To present an interdisciplinary collection with âneoliberalâ in the title is, in the twenty-first century academy, a risky business . The risk lies in the termâs ubiquity. Writers across social, cultural and economic fields seem to agree that the use of âneoliberalâ has become too lazy, too vague and too readily used to denounce (Peck 2013); too frequently undefined and unevenly employed (Boas and Gans-Morse 2009); too âoverblownâ and in need of being âseverely circumscribedâ (Dean 2014, p. 150). We have organised the essays in this collection around its banner precisely because of, rather than in spite of, this tendency to ubiquity.
Our rationale is threefold: first, while we recognise the change in the discursive deployment of âneoliberalismâ from a specific political term describing a coherent ideology and policy stance to the more generic description of fundamental and widespread forms of social reorganisation, like Stuart Hall (2011), we nonetheless acknowledge its usefulness in capturing the manifold ways in which neoliberalism is a hegemonic project in process. The termâs very ubiquity, as Hall argues (p. 10), provides a focus for both criticality of and resistance to those processes which erode the structures that have existed to mitigate inequalities, to reinforce community , and to foster well-being , in order to replace them with market services and an emphasis on personal responsibility .
Second, the essays in this collection offer insights into some of the âmessy actualitiesâ described by Wendy Larner as arising from the study of âspecific neoliberal projectsâ, rather than from accounts of particular epochs or unifying theories (2000, p. 14). Larner suggests that more useful avenues are opened up for the investigation of the ways in which our social structures are being reorganised if we keep insights from the many diverse interpretations in mind. Her summary of three key interpretations of neoliberalismâas policy, as ideology and as governmentality ânot only usefully captures the challenges of neoliberalismâs complexities, but shows how individual interpretations deployed alone can limit understanding of how power is played out, and of how strategies for well-being are envisaged.
Third, the term âneoliberalâ has moved from being something encountered only in academic circles, to a diagnostic term shaping the agendas of new political manifestos. No longer solely a term used in the academy, it is now a regular feature of broader public political discourse . It is telling that the UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn felt his audience would understand him if he included it in his conference speech to the Party in September 2017. âAnd now is the time that we developed a new model of economic management to replace the failed dogmas of neoliberalismâ, he declared. As the word is becoming more well-used, the danger is that it can become something of an un-interrogated shorthand for things and attitudes the user does not like. Political writing in the public domain has followed the academyâs lead in expressing misgivingsâfor example, Nathan J. Robinson, the editor of the online Current Affairs magazine, bans his contributors from using it because he feels it is imprecise and over-used, while at the same time acknowledging that the term captures some very real tendencies in policy and social experience (Robinson 2018). In the UK, a right-leaning group within the Labour Party complains that âNeoliberal has become a catch-all for anyone with whom you disagreeâ (The Progressive 2015).
Yet the genie, it seems, is out of the bottle and cannot be put back. âNeoliberalismâ has passed out of the ownership of the academy and the policy pundit into more public and popular domains. It is employed in the broadsheet and tabloid press; in schools (Frank 2018); in social media hashtags; in grass-roots movements such as âOccupyâ, and as a provocation on mainstream political TV shows such as BBCâs Question Time. While it could be argued that the term itself is only likely to be understood or deployed by a small number of politically engaged people, its associated conceptsâthose of self-responsibility , individualism , aspiration and economic citizenship âcan be and are more readily translated into popular and institutional discourses. This collection explores the ways in which these concepts have been taken up in a variety of settings and practices and, importantly, internalised by subjects themselves. Jason Read (2009, p. 27) highlights Foucaultâs recognition that âneoliberalism is not just a manner of governing states and individuals, but is intimately tied to the lives of the individual , to a particular manner of livingâ. It is aspects of this âmanner of livingâ that our contributors explore.
To consider the life cycle is to focus on the experience of the individual subject in societies dominated by neoliberal categories. If the thinkers of the European Enlightenment defined the self as rational , autonomous and capable of choice , the last forty years have seen these âchoicesâ shaped through the activities of consumer capitalism. According to Foucault (2008), while Enlightenment rational choice was always located in an economic setting in which the idea of exchange and barter are naturalised, the shift under neoliberalism is one which sees exchange and barter replaced by competition, the conditions for which are artificial and must be fostered by the state (Oksala 2013). Rather than exchanging labour for goods, under neoliberalism the worker develops their individual human capital , which is invested for revenue (Read 2009). The image of the competitive human subject arises from the concerns of politicians to create a free-market economy, where the focus is on entrepreneurial activity, private enterprise and the shaping of all activitiesâhealth and education includedâthrough the lens of the economic.
The sociologist David Harvey provides a neat summary of the concerns which shape neoliberal subjectivity:
Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets , and free trade. (2005, p. 2)
This is never simply about a discrete economic project that leaves the individual largely unaffected. Rather, âthe financialisation of everythingâ, as Wendy Brown (2015, p. 28) describes the neoliberal economic project, requires something more. As the scope of the free market is extended to all areas of life, it is not just the public sphere that is changed. Public services adopt the model of business , but so too is human subjectivity reimagined. An entrepreneurial economic model requires the individual themselves to be shaped as an entrepreneur , not simply in the workplace, but in every area of their life.1 Brown captures what this means for the individual âs experience of their world rather neatly:
Neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activitiesâeven where money is not the issueâand configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus. (2015, p. 31)
Here, we start to get a sense of why an exploration of the life cycle is an important way of both exposing and challenging some of the key tropes of neoliberalism.
Work, University and Success
To think of the life cycle suggests reflection on those aspects of life we share as embodied human beings: birth, childhood, adulthood, ageing, death . However, for the economic citizen of neoliberalism, the human individual is always and everywhere defined through their ability to take part in (or not take part in) the world of work . It is important at this juncture to pay attention to the role âsuccess â plays in shaping this neoliberal life cycle, for to do so enables understanding of the preeminent role that is given to work in shaping the individual âs experience. Moreover, while all individuals are constrained to be economically productive in order to enjoy full citizenship , it is university attendance that has become a key marker in the development of the success narrative ; for this reason, two chapters are designated to discussing the shape of the neoliberal university. Under New Labour , targets for university attendance were expanded to 50% of the population (BBC 2002), and in 2017 the directo...