A Conceptual History of Neoliberalism (original) (raw)
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Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016)
2016
Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts provides a critical guide to a vocabulary that has become globally dominant over the past forty years. The language of neoliberalism both constructs and expresses a particular vision of economics, politics, and everyday life. Some find this vision to be appealing, but many others find the contents and implications of neoliberalism to be alarming.Despite the popularity of these concepts, they often remain confusing, the product of contested histories, meanings, and practices. In an accessible way, this interdisciplinary resource explores and dissects key terms such as: Capitalism Choice Competition Entrepreneurship Finance Flexibility Freedom Governance Market Reform Stakeholder State Complete with an introductory essay, cross-referencing, and an extensive bibliography, this book provides a unique and insightful introduction to the study of neoliberalism in all its forms and disguises.
What is new about neoliberalism? Such a question immediately implies that certain objects and processes can be defined as ‘neoliberal’ and, importantly, that the contents of the ‘neo’ can be explained by reference to a larger phenomenon called liberalism. A veritable galaxy of things are now attached to the term neoliberalism, if not as some primary identifying marker then at least as one descriptive property among others. This chapter seeks to offer a window through which to problematise and analyze this core if recalcitrant question. In keeping with other debates in the social sciences, it proposes that the frame of neoliberalism tries to capture something about developments in capitalism since the 1970s, with commodification, financialisation, and general moves towards ‘market-based’ modes of regulation or governmentality being major debates in the literature (Harvey 2005; Brenner, Peck, and Theodore, 2010; Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2012; Springer 2010). While accepting this temporal frame as a starting point, the chapter seeks to contextualise the history of neoliberalism in two ways. First, the chapter sheds a sharper light on the relationship between capitalism and its mechanisms of legitimation, particularly at the level of everyday experience. Second, within the inevitable space constraints, the argument traces certain threads of meaning that connect the history of the liberal tradition to the present, specifically the themes of individualism, universalism, and meliorism. Thus, the chapter aims to reveal how justifications for neoliberal capitalist practices are the product of a long history of social struggles that are, moreover, often confusing, multifarious, and even contradictory. Ironically, once this perspective is recognised, the task of deciphering contemporary neoliberalism arguably becomes harder, particularly concerning efforts to understand where certain ideas and values tied to neoliberalism acquire their commonsensical power. If neoliberalism is a moving concept then scholarship needs to be equally adept at moving with it.
'Introduction', in Eagleton-Pierce, M., Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).
2016
Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts provides a critical guide to a vocabulary that has become globally dominant over the past forty years. The language of neoliberalism both constructs and expresses a particular vision of economics, politics, and everyday life. Some find this vision to be appealing, but many others find the contents and implications of neoliberalism to be alarming. Despite the popularity of these concepts, they often remain confusing, the product of contested histories, meanings, and practices. In an accessible way, this interdisciplinary resource explores and dissects key terms such as: capitalism, choice, competition, entrepreneurship, finance, flexibility, freedom, governance, market, reform, stakeholder, and state. This introduction clarifies the context behind the rise of neoliberalism as an analytical term, its possibilities and pitfalls, and the rationale for the book. Overall, the book provides a unique and insightful introduction to the study of neoliberalism in all its forms and disguises.
2016
The Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism seeks to offer a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of neoliberalism by examining the range of ways that it has been theorized, promoted, critiqued, and put into practice in a variety of geographical locations and institutional frameworks. Neoliberalism is easily one of the most powerful discourses to emerge within the social sciences in the last two decades, and the number of scholars who write about this dynamic and unfolding process of socio-spatial transformation is astonishing. Even more surprising though is that there has, until now, not been an attempt to provide a wide-ranging volume that engages with the multiple registers in which neoliberalism has evolved. The Handbook of Neoliberalism accordingly serves as an essential guide to this vast intellectual landscape. With proposed contributions from over 50 leading authors, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will offer a systematic overview of neoliberalism’s origins, political implications, social tensions, spaces, natures and environments, and aftermaths in addressing ongoing and emerging debates. Numerous books have been published on neoliberalism, including important edited volumes, but none of these contributions have attempted to bring the diverse scope and wide-ranging coverage that we plan to incorporate here. Most of the edited volumes and monographs on neoliberalism that have been published to date have a very specific thematic focus, either on particular empirical case studies, or alternatively attempt to wrestle with a specific theoretical concern. In contrast, the Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism aims to provide the first comprehensive overview of the field. With authors working at institutions around the world, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will offer a thorough examination of how neoliberalism is understood by social scientists working from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Our goal is to advance the established and emergent debates in a field that has grown exponentially over the past two decades, coinciding with the meteoric rise of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, state form, policy and program, and governmentality. In short, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will intervene by both outlining how theorizations of neoliberalism have evolved and by exploring new research agendas that we hope will inform policy making and activism. The Handbook of Neoliberalism will include a substantive introductory chapter and seven main thematic sections. By presenting a comprehensive examination of the field, this edited volume will serve as an invaluable resource for undergraduates, graduate students, and professional scholars alike. We envision the book as both a teaching guide and a reference for human geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, heterodox economists, and others working on questions of neoliberalism and its multifarious effects.
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 onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 has been widely interpreted as a fundamental challenge to, if not crisis of, neoliberal governance. Here, we explore some of the near-term and longer-run consequences of the economic crisis for processes of neoliberalization, asking whether we have been witnessing the terminal unraveling of neoliberalism as a form of social, political, and economic regulation. In many ways a creature of crisis, could neoliberalism now be falling to a crisis of its own making? Answering this question is impossible, we argue, without an adequate understanding of the nature of neoliberalization and its evolving sociospatial manifestations. These are more than definitional niceties. The prospects and potential of efforts to move genuinely beyond neoliberalism must also be considered in this light.
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?
Post-Neoliberalism? An Introduction
Theory, Culture & Society, 2021
This article provides an introduction to the special issue on post-neoliberalism. It does so by considering challenges to the neoliberal order that have come, postfinancial crisis, from the political right. It looks closely at the relation of neoliberalism to conservatism, on one hand, and libertarianism, on the other, in order to address the threat posed to the neoliberal order by paleoconservatism, neoreactionary politics, ordonationalism, libertarian paternalism, and different forms of sovereignty and elite power. The final section of this introduction reflects on the challenge to the neoliberal orthodoxy posed by the current COVID-19 crisis. For while events of 2020-21 have facilitated new forms of privatization of many public services and goods, they also signal, potentially, a break from the neoliberal orthodoxies of the previous four decades, and, in particular, from their overriding concern for the market.