Many people believe the global economy is unjust, but they don't know what to do about it. What responsibilities do American consumers have to workers in China making their iPhones? Should they still buy clothes made in Bangladesh's sweatshops? Offering an overview of how neoliberalism orients us to the world, Benjamin L. McKean shows the practical shortcomings of neoliberal approaches to the world and develops an alternative way of thinking and acting guided by a compelling new account of freedom. (...) Disorienting Neoliberalism offers a framework for understanding the politics of the global economy and shows how we can act in solidarity to promote justice. (shrink)

This paper draws from Foucault’s analysis of liberalism and neoliberalism to reconstruct the mechanisms and the means whereby neoliberalism has transformed society into an ‘enterprise society’ based on the market, competition, inequality, and the privilege of the individual. It highlights the role of financialization, neglected by Foucault, as a key apparatus in achieving this transformation. It elaborates the strategies of individualization, insecuritization and depoliticization used as part of neoliberal social policy to undermine the principles and practices of mutualization (...) and redistribution that the Welfare State and Fordism had promoted. It shows that the aim of neoliberal politics is the restoration of the power of capital to determine the distribution of wealth and to establish the enterprise as dominant form; this requires that it target society as a whole for a fundamental reconstruction, putting in place new mechanisms to control individual conduct. The analysis refers to the case of workers in the culture industry to illustrate the operation of these mechanisms in practice. It also outlines the main elements of the analytical apparatus that makes visible the new role of the state as an ensemble of apparatuses constituting the conditions for neoliberal market capitalism and the new type of individual appropriate for it. The paper thus adds a new dimension to Foucault’s analysis. (shrink)

Critical accounts over the past years have focused on neoliberalism as a subject of knowledge; there has been a recently growing interest in neoliberalism as an object of knowledge. This article considers the theoretical, epistemological and political implications of the relationship between neoliberalism as an epistemic subject and neoliberalism as an epistemic object. It argues that the ‘gnossification’ of neoliberalism – framing it an epistemic project, and deriving implications for political engagement from this – avoids (...) engaging with numerous ambiguous elements of the production of knowledge. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘scholastic fallacy’ and Boltanski and Chiapello’s work in sociology of critique, the article lays out a framework for the study of the relationship between epistemic, moral, and political elements of critique of neoliberalism, including the conditions of its own production in contemporary academic contexts. (shrink)

Neoliberalism advocates for the construction of free markets, which are to be used for solutions to economic and social problems rather than state solutions to those problems. Though Neoliberal reforms in Japan have affected its science and technology, STS literature has not focused on responses to neoliberalism through the lens of a country. Japan has a discrete STS history and Japan makes a good case study to the influence of neoliberalism on STS. In August 2010, at Tokyo’s (...) Social Studies of Science (4S) meetings, there were several sessions on neoliberalism and STS. At these sessions, Kunio Goto, Yasumoto Fujita, Hidetoshi Kihara, Hideto Nakajima, Steve Fuller, David Hess, Francis Remedios presented different responses to neoliberalism and STS. This special issue explores two themes. The first theme is Goto's and Fujita's call for a revitalization of Marxist STS as an alternative to the influence of neoliberalism on STS in Japan. The second theme is Kihara's and Nakajima's call for a revitalization of a critical function of STS in Japan. Hess examines STS as a field and its response to neoliberalism in Europe and Anglophone countries. (shrink)

This book proposes a shift in the very concept of neoliberalism as an ambivalent product of subjectivity. It is not resolved in dichotomies between the included and excluded, interior and exterior, capitalist and noncapitalist. Neoliberalism operates in blurred lines, through flexible structures, and amid internal gradients and varying tensions.

This article presents a new account of the relationship between Michel Foucault’s work and neoliberalism, aiming to show that the relationship is significantly more complicated than either Foucault’s critics or defenders have appreciated in the recent controversy. On the one hand, I argue that Foucault’s salutary response to some of Gary Becker’s ideas in the lecture course from 1979 should be read together with the argument of Discipline and Punish. By means of this contextualization I show that Foucault’s sympathetic (...) response to Becker is limited to the domain of penal practices, specifically concerning the question of how to resist their rationality of normalization, and thus it involves no broader commitment to neoliberal economic theory or its political implications. On the other hand, however, I argue that there is a strategic allegiance between Foucault’s work and the ascendance of the neoliberal rationality of governing, although it has nothing to do with his sympathetic engagement with Becker’s work. Instead, I explain how Foucault’s focus on the political stakes of subjectivity has helped to congeal, in the posthumous neoliberal context, a conception of politics that leaves out the topic of economic equality. To explain how Foucault’s work has had this unintended yet lasting effect, I introduce the concept of topical exclusion. It designates a social mechanism of producing ignorance, which operates by directing attention instead of creating false consciousness. The strategic relationship between Foucault’s work and neoliberalism today illustrates that this type of explanation is essential in the analysis of power relations. Thus, my account motivates the adoption of topical exclusion as a conceptual supplement that equips the Foucaultian framework to study cases in which relations of power harness, produce, and sustain ignorance, not knowledge. (shrink)

_Neoliberalism and Academic Repression_ provides a theoretical examination of how the current higher education system is being shaped into a corporate-factory-industrial-complex. This timely collection challenges the neoliberal emphasis on valuation based on job readiness and outcome achievement.

Writing for a wide audience, Harvey here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. He constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for more socially just alternatives.

Psychology may have to get seriously political as human aims in living and selfhood itself are increasingly influenced in a deleterious manner by the vicissitudes of living in a neoliberal political economy and one-sided “enterprise culture” (Martin & McLellan, 2013; Sugarman, 2015). This article reviews recent writings of several social critics, including Jackson Lears (2015), Sebastion Junger (2015), Philip Blond (2010), and Christopher Lasch (1995), who richly flesh out the picture of this detrimental state of affairs. We note that many (...) of these critics have little to say about credible alternatives to neoliberalism. The article then seeks to identify resources within theoretical and philosophical psychology, including hermeneutic philosophy and interpretive social science, for helping to overcome neoliberalism. They might help clarify and nurture a renewed democratic populism or engaged democratic politics and contribute to gaining what Lasch termed a much-needed “wisdom of limits” in today’s society. (shrink)

This paper describes neoliberalism and summarizes new works on democracy in Continental philosophy. Unlike laissez-faire or liberal economic theory—a “leave us alone” strategy in which the state does not interfere with private enterprise—neoliberal governments use the resources of the state to assist the market directly and employ the market to direct or oversee the resources of the state. Alongside neoliberal government, and in its wake, is a society in which the guiding axioms for each human being are self-entrepreneurship and (...) competition. Over the last decade, however, a new body of philosophical work has been dissociating democracy from neoliberal government, critiquing a failed system of political representation, and considering to what extent democracy must take place beyond or outside of the current state. Of equal concern to these philosophers is how to take flight from a way of life that is characterized by self-entrepreneurship and competition. For some, the start of a political future beyond neoliberalism hinges upon a recent distinction between constituent and destituent forms of power. Whereas constituent power attempts to reform one’s government through demonstrations in public space, destituent power abandons the project of reforming one’s government momentarily or even completely in order to experience another form of life entirely. (shrink)

La "judicialización" es un fenómeno amplio, que resulta de la confluencia de innumerables tendencias históricas y que produce diversos efectos en las prácticas económicas, sociales y políticas. Algunos analistas contemporáneos han advertido que la judicialización implica una profunda transformación sobre las prácticas de gobierno. Este artículo sostiene quela judicialización, especialmente la denominada "judicialización de la política", tienen estrechos vínculos con el neoliberalismo. El problema consiste en que, al día de hoy, son escasos los estudios capaces de corroborar tal relación. ¿Cómo (...) y hasta qué punto la judicialización fue promovida por el neoliberalismo? Para contestar esta pregunta, se procederá al análisis genealógico de una serie de documentos redactados a mediados del siglo XX, siguiendo la hipótesis de que allí emerge un programa de gobierno donde la judicialización no sólo es admitida e incluso promovida, sino además propuesta como una práctica privilegiada de intervención estatal sobre la sociedad. "Judicialization" is a broad phenomenon, which is the result of the confluence of innumerable historical trends and that produces diverse effects on economic, social and political practices. Some contemporary analysts have observed that the judicialization implies a profound transformation in government practices. This article argues that judicialization, especially the so-called "judicialization of politics", has close relations with neoliberalism. The problem is that, at present, there are few studies capable of corroborating this relationship. How and to what extent was the judicialization promoted by neoliberalism? To answer this question, we make a genealogical analysis on a set of documents written in the mid-twentieth century. According to our hypothesis, these documents emerge a program of government where the judicialization is not only admitted and even promoted, but also proposed as a privileged practice of state intervention on society. (shrink)

Neoliberalism is an approach to social policy, now globally influential, that applies market approaches to all aspects of social life, including education. Charter schools, privately operated but publicly funded, are its most prominent manifestation in the U.S. The neoliberal principles of competition, consumerism, and choice cannot serve as foundations of a sound and equitable public education system. Neoliberalism embraces socio-economic inequality overall and in doing so constricts any justice mission its adherents espouse in virtue of serving a relatively (...) disadvantaged student population, as charter schools often (by no means always) do. It constricts educational justice by (1) embracing a “human capital” approach as the primary good of education, (2) creating educational inequality through (unofficially) selecting a relatively advantaged segment of the disadvantaged demographic it serves, (3) denying the effect of poverty on educational performance, and (4) devaluing its students’ familial ethnic cultures. (shrink)

Neoliberalism has shaped the academy in ways that constrain its potential as a public good. Neoliberalism is based on the assumption that, by submitting to the so-called neutral forces of the market, wealth can be created alongside the achievement of equality and efficiency. Although this assumption is demonstrably false, neoliberalism remains politically powerful. As an example, this article discusses how neoliberalism has enabled the rapid uptake of proctoring software during the covid pandemic and since. ‘Proctoring' is (...) the online monitoring of students’ behaviour as they sit for exams. Many within the academy consider proctoring software to be dehumanizing – essentially legalized spyware. They argue that the software invades privacy and is inherently racist and ableist, amongst other things. It is hoped that by understanding how structural forces such as neoliberalism affect both our agency and university activities, frequently against the common good, strategies can be developed to change these structures. (shrink)

What is neoliberalism? -- The state -- Democracy -- Science -- Politics -- European crises, causes, and consequences -- Ideas, uncertainty, and the ordoliberalization of Europe.

Introduction: Beyond neoliberalism -- Friedrich A. Hayek : markets, planning, and the rule of law -- The politics of utopia and the liberal theory of totalitarianism : Karl Popper and Michael Foucault -- Pluralism and positive freedom : toward a critique of Isaiah Berlin -- From the Crick report to the Parekh report : multiculturalism, cultural difference and democracy -- Foucault, liberal education and the issue of autonomy -- Saving Martha Nussbaum from herself : help from friends she didn't (...) know she had -- Social democracy in the 21st century : Hobson, Keynes and complexity. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even (...) dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures. (shrink)

While many connections can be drawn with some confidence between neoliberalism and penal policy and practice, it is difficult to support Loïc Wacquant’s attempt to render punitive penality integral to neoliberalism, and to regard both as being strategically exported from the US. Neoliberalism is a fluid and variable political formation, both over time and internationally, and is impossible to reduce to a few primary characteristics such as a specific penal policy. Correspondingly, neoliberal doctrines and regimes appear to (...) be consistent with many forms of penal policy other than punitive imprisonment. This is partly because of neoliberalism’s own variability, but also because of the impact of local conditions and the multiple ways through which penal policy may (or may not) be linked with particular political formations. Not only theoretically but also politically, Wacquant’s thesis remains of questionable strategic utility although evidently valuable in consciousness raising. (shrink)

This book explores how changes that occurred around 1989 shaped the study of the social sciences, and scrutinizes the impact of the paradigm of neoliberalism in different disciplinary fields. The contributors examine the ways in which capitalism has transmuted into a seemingly unquestionable, triumphant framework that globally articulates economics with epistemology and social ontology. The volume also investigates how new narratives of capitalism are being developed by social scientists in order to better understand capitalism's ramifications in various domains of (...) knowledge. At its heart, Beyond Neoliberalism seeks to unpack and disaggregate neoliberalism, and to take readers beyond the analytical limitations that a traditional framework of neoliberalism entails. (shrink)

In the sociology of science and sociology of scientific knowledge, the decline of functionalism during the 1970s opened the field to a wide range of theoretical possibilities. However, a Marxist-influenced alternative to functionalism, interests analysis, quickly disappeared, and feminist-multicultural frameworks failed to achieved a dominant position in the field. Instead, functionalism was replaced by a variety of agency-based frameworks that focused on constructive or performative processes. The shift in the sociology of science from Mertonian functionalism to the poststrong program, agency-based (...) sociology of scientific knowledge has parallels with the broader shift in political ideologies from social liberalism to neoliberalism. The argument is made in a way that is cognizant of the criticisms raised against interests analysis and avoids the ?short circuit? of class imputation. Instead, the approach defends the potential for a more integrated approach to the structure-agency-meaning triangle in STS via the use of field sociology. (shrink)

After offering an opening consideration of the hazards of neoliberalism, I address the general shape of the crisis of care that has evolved under its auspices. Two aspects of this crisis require greater attention: the moral precarity of caregivers and the relational harms of neoliberal capitalism. Thus, I first consider the moral precarity that caregivers experience by drawing on a concept that originates in scholarly work on the experiences of healthcare workers and combat veterans, namely, moral injury. Through this (...) concept, we can see how caregivers in late-stage capitalism face a seemingly unavoidable violation of their own significant moral beliefs. Second, I examine how the crisis of care results not only in individual harms of moral injury but also in harms to relationships themselves, as I continue to track the impact of moral injury on our intrapersonal and interpersonal lives. Ultimately, I argue that an important facet of the crisis of care is how it operates as a crisis of relationality in which our intrapersonal and interpersonal connections are placed under practical and moral strain. In taking a broader view, we can see how the fraying of particular intrapersonal and interpersonal connections can accumulate, resulting in the unraveling of wider webs of interdependency, just when we need them most. Throughout the paper, I zero in on the moral implications of the crisis of care driven by neoliberalism, featuring the damages that caregivers and their relationships sustain when situated in morally precarious ways. In doing so, I drive home the point that the crisis of care under neoliberalism is as much a moral and relational crisis as it is a political and economic one. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a surge in critical and historical work, dedicated to uncovering the roots of neoliberal thinking. In the process, the concept of ‘neoliberalism’ has become used in a far more nuanced way, contrary to the frequent allegation that it is merely a pejorative slogan used against capitalism generally. This bibliographic review identifies the texts that have mapped out this more sophisticated account of neoliberalism, and which distinguish between its different varieties and trajectories. In (...) particular, the recognition that neoliberalism is not simply about laissez-faire economics becomes a basis on which to interrogate neoliberalism more sociologically, learning especially from Foucault’s lectures on the topic. The review concludes by identifying those texts which point towards possible futures for neoliberalism. (shrink)

The terms neoliberalism and neoliberal play a variety of roles ranging from major to trivial in the papers they appear in. Both phrases carry pejorative connotations in nurse writing. Yet irrespective of the role assumed in argument, readers are rarely provided with enough information to determine what the descriptors mean in a substantive or concrete sense. It is proposed that scholars who use these terms in their work should consider expressing themselves more carefully than often occurs at present. Virtue (...) signalling in academic writing should, absent critical argument, be discouraged. (shrink)

This article reinterprets Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurship in a decidedly un-“Schumpeterian” way, and argues that continued emphasis on Schumpeter’s alleged glorification of the entrepreneur constitutes a missed opportunity for democratic critics of capitalism and neoliberalism. I demonstrate that Schumpeter did not exalt the individual entrepreneur as the paradigm for economic and political leadership in capitalist societies, and I show that he offers a surprisingly robust resource for reconceptualizing entrepreneurship. Schumpeter theorized entrepreneurship: (1) as a phenomenon that could not be (...) exemplified by either individual persons or strictly private entities; (2) as a conceptual mechanism for analyzing change in the history of capitalism; and (3) even as evidence that political and economic leadership should not be conflated in modern democratic societies. By contextualizing Schumpeter’s discussions of the entrepreneur, I suggest that a reconsideration of Schumpeter’s actual theory of entrepreneurship would invigorate contemporary debates about the role of leadership in capitalist economies and liberal-democratic polities. (shrink)

The paperback edition of “Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and Human Development”, which was published in 2014, almost coincided with the publication of two book reviews; one kindly written by Fabienne Gfeller and one by Jacob Klitmøller. A third review of “Neoliberalism, Pedagogy and Human Development” has recently been published with Power and Education. As a first response to the discussion, which the book provoked, I try to briefly explore below a central question: Is linking post-structuralist thinking and Vygotskian scholarship meaningful?

The main argument in favor of neoliberalism is simple enough: individuals will freely exchange whenever mutual gains result. It follows that restricting trade and investment across borders both infringes liberty and prevents people from enjoying benefits. At this point an appeal is made to historical evidence: previously poor regions have lifted more people out of poverty at a faster rate than ever before in human history by opening up to trade and investment. Neoliberal theorists and policy makers conclude..

In this article I assess the contribution of works by Nancy Fraser and Wendy Brown on neoliberalism and the rise of right-wing populism. Both theorists report on monstrous and morbid symptoms that have emerged recently: the result of a crisis of hegemony for Fraser, and of contradictions in morality and moral conscience produced by neoliberalism, for Brown. Both also offer a feminist lens in relation to the politics of recognition and identity on the one hand, and wounded angry (...) white maleness on the other. I discuss the differences in their particular contributions to post-Marxist debate and ways forward from the uneasy place in which we find ourselves, in which the moral authority of neoliberalism both wanes and continues to persist. Their work is of particular importance in understanding how subjects are enrolled into neoliberalism and, therefore, how alternative principles, practices and subjectivities, and new coalitions and alliances might be built. (shrink)

Based in a holistic exposition and appraisal of Gramsci’s writings that are of relevance to education in neoliberal times, this book--rather than simply applying Gramsci's theories to issues in education--argues that education constitutes the leitmotif of his entire oeuvre and lies at the heart of his conceptualization of the ancient Greek term hegemony that was used by other political theorists before him. Starting from this understanding, the book goes on to compare Gramsci's theories with those of later thinkers in the (...) development of a critical pedagogy that can confront neoliberalism in all its forms. (shrink)

There is a negative influence of neoliberalism on poverty in Canada, specifically its impact on women in the lower socioeconomic sectors; the relationship between the government and women; and the importance of addressing women‟s issues in the context of welfare.

The article turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of state capitalism and their theorization of money and debt in their critique of capitalism to develop an analysis of the governmental management of the current crisis determined by ordo- and neoliberalism. The paper argues that analyses which fail to properly recognize the power of capital to determine both state apparatuses and economic policy thereby fail to grasp the real functioning of money, debt and the Euro in the crisis and end (...) up unwittingly supporting liberalism. This is true of positions such as heterodox theory that, though critical of conventional and neoliberal political economy, nevertheless continue to uphold the state as an independent or mediating mechanism in relation to the power of capital. The neglect of the role which money plays in the strategies of capital to control both the creation of value and the functioning of the state is to be found even in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism, a neglect which undermines his analysis of power. The paper highlights the implications of the standpoint of state capitalism for a more incisive analysis of the current crisis that reveals what is at stake for political struggles. (shrink)

This article adds to contemporary analyses of neoliberalism by shedding light on its psychic life. Writers in the Foucauldian tradition have explored how subjectivities are reconstituted under neoliberalism, showing that the neoliberal self is an entrepreneurial subject. Yet, there has been little empirical research that explores entrepreneurial subjectivity and, more specifically, its psychic life. By drawing on over 60 in-depth interviews with individuals who may be entrepreneurial subjects par excellence, this article adds to our understanding of how (...) class='Hi'>neoliberalism is lived out. The article is divided into 10 sections, with each section exploring a distinct contour of entrepreneurial subjectivity. They show, for example, that competition is not only other-directed under neoliberalism, but also directed at the self, and that exclusionary processes lie at the heart of the constitution of entrepreneurial subjectivities. By providing a theoretically informed analysis of a wealth of empirical data, the article makes an original contribution to our understanding of the psychic life of neoliberalism. (shrink)

This book explores the blurred boundaries between language and matter, cognition and thing, living and inanimate, technology and nature, which is the neoliberal way of governing the unpredictable. Adorno and the concept of form of life provide a way to claim the irreducibility of reality to its description and of nature to mere environment.

This paper examines the theoretical ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, arguably the key progenitor of the global economic orthodoxy of the past two decades. It assesses Hayek's thought as he presents it: namely as a form of liberalism. Section I argues that Hayek's thought, if liberal, is hostile to participatory democracy. Section II then argues the more radical thesis that neoliberalism is also in truth an illiberal doctrine. Founded not in any social contract doctrine, but a form of constructivism, (...) neoliberal thought at its base accepts the paradoxical need to "discipline subjects for freedom", however this might contravene peoples' natural, social inclinations. The argument is framed by reference to Aristophanes' great comedy, The Birds, whose off shore borderless empire ironically prefigures the dream of neoliberal social engineers, and their corporate supporters.
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Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 67-77, February 2022.

Drawing on research from digital media studies, political theory and rhetoric, this article explores online radical conservative and reactionary ‘ideological entrepreneurs’. It argues that online media are uniting an ‘ideological family’ around concepts of natural inequality and hostility to those who deny them. Placing this phenomenon in context, the article shows how online culture reinvigorates well-established discourses of opposition to bureaucrats, intellectuals and experts of all kinds, rejecting one version of the neoliberal state and of its personnel, a ‘new class’ (...) understood to dominate through discursive, cultural power and imagined through the figures of the ‘Social Justice Warrior’ and the ‘Cultural Marxist’. In competing for a share of the marketplace of ideas, these ideological entrepreneurs promise insights – the revelations of the ‘red pill’ – critiquing ‘actually-existing’ neoliberalism yet insisting on the ‘rationality’ of governance through markets and promising adherents techniques for achieving success as liberated entrepreneurial selves. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 2, Page 174-183, February 2022. This article is a commentary on Asger Sørensen's book Capitalism, Alienation and Critique, especially his definition and delimitation of neoliberalism. Overall, I sympathize with Sørensen's aim and critical project and also acknowledge the contribution of his particular approach to a critique of capitalism, political economy and more specifically neoliberalism. However, I shall discuss whether his definition of neoliberalism is the most appropriate from a critical perspective, (...) i.e. as a Critical Theory approach to the role of neoliberalism in contemporary capitalism. This commentary aims to provide a perspective to certain themes in Sørensen's text by discussing his approach in comparison with other ways of defining and understanding neoliberalism. (shrink)

This article addresses a little-known event in the history of neoliberalism: a conference at Stanford University held in 1982 to reconsider Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’ The Modern Corporation and Private Property 50 years after its initial publication. This event is important as it is where key members of the neoliberal thought collective sought to define and defend the powers and freedoms of the corporation. First, this article outlines the political commitments of Berle and Means by considering the core (...) arguments of The Modern Corporation and Private Property; second, it addresses key papers from the event published subsequently in the Journal of Law and Economics; and third, it analyses the neoliberal defence of the corporation that emerged from these papers, and reflects on the limitations of the work of Berle and Means for developing a response to their neoliberal critics. (shrink)

Neoliberalism co-opts noisy riots like feminism and hardcore music--can melancholic siren songs fight back?

Neoliberalism has installed an unending competitive struggle in the economy. Within this context activists have pushed for a reappraisal of laziness and inactivity as forms of resistance. This idea has been picked up by Maurizio Lazzarato and Giorgio Agamben in different ways. I start with explaining the former’s appraisal of laziness as a release of potentialities unrealizable under financial capitalism. Lazzarato’s appraisal of laziness however resembles neoliberal theories of innovation, because both share the conceptual persona of a subject whose (...) potentialities exceed the current status quo. Potentiality is thus not an unambiguous antagonist of capitalism, as Lazzarato suggests. In order to adequately oppose neoliberalism, Lazzarato should question the role of potentiality in capitalism. Agamben has undertaken such a project. In the second part of the essay I consequently argue that Agamben’s philosophy of inactivity as impotentiality is able to circumvent neoliberalism and the society of the spectacle. (shrink)

Neoliberalism and financialization are not synonymous developments. Financialized nations are directed by particularly financialized epistemologies, cultures, and practices, not only neoliberal ones. In examining the financialization of the UK economy since the mid-1970s, this study discovers a socio-economic shift beyond the broad transition from Keynesianism towards free-market fundamentalism. Economic developments were guided by the very particular economic paradigms, discursive practices, and financial devices of the City of London, as financial elites became influential in the Thatcher governments. Five epistemological elements (...) specific to finance are discussed: the creation of money in financial markets, the transactional focus of finance, the centrality of financial markets to economic management, the orthodoxy of shareholder value, and the intensely micro-economic approach to financial calculation. Identifying these distinctions creates new possibilities for understanding financialization, elites, and the neoliberal condition that brought about both the financial crash of 2007–8 and the political and economic crises that have followed. (shrink)

This short article provides an overview of the various theoretical and methodological approaches to analysing neoliberalism, paying particular attention to political-economic and governmental approaches (and the extent to which they can be contrasted or combined), and argues for a more theoretically- and methodologically-informed, interdisciplinary critique of neoliberalism in media studies. In emphasising the heterogeneity of approaches to studying an object such as neoliberalism, as well as the differences in how those approaches are deployed in different ‘studies’, it (...) will thus also argue for the applicability of such concerns to research in multiple disciplines in other countries (such as France) as well. (shrink)

Neoliberalism is fundamentally a mode of production of subjectivity which, as a political rationality, Michel Foucault and other authors inscribe in a history of governmentality, whose singularity is the establishment of a type of government tending to validate an economic way of seeing life, as an articulating principle of the disposition to the competence of the individual entrepreneur of himself. This implies that each individual establishes a type of relationship with himself as human capital that he must make profitable, (...) for which he counts on an industry and technologies of selfhelp tending to his permanent realization. (shrink)

(2003). Pedagogy, Neoliberalism and Postmodernity: Reflections on Freire's later work. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 451-465.

Neoliberalism, health and illness are all vast topics that range from global to local, personal to political. Critical realism offers valuable concepts, which help to extend and deepen analysis of...

This volume brings together twenty original essays on the changes and continuities in gender relations and intersecting politics of sexuality, race, class and location. The book is located in debates about contemporary culture at a moment of rapid technological change, global interconnectedness and the growing cultural dominance of neoliberalism and postfeminism. The collection traverses disciplines, spaces and approaches. It is marked by an extraordinarily wide focus, ranging from analyses of celebrity magazines and makeover shows to examinations of the experiences (...) of young female migrants, 'mail order brides' and young women who repudiate feminism. The contributions are united by their attempts to think through the ways in which experiences and representations of femininity are changing in the twenty-first century. Are we seeing new femininities? Are neoliberalism and postfeminism constructing new identities and subjectivities? What kinds of analytic tools and cultural politics are needed to critically engage with the current moment? This book will be of interest to everyone studying gender, media or cultural studies. (shrink)

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, post-financial 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. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of current research in the field of STS on neoliberalism. The paper discusses the major changes in science associated with the spread of neoliberalism. The following key aspects of neoliberalism influence on the development of science are discussed: the increasing commercialization of science (on the examples of commercialization of meteorology and privatization of stream restoration); an increasing influence of scientism in regulation of technology; and an increasing role of social activism in this (...) regulation. (shrink)

This paper explicates a Marxian theory of management that suggests that the social relation to be managed in capitalism is the separation of the political from the economic. While it is commonly understood that this must be an active process of management taken up on behalf of modern capitalist states, this paper suggests that the market mechanism itself also assumes this role without the active intervention of any managerial direction. The intensive expansion of the market facilitates a management function of (...) subverting the political deliberation which challenges the political-economic separation that could otherwise be expected in neoliberal restructuring. Both the changing nature of consumption and the growth of the small business sector are cited as examples of ways in which neoliberalism reproduces itself in the presence of social contradiction but in the absence of any actively planned strategy of management to deal with those contradictions. (shrink)