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)

Offers a comprehensive account of Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism that is driven not by polemics but a careful reading of Foucault’s texts and political positions.

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)

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)

The first book to investigate the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno's work for theorizing the age of neoliberal capitalism. Through an engagement with Adorno's critical theory of society, Charles Prusik advances a novel approach to understanding the origins and development of neoliberalism. Offering a corrective to critics who define neoliberalism as an economic or political doctrine, Prusik argues that Adorno's dialectical theory of society can provide the basis for explaining the illusions and forms of domination that structure contemporary life. Prusik (...) explains the importance of Marx's critique of commodity fetishism in shaping Adorno's work and focuses on the related concepts of exchange, ideology, and natural history as powerful tools for grasping the present. Through an engagement with the ideas of neoliberal economic theory, Adorno and Neoliberalism criticizes the naturalization of capitalist institutions, social relations, ideology, and cultural forms. Revealing its origins in the crises of the Fordist period, Prusik develops Adorno's analyses of class, exploitation, monopoly, and reification to situate neoliberal policies as belonging to the fundamental antagonisms of capitalist society. (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)

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 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)

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)

This book provides a political, economic, and sociological investigation of how neoliberalism shapes 'working class capacities,' or the power of the working class to organize and struggle for its collective interests. Efe Can Gürcan and Berk Mete discuss the global importance of the labor question as it pertains to Turkey. They apply the main theoretical framework of the combined and uneven development of class capacities to Turkish trade unionism. They also address Turkey's recent history of neoliberalization and its repercussions for (...) class capacities, as mediated by national regulations, conservative unionism, and Islamic social assistance networks. Finally, the authors explore how neoliberalism generates intra-class fragmentation through public regulatory mechanisms and cultural differentiation in the sphere of social unionism. (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)

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.

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.

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)

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?

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)

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 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.

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)

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)

_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.

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 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)

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 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.

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 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..

Contrary to widespread assumptions, post-truth politicians formally adopt a rhetoric of ‘truth’ but turn it against established experts. To explain one central factor behind this destructive strategy and its success with voters, I consider Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek, who from 1922 onwards helped develop and popularize a political rhetoric of ‘truth’ in terms of scientific expertise. In Hayek’s influential version, market economics became the crucial expert field. Consequently, the 2008 financial crisis impacted attitudes towards experts more generally. But even (...) sweeping rejection of experts continues to use the rhetoric, by now dominant, of expert truth. Paradoxically, this bipartisan language fuels division as opponents accuse each other of disregarding ‘truth itself’. Against the underlying metaphysics of context-free ‘facts’, John Dewey and Alfred Schutz recommend understanding truth as ‘presumptive’ knowledge produced within human practices, which can be robust but requires a readiness to engage in pluralistic and open-ended processes of (re-)contextualization. (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)

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

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)

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)

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)

This book explores the relationship between the security state and the dominant economic interests, pointing to the ever-increasing reliance on a quantitative understanding of the natural and social worlds, which has vitiated the traditional values that constrained the exercise of power by both the market and the intrusive apparatus of the state.

Competency has become a key concept in education in general over the last four decades. This article examines the development of the competency‐based movement with a particular focus on the significance it has had for nursing education. Our hypothesis is that the competency movement can only adequately be understood if it is analyzed in relation to the broad societal transformation of the last decades—often summarized under the catchword neoliberalism—and with it the emergence of managerial models for Human Resource Management (HRM) (...) for the reorganization of social services. Classical professions, which were characterized under welfarism by an esoteric knowledge based on ethical norms, have now become marketable commodities that can be evaluated in the same way as other commodities. We want to underline that while this development is still under way, it is the concept of competency that was the decisive political instrument enabling this profound change. With the widespread implementation of competency‐based education that now governs nursing knowledge, the development of a critical, oppositional perspective becomes more challenging, if not entirely impossible. We will be focusing primarily on nursing education in Canada, although we maintain that it has relevance for nursing internationally. (shrink)

If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism, social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximisation and the common good. (...) Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including "the futilitarian condition," "homo futilitus," and "semio-futility"--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximisation traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness. This urgent and provocative book chimes with the mood of the time by at once mapping the historical relationship between utilitarianism and capitalism, developing an original framework for understanding neoliberalism, and recounting the lived experience of uselessness in the early twenty-first century. At a time of epoch-defining disasters, from climate emergencies to deadly pandemics, countering the futility of neoliberal existence is essential to building an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future" -- Publisher description. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Debates about global distributive justice focus on the gulf between the wealthy North and the impoverished South, rather than on issues arising between liberal democracies. A review of John Rawls’s approach to international justice discloses a step Rawls skipped in his extension of his original-position procedure. The skipped step is where a need for the distributional autonomy of sovereign liberal states reveals itself. Neoliberalism denies the possibility and the desirability of distributional autonomy. A complete Rawlsian account of global justice (...) shows the necessity and possibility of a charter between liberal states, assuring each a proper minimum degree of distributional autonomy. (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)

This volume encompasses deeply critical dialogues that question how the field of psychology exists within and is shaped by the current neoliberal political context. Spanning from psychoanalysis to post-colonial theory, these far-reaching discussions consider how a greater ethical responsiveness to human experience and sociopolitical arrangements may reopen the borders of psychological discourse. With the understanding that psychology grows in the soil of neoliberal terrain and is a chief fertilizer for neoliberal expansion, the interviews in this book explore alternative possibilities for (...) this field of study might function. By offering their own unique responses regarding the current condition of their respective disciplines, these scholars critically consider the current conceptual frameworks that set the theoretical boundaries of psychology, and contemplate the ethical responsibilities currently affecting the field. This book will prove essential for scholars and students across several disciplines including psychology, philosophy, ethics, and post-colonial and socio-cultural studies, as well as practicing mental health professionals with an interest in the importance of psychological and social theory. (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)

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.

What is the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies that promote workers' dignity and standing? Hijacked explores how the history of political economy has been a contest between these two ideas about whom the work ethic is supposed to serve. Today's neoliberal ideology deploys the work ethic on behalf of the One Percent. However, workers and their advocates have long used the work (...) ethic on behalf of ordinary people. By exposing the ideological roots of contemporary neoliberalism as a perversion of the seventeenth-century Protestant work ethic, Elizabeth Anderson shows how we can reclaim the original goals of the work ethic, and uplift ourselves again. Hijacked persuasively and powerfully demonstrates how ideas inspired by the work ethic informed debates among leading political economists of the past, and how these ideas can help us today. (shrink)

This is Part 1 of an article aimed at defending Marx against orthodox Marxists to reveal the possibilities for overcoming capitalism. It is argued that Marx’s general theory of history as technological determinism along with his call for the dictatorship of the proletariat is inconsistent with his profound insights into alienation and commodity fetishism as the foundations of capitalism. Humanist Marxists focused on the latter in opposition to Orthodox Marxists, but without fully acknowledging this inconsistency and its implications, failed to (...) realize the full potential of Marx’s work. The outcome has been the triumph of “neoliberalism,” effectively a synthesis of the worst aspects of capitalism with Soviet managerialism. Here I argue that eco-Marxists should combine humanistic Marxism with the defence of genuine science to revive a tradition of thought going back to Aleksander Bogdanov and Ernst Bloch, and to Marx himself. However, traditional Marxists’ lack of appreciation of the importance of the “superstructure” has hindered even eco-Marxists from developing the culture required to replace capitalism. In Part 2 I will argue that the call for an “ecological civilization” brings into focus what is required: a realistic vision of the future based on ecological concepts. -/- . (shrink)

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)

In the beginning of the 1970s, Michel Foucault dismisses the terminology of ‘exclusion’ for his projected analytics of modern power. This rejection has had major repercussions on the theory of neoliberal subject-formation. Many researchers disproportionately stress how neoliberal dispositifs produce entrepreneurial subjects, albeit in different ways, while minimizing how these dispositifs sometimes emphatically refuse to produce neoliberal subjects. Relying on Saskia Sassen’s work on financialization, I argue that neoliberal dispositifs not only apply entrepreneurial norms, but also suspend their application for (...) groups that threaten to harm the population’s profitability. Neoliberal dispositifs not only produce entrepreneurial subjects, but also surplus populations that are expelled from the overall population to maintain its productivity. Here, the concept of ‘exclusion’ is appropriate if understood in Agamben’s sense of an inclusive exclusion. The surplus population is part of neoliberal dispositifs, but only as the element to be abandoned. (shrink)

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 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)

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.