Academia.eduAcademia.edu

Outline

Title
Abstract
Conclusion
References
All Topics
Economics
Political Economy

Post-Neoliberalism? An Introduction

Profile image of Nicholas GaneNicholas Gane

2021, Theory, Culture & Society

https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211036722
visibility

…

description

26 pages

link

1 file

Abstract

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.

Related papers

Neoliberalism, Crisis, Alternatives: Revitalizing Public Goods Neoliberalism, Crisis, Alternatives: Revitalizing Public Goods
Alfredo Saad Filho

Journal of Law and Public Policy, 2022

My address to you today focuses on neoliberalism, the evolving and developing crises of neoliberalism, and the ways in which we can think of alternatives to transcend, or to overcome, neoliberalism. The first difficulty we have is that neoliberalism is a term that is used frequently in the social sciences and in the media, but often without a very clear content. A lot of my work in this area has been to try and contribute to the analytical grounding of this concept because I think it is hugely important in order to understand society, the economy, and politics today. For all the talk that we see about neoliberalism, it is difficult, and known to be difficult, to try and understand what it is, and the concept remains heavily disputed within the social sciences. This is the first challenge that we have, yet [it is] something that I believe can be defined and distinguished and examined. It dominates ideology, policymaking, and social organization today, and that is all beyond the economy. One of the challenges for us now is to address what it is. Clearly, neoliberalism is conservative and neoliberal thought is conservative thought, and it is associated with the political right, but it is not just any kind of conservative thought. Neoliberal thought has specific features and those features and those ideas, they rule the world. They inform policymaking in most countries, and they are also the bedrock of the common sense of our age. This makes them hugely important in our lives. They are the things that don't need to be discussed, that are accepted without the need for a conversation about them. Neoliberal ideas have very clear principles. They are, first of all, principles about the importance of property rights. I have tried to illustrate those principles with quotes by prominent neoliberal thinkers that you have

View PDFchevron_right
IN THE SHADOW OF ORDOLIBERALISM: THE PARADOX OF NEOLIBERALISM IN THE 21 ST CENTURY
Philip G. Cerny

Neoliberalism and Ordoliberalism grew out of the same debates in the 1930s and 1940s but increasingly diverged in the postwar period. Anglo-American neoliberalism became associated with laissez faire economics, whereas Ordoliberalism (closely associated with what was called neoliberalism in Germany) is about a strong 'constitutive rule-based economic order'. Nevertheless, the core dynamic of both Ordoliberalism and so-called 'paleoliberal' neoliberalism is marketisation. Efficient markets, regulated by the price mechanism, are seen as the raison d'être of successful capitalism. For both, the most crucial condition for market efficiency is competition. However, they diverge on the requirements for effective competition. Anglo-American neoliberals see the market as a 'spontaneous order' with a minimal role for the state while Ordoliberals believe markets left to their own devices are prone to systemic anti-competitive cartellisation and rent-seeking by capitalists, labour unions and bureaucrats. Competition therefore must be promoted, enabled and enforced by a strong pro-competitive state through 'commodifying' regulation. However, both Orodliberalism and Anglo-American neoliberalism in practice have involved extensive ad hoc re-regulation in response to complex, unforeseen events such as the global financial and Eurozone crises and other market failures and inefficiencies. They have become more regulatory and interventionist de facto, what I call 'post-Ordoliberalism'.

View PDFchevron_right
Neoliberalism: Theories, Practices, and Conflicts
Giulio Moini

Partecipazione e Conflitto, 2016

Work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial-Share alike 3.0 Italian License

View PDFchevron_right
Introduction To Themed Section: Neoliberalism’s Afterlives: States Of Neoliberalism, Power And Resistance In Post-Crisis Societies
Patricia Kennett

Critical Social Policy

View PDFchevron_right
A Conceptual History of Neoliberalism
Marcelo Rizzo

Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science

Book Review OLSEN, Niklas. The Sovereign Consumer – A New Intellectual History of Neoliberalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. ISBN: 978-3-319-89583-3 – 77,97 €

View PDFchevron_right
A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Tugrul Keskin

Societies Without Borders, 2009

View PDFchevron_right
Thesis Eleven Six theories of neoliberalism
Jack Guo

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.

View PDFchevron_right
Editors' Introduction: Genealogies of Neoliberalism
Mark Soderstrom

Radical History Review, 2012

View PDFchevron_right
Neoliberal Capitalism: The Authoritarian Turn
Alfredo Saad Filho

Socialist Register 2019: A World Turned Upside Down?, 2019

What exactly is the nature of neoliberalism that it can simultaneously both rely upon state intervention and deny its efficacy by recourse to political and ideological populism, quite apart from appeals to other (conservative) collectivities – nationalism and racism, in particular – in the context of market individualism? Coherence is not the order of the day, but there is underlying order in the chaos as our argument here, summarized as follows, suggests. First, what occurred in 2008-09 was a severe crisis within neoliberalism, exposing the limits of reliance on finance as the driver of global accumulation. Initially taken by many as a fatal crisis of neoliberalism, especially as the market failed spectacularly in its favoured arena of finance, the crisis proved nothing of the sort. Despite the decline of GDP growth rates and the vast and continuing reverberations of the crisis, neoliberalism remains alive and well in the economic domain and beyond. Indeed, in most respects, neoliberalism has been strengthened during the last decade. Second, the social and institutional changes brought about by neoliberalism, and furthered by the finance-first and fiscal ‘austerity’ policies imposed in the wake of the global crisis, have destabilized the political sphere formed under neoliberalism and steadily sapped the ideological legitimacy of the system of accumulation. These developments have not quelled political activism entirely, but they have severely undermined its traditional forms of expression and created fertile conditions for more extreme politics as new vulnerabilities to livelihoods emerged. Third, while neoliberalism was, previously, typically grounded in increasingly shallow and formal practices of liberal democracy, its current political forms are transitioning towards unstable modalities of which authoritarianism is increasingly common, with ‘spectacular’ leaders driving right-wing exclusionary programmes and the emergence of mass movements of the right both supporting and pushing them forward. We argue that these political shifts are not transitory phenomena ensuing directly from poor economic performance, that will reverse once faster economic growth resumes. Instead, they are the outcome of the degeneration of liberal democracy under neoliberalism. Yet, to understand whether authoritarian neoliberalism is a transitory adjustment phase to the murky post-crisis world or becoming the ‘bestfit’ political arrangement for neoliberalism, the tendencies and countertendencies characterizing the present phase of neoliberalism need to be identified and disentangled. For the fate of authoritarian neoliberalism inevitably hinges on how such tendencies will be resolved – a process which is chaotic, still in flux, and by no means predetermined.

View PDFchevron_right
Neoliberalism: The whys and wherefores ... and future directions
Kean Birch

Neoliberalism means many things to many people. Often used indiscriminately to mean anything ‘bad’, neoliberalism is in need of dissection as an analytical category and a way of understanding the transformation of society over the last few decades. This paper is a brief introduction to neoliberalism and a number of key analytical approaches used to study it, including governmentality, Marxism, ideational analysis, history and philosophy of economics, institutional analysis, state/regulation theory, and human geography. It finishes with some suggestions for areas of further and future research.

View PDFchevron_right

References (83)

  1. Amoore L (2013) The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  2. Aron R (1994) The liberal definition of liberty: Concerning F.A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. In: Mahoney DJ (ed.) In Defense of Political Reason. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
  3. Bowman A, Erturk I, Folkman P, Froud J, Haslam C, Johal S, Leaver A, Moran M and Tsitsianis N (2015) What a Waste: Outsourcing and How it Goes Wrong. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  4. Brenner R (2020) Escalating plunder. New Left Review, May/June.
  5. Brown W (2015) Undoing the Demos. New York: Zone.
  6. Brown W (2019) In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press.
  7. Bruff I (2014) The rise of authoritarian neoliberalism. Rethinking Marxism 26(1): 113-129.
  8. Burgin A (2012) The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  9. Callison W and Manfredi Z (2020) Introduction: Theorizing mutant neoliberal- ism. In: Callison W and Manfredi Z (eds) Mutant Neoliberalism. New York: Fordham University Press.
  10. Callison W and Slobodian Q (2021) Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol. Boston Review. Available at: https://bostonreview.net/politics/wil- liam-callison-quinn-slobodian-coronapolitics-reichstag-capitol (accessed 10 August 2021).
  11. Calvert J and Arbuthnott G (2021) Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle with Coronavirus. New York: HarperCollins.
  12. Christophers B (2020) Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? New York: Verso Books.
  13. Cooper M (2017) Family Values. New York: Zone.
  14. Cooper M (2021) The Alt-right: Neoliberalism, libertarianism and the fascist temptation. Theory, Culture & Society 38(6): 29-50.
  15. Cooper M and Konings M (2015) Contingency and foundation: Rethinking money, debt, and finance after the crisis. South Atlantic Quarterly 114(2): 239-250.
  16. Culpepper PD and Thelen K (2020) Are we all Amazon Primed? Consumers and the politics of platform power. Comparative Political Studies 53(2): 288-318.
  17. Dardot P and Laval C (2014) The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. New York: Verso.
  18. Davies W (2010) Economics and the 'nonsense' of law: The case of the Chicago antitrust revolution. Economy and Society 39(1): 64.
  19. Davies W (2013) When is a market not a market?: 'Exemption', 'externality' and 'exception' in the case of European state aid rules. Theory, Culture & Society 30(2): 32-59.
  20. Davies W (2014) The Limits of Neoliberalism. London: SAGE.
  21. Davies W (2021) The revenge of sovereignty on government? The release of neoliberal politics from economics post-2008. Theory, Culture & Society 38(6): 95-118.
  22. Dijck J van, Poell T and Waal M de (2018) The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  23. Durand C (2021) 1979 in reverse. Sidecar, 1 June. Available at: https://newleftre- view.org/sidecar/posts/1979-in-reverse (accessed 17 June 2021).
  24. Finlayson A (2021) Neoliberalism, the Alt-right and the Intellectual Dark Web. Theory, Culture & Society 38(6): 167-190.
  25. Fitzgerald D, Hinterberger A, Narayan J and Williams R (2020) Brexit as her- edity redux: Imperialism, biomedicine and the NHS in Britain. The Sociological Review 0038026120914177.
  26. Foucault M (2004) Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1975-76. London: Penguin.
  27. Foucault M (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1977-78. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
  28. Foucault M (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
  29. Gane N (2015) Central banking, technocratic governance and the financial crisis: Placing quantitative easing into question. Sosiologia 15: 381-396.
  30. Gane N (2016) In and out of neoliberalism. Journal of Classical Sociology 16(3): 261-279.
  31. Gane N (2020) Competition: A critical history of a concept. Theory, Culture & Society 37(2): 31-59.
  32. Gane N (2021) Nudge economics as libertarian paternalism. Theory, Culture & Society 38(6): 119-142.
  33. Geva D (2021) Orba´n's ordonationalism as post-neoliberal hegemony. Theory, Culture & Society 38(6): 71-93.
  34. Gillespie T (2010) The politics of 'platforms'. New Media & Society 12(3): 347-364.
  35. Hall PA (1993) Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: The case of economic policymaking in Britain. Comparative Politics 25(3): 275-296.
  36. Harvey D (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  37. Hayek F (1944) The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge.
  38. Hayek F (1948) Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
  39. Hayek F (1960) The Constitution of Liberty. London: Routledge.
  40. Hayek F (1967) Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. London: Routledge.
  41. Hayek F (1973) Law, Legislation and Liberty. London: Routledge.
  42. Hayek F (1976) The Denationalization of Money. London: IEA.
  43. Hendrikse R (2018) Neo-illiberalism. Geoforum 95: 169-172.
  44. Hopkin J (2020) Anti-system Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies. London: Polity.
  45. Hopkin J and Blyth M (2019) The global economics of European populism: Growth regimes and party system change in Europe (The Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro Lecture 2017). Government and Opposition 54(2): 193-225.
  46. Ingham G (2020) Money. Cambridge: Polity.
  47. Jones L and Hameiri S (2021) COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regu- latory state. Review of International Political Economy. DOI: 10.1080/ 09692290.2021.1892798.
  48. Klein N (2020) How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic. The Guardian, 13 May. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/ naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic (accessed 10 August 2021).
  49. Langley P and Leyshon A (2016) Platform capitalism: The intermediation and capitalisation of digital economic circulation. Finance and Society. Available at: http://financeandsociety.ed.ac.uk/ojs-images/financeandsociety/FS_ EarlyView_LangleyLeyshon.pdf (accessed 10 August 2021).
  50. Lonergan E and Blyth M (2020) Angrynomics. New York: Agenda Publishing/ Columbia University Press.
  51. Marmot M, et al. (2020) Build Back Fairer: The COVID-19 Marmot Review. London: Institute of Health Equity.
  52. Mirowski P (2009) Postface: Defining Neoliberalism. In: Mirowski P and Plehwe D (eds) The Road From Mont Pelerin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  53. Mirowski P (2013) Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. New York: Verso Books.
  54. Mirowski P (2020) How neoliberalism will exploit the coronavirus crisis. Tribune, 18 May. Available at: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/05/how-neoli- beralism-will-exploit-the-coronavirus-crisis (accessed 10 August 2021).
  55. Mirowski P and Plehwe D (2009) The Road from Mont Pe`lerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  56. Mitchell T (1998) Fixing the economy. Cultural Studies 12: 82-101.
  57. Pana TA, Bhattacharya S, Gamble DT, Pasdar Z, Szlachetka WA, et al. (2021) Country-level determinants of the severity of the first global wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: An ecological study. BMJ Open 11(2): e042034.
  58. Peck J (2010) Zombie neoliberalism and the ambidextrous state. Theoretical Criminology 14(1): 104-110.
  59. Peck J and Theodore N (2019) Still neoliberalism? South Atlantic Quarterly 118(2): 245-265.
  60. Peck J and Tickell A (2002) Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34(3): 380-404.
  61. Peck J, Theodore N and Brenner N (2010) Postneoliberalism and its malcon- tents. Antipode 41: 94-116.
  62. Plantin J-C, Lagoze C, Edwards PN and Sandvig C (2018) Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook. New Media & Society 20(1): 293-310.
  63. Rahman KS and Thelen K (2019) The rise of the platform business model and the transformation of twenty-first-century capitalism. Politics & Society 47(2): 177-204.
  64. Reinhoudt J and Audier S (2018) The Walter Lippmann Colloquium. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
  65. Rhodes RAW (1996) The new governance: Governing without government. Political Studies XLIV: 652-667.
  66. Ro¨pke W (1960) A Humane Economy. Chicago: Regnery.
  67. Ro¨pke W (1965) South Africa: A Positive Appraisal. Information Service of South Africa.
  68. Rose N (2017) Still 'like birds on the wire'? Freedom after neoliberalism. Economy and Society 46(3-4): 303-323.
  69. Rothbard M (1995) Classical Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
  70. Rothbard M (2009) Murray N. Rothbard vs. the Philosophers. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute.
  71. Saad-Filho A (2020) From COVID-19 to the end of neoliberalism. Critical Sociology 46(4-5): 477-485.
  72. Slobodian Q (2018) Globalists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  73. Slobodian Q (2021) The backlash against neoliberal globalization from above: Elite origins of the crisis of the new constitutionalism. Theory, Culture & Society 38(6): 51-69.
  74. Smith H and Burrows R (2021) Software, sovereignty and the post-neoliberal politics of exit. Theory, Culture & Society 38(6): 143-166.
  75. Springer S (2014) Postneoliberalism? Review of Radical Political Economics 47(1): 5-17.
  76. Srnicek N (2016) Platform Capitalism. Oxford: Wiley.
  77. Stedman Jones D (2012) Masters of the Universe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  78. Tazzioli M and and Stierl M (2021) Europe's unsafe environment: Migrant confinement under COVID-19. Critical Studies on Security 9(1): 76-80.
  79. Thiel P (2014) Competition is for losers. Wall Street Journal, 12 September. Available at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for- losers-1410535536 (accessed 10 August 2021).
  80. Tooze A (2018) Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. London: Penguin UK.
  81. Tooze A (2020) How coronavirus almost brought down the global financial system. The Guardian, 14 April. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/ business/2020/apr/14/how-coronavirus-almost-brought-down-the-global- financial-system (accessed 10 August 2021).
  82. Whyte J (2019) The Morals of the Market. London: Verso.
  83. William Davies is Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is author most recently of This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain (Verso, 2020), and also of Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World (Jonathan Cape, 2018), The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing (Verso, 2015) and The Limits of Neoliberalism: Sovereignty, Authority and the Logic of Competition (SAGE, 2014). He is a regular contributor to The London Review of Books and The Guardian.

Related papers

Rethinking Neoliberalism
Mitchell Dean

2012

"There are many key questions concerning the current status of the notion of neoliberalism. What is it? Is it an appropriate concept to describe a political and intellectual movement or form of state? What are its prospects as a framework of public policy after the global financial crisis? The article proposes a way of answering these questions by regarding neoliberalism as a definite ‘thought collective’ and a regime of government of and by the state. It exemplifies these by shifts within neoliberalism regarding the question of monopoly, its relationship to classical liberalism and its approach to crisis management. In regard to the latter, it further proposes an emergent rationality of the government of and by the state concerning the fostering of resilience in the anticipation of catastrophe."

View PDFchevron_right
Postneoliberalism: a catch-all word or valuable analytical und politica concept? - Aims of a beginning debate
Ulrich Brand

Development Dialogue. Postneoliberalism. A beginning debate, 2009

In the last 30 years, neoliberal policies have been implemented in almost every society on the globe, resulting in fairly specific ‘neoliberal’ configurations. This volume has been compiled in time for the World Social Forum in January 2009 in Belém in order to initiate a new debate. It off ers various responses to the negative impacts of neoliberalism and its growing inability to deal with the upcoming contradictions and crises. The contributors are mainly scholar-activists from different parts of the world, who present perspectives on social, political and/or economic transformations. They deal with shifting terrains of social struggles and compromises, taking place on diff erent scales, in various contexts and by diff erent actors. All postneoliberal approaches have in common that they constitute a rupture with specific aspects of ‘neoliberalism’. The contributors explore different aspects of a possible postneoliberalism, focusing on continuities and discontinuities, which vary in depth, complexity and scope, and relate to everyday practices as well as comprehensive concepts.

View PDFchevron_right
The rise and fall of neo-liberalism: the collapse of an economic order (Edited by Kean Birch and Vlad Mykhnenko)
Sean Phelan
View PDFchevron_right
The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: The Collapse of an Economic Order?
Vlad Mykhnenko, Kean Birch

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

View PDFchevron_right
Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore and Neil Brenner, “Postneoliberalism and its malcontents,” Antipode, 41 (2009): 94-116.
Neil Brenner

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.

View PDFchevron_right

Related topics

  • Sociology
  • Political Economy
  • Political Philosophy
  • Political Theory

    • Cited by

    Between Justice and Money: How the Covid-19 Crisis was used to De-Differentiate Legality in Ecuador
    Philipp Altmann

    International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique

    Legality in the Global South suffers from problems of application by convenience. Some rules are applied, and some are not, depending on certain actors, such as the State, the stakeholders, or others. This undermines legitimation as constructed by legality and due process. These problems are connected to a wider complex formed by coloniality, internal colonialism, and a form of functional differentiation that limits autonomy of the different social systems. This complex of structural properties allows States and other actors to systematically use one system against the other or-within a given system-one level of rules against the other. This was the case in Ecuador: in the initial months of quarantine due to Covid-19, the government took decisions about external state bonds following international legislation-and quite contrary ones related to local work contracts. Once again, legality followed different paths in diverse cases. Ecuadorian economic authorities accept and respect conditions on external public bonds which are protected by some complex and specific clauses to secure the payment. The same authorities have different practices towards international and national legislation that were organized in the sense of legal subsidiarity. This text will explore reasons and effects of legal de-differentiation in the Global South in times of crisis. The Ecuadorian case in time of Covid-19 helps to understand how structural problems related to the lack of autonomy of the legal system are perpetuated and lead to effects of convenient political action.

    View PDFchevron_right
    580 California St., Suite 400
    San Francisco, CA, 94104
    © 2025 Academia. All rights reserved