERALISM AS A “VILLAIN”: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF THEORETICAL CRITICAL STANCE TOWARDS NEOLIBERALISM IN THE TEXTS FROM ANTIPODE – A RADICAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY, 2010-2013

The paper represents a study of papers published in Antipode – A Radical Journal of Geography, from 2010 to 2013, in which, as to the author’s assessment, a highly critical stance towards contemporary neo-liberalism exists. Hence Antipode publishes “a radical analysis of geographical issues and its intent is to engender the development of a new and better society,” and, of course, a critical stance towards neo-liberalism is expected in the papers published. However, the intent of this paper is to analyze what kind of critical stance was present in the texts published in Antipode in the period of four years (2010-2013). The period of four years was taken as a referential period, especially because it started after the year in which the Great Recession struck most of the developed economies (2009). It ends with the end of the year 2013, which was the year when almost all developed economies exited the recession or the stagnation of their economies ended. Since neoliberalism, which brought the liberalization of markets, particularly the financial one, was usually blamed as the ideology behind the outbreak of the economic crisis that shocked the world in 2008 and 2009, the intention was to show how radical the leftist critique is in its perception of neoliberalism in the era of the current economic crisis. A basic content analysis was used inorder to analyze the discourse that was used to describe, characterize, and critically judge contemporary neoliberal capitalism, i.e. neoliberalism. Due to the ubiquity of the topic (neoliberalism), and the critical stance of the Antipode towards it, the research contains only the texts from the studied period, in which the word “neoliberalism” was found in the title of the text or among the key words mentioned below the abstract.