The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism

Damien Cahill, Melinda Cooper, Martijn Konings, David Primrose, Damien Cahill, Melinda Cooper, Martijn Konings, David Primrose, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781412961721
• eBook ISBN: 9781526415974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

Over the last two decades, 'neoliberalism' has emerged as a key concept within a range of social science disciplines including sociology, political science, human geography, anthropology, political economy, and cultural studies. 

The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism showcases the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship in this field by bringing together a team of global experts. Across seven key sections, the handbook explores the different ways in which neoliberalism has been understood and the key questions about the nature of neoliberalism: 

Part 1: Perspectives
Part 2: Sources
Part 3: Variations and Diffusions
Part 4: The State
Part 5: Social and Economic Restructuring
Part 6: Cultural Dimensions
Part 7: Neoliberalism and Beyond

This handbook is the key reference text for scholars and graduate students engaged in the growing field of neoliberalism. 

Part I Perspectives

1 Actually Existing Neoliberalism

Jamie Peck

Neil Brenner

Nik Theodore

Introduction: Definitions

The notion of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ would hardly be necessary were it not for the marked but also constitutive discrepancies between the utopian idealism of free-market narratives and the checkered, uneven, and variegated realities of those governing schemes and restructuring programs variously enacted in the name of competition, choice, freedom, and efficiency. Understood as a ‘strong discourse’ deeply enmeshed with the primary circuits of financial, cultural, and corporate power (Bourdieu, 1998), neoliberalism tells a self-serving story of free markets and small states, selective deregulation and targeted reregulation, low taxes and lean administration, in which privatized and market-like arrangements are presented in positive terms, in contrast to the corrupt and bloated objects of reform – most notably ‘big government’ and ‘big labor'. This said, ‘neoliberalism’ itself has practically no officially sanctioned status, rarely crossing the lips of even the most ardent of free-market reformers. Some time around the middle of the twentieth century, when the ideational project of neoliberalism was confined to a fringe network of conservative intellectual and renegade economists, the term fell out of use among proponents, to be replaced by an altogether more euphemistic vocabulary. This has made analyzing the dimensions and characteristics of market rule all the more complicated.¹ In the age of actually existing neoliberalism(s), since the 1970s, when the project has rarely spoken its name, academic critics and political foes resuscitated this terminology and began to define, place, and position neoliberalism. It is to this task to which we devote this chapter.

The ‘flexible credo’ of neoliberalism has been realized through a somewhat improvised and shape-shifting repertoire of pro-corporate, pro-market programs, projects, and power-plays, variously founded on a sympathetic critique of nineteenth-century liberalism (or laissez faire), on an uncompromising Cold-War repudiation of socialism and communism, and on a decidedly antagonistic relationship with post-Second World War modes of liberal regulation (notably, Keynesianism and developmentalism, represented as perilous compromises on the slippery slopes of totalitarianism, statism, and serfdom). While sharing some common points of reference, programs of identifiably neoliberal state and societal transformation, as they began to gain traction in the 1970s, did not emerge in a singular or uniform manner, shaped as they (each) were by context-specific crises, struggles, and experiments. What began as a loosely articulated cluster of state projects, in countries such as Chile, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States, would subsequently morph into an adaptive matrix of market-oriented and pro-corporate regulatory norms. Read as a free-market policy paradigm, this would inform the operating manual developed by the architects of structural-adjustment programs among the ‘Washington consensus’ institutions; as a transnational political project, it would cumulatively reshape rules of the regulatory game on a much more generalized basis, seeping and sprawling into something resembling a normalized commonsense, or practical hegemony. In the process, neoliberalism has gone from a vanguardist political project to an entrenched mode of regulation – indeed, in some respects both an ‘ordinary’ and a ‘constitutionalized’ one (see Brenner et al., 2014; Gill and Cutler, 2014; Peck, 2017).

Understood as an ideological matrix and as an adaptive rationale for ongoing projects of state and societal restructuring, fortified and guided by a strong discourse of market progress, neoliberalism plainly cannot exist in the world in ‘pure', uncut, or unmediated form. Instead, its ‘actually existing’ manifestations are – and can only be – partial, polycentric, and plural; its dynamics of frontal advance and flawed reproduction are marked by friction, contradiction, polymorphism, and uneven geographical development, and not just because the project-cum-process has been somehow ‘blocked’ or half-cocked – in that it remains incomplete – but because volatile hybridity is the condition of existence. It is for these reasons that we have long made the case for processual understandings of neoliberalization, coupled with a recognition of the necessary diversity of its actually existing forms, the combined and uneven development of which is enduring but also mutually conditioning (Brenner and Theodore, 2002a; Peck and Tickell, 2002).

As critical social scientists have wrestled with the complex connections between the ideological, ideational, institutional, and often-idiosyncratic manifestations of the free-market project, the term ‘neoliberal’ gradually came to assume a quite determinate political meaning within the radical lexicon. For many on the left, it has become a byword for marketization, privatization, commodification, and the rule of the 1%, but quite often as more of a slogan rather than a precisely specified term. Along the way, the terminology of neoliberalism has been variously invoked – increasingly liberally, one might say – sometimes as a shorthand signifier of the free-market zeitgeist of the post-1970s period or the pressures of global competition, sometimes as a political attack term or everyday pejorative, and in other cases as an analytical frame, covering concept, or diagnostic device. In a quite extraordinarily diffuse way, different readings and renderings of ‘neoliberalism’ can now be found ‘all over the place'. They will be invoked in microsociological studies of shifting subjectivities and in the cultural critique of social codes and governing rationalities; they have become adjectival commonplaces in work that spans the scalar spectrum, from localized institutional reforms through projects of national (state) transformation, to global rule regimes and geopolitical orders. The politically charged label will be broadly (and sometimes quite indiscriminately) applied to the institutions and interests of the Washington-consensus agencies or those of Wall Street, but also to a diverse array of ‘deregulation', privatization, market reform, and structural-adjustment policies. In more or less oblique ways, it may be attached to the initiatives of reforming social-democratic governments in northern Europe and also to certain actions of the Chinese (communist) party state. And yet, perhaps most paradoxically, the lingo of neoliberalism remains difficult to ‘translate’ in what many consider to be the ‘home’ of this Washington-and-Wall-Street worldview, the United States, partly thanks to the left-of-center connotations of the word ‘liberal’ in that country, not to mention the contradictory gyrations of the Trump administration.

In light of the arguments that we will develop in the remainder of this chapter, however, it is quite appropriate that the tangle of meanings attached to ‘neoliberalism’ remain both somewhat ambiguous and situationally specific, spanning as they do a rash of promiscuously ‘global’ applications and a constellation of quite particular local translations. This may be a little perplexing from an analytical point of view, but it arguably says something about how neoliberalism exists in the world – as a presence seemingly oppressive, real, and immediate in some respects, but at the same time one that can also be considered to be diffuse, abstract, and liminal. Due in no small measure to these wheels-within-wheels puzzles of semantics and signification, the problems associated with defining and delimiting neoliberalism are arguably more daunting now than ever before. Some will confidently proclaim that they know the telltale signs of neoliberalism whenever and wherever they see them, and they will see them practically everywhere; others insist no less emphatically that the recognition of this connective, enveloping concept is constraining (if not suffocating) in both analytical and political terms, opting to hold it at a skeptical distance, or perhaps to spurn the formulation altogether. To be sure, it is one thing to apply the label to the radical restructuring programs initiated by Augusto Pinochet or Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan, quite another to account for a bewildering array late-stage mutations, ambient traces, local hybrids, incipient tendencies in these same (or similar) terms, interpretative and classificatory challenges that have prompted some analysts to question the utility of the concept, just as others continue to find it necessary, while wrestling with its rascal character (see Clarke, 2008; Ferguson, 2010; Peck et al., 2010; Hall, 2011; Peck, 2013; Vengopal, 2015; Le Galès, 2016).

Among those who find continuing utility in the concept of neoliberalism, as an analytical frame and as a necessary (if awkward) conceptual formulation, the notion of actually existing neoliberalism has served the significant function of signaling and problematizing the enduring discrepancies between the idealized and universalizing language of market reform (neoliberalism as stark utopia, to borrow Polanyi's prophetic phrase) and the path-dependent, pragmatic, and contextual embeddedness of extant programs of neoliberal transformation (neoliberalism as stark reality, one might say). This is a way of acknowledging, at the outset, that the strong discourse of neoliberalism itself has generative and constitutive effects, not least by virtue of the ongoing effects of naturalization and normalization, but also through the creep of policymaking contagion and the colonization of commonsense understandings. Furthermore, invoking actually existing neoliberalism reflects the recognition that real-world programs of neoliberal restructuring are never unfurled across a tabula rasa, nor are they entrained on a convergent transformational course. Rather, they are forged (and often forced) in dialectical tension with inherited social and institutional landscapes, and through an array of situated political struggles and strategic maneuvers, such that neoliberalism ‘can never be understood in radical separation from historical [and geographical] configurations’ (Hilgers, 2012: 81; see also Brenner and Theodore, 2002a; Peck and Theodore, 2012; Ban, 2016).

Eschewing ‘flat’ readings of totalizing convergence (where neoliberalism exhibits a singular and rigidly imposed global form) as well as ‘centric’ models of coercion and diffusion (where neoliberalism is read as a top-down imposition, or as a phenomenon radiating unidirectionally out from ‘heartlands’ to ‘peripheries'), the concept of actually existing neoliberalism is a provocation to theorize – continually – through and across historical and geographical difference. It explicitly problematizes an ongoing interpretative dialogue between critical investigations of material and discursive projects of political-economic transformation ‘on the ground', many of which are routinely distorted even if they are not all that regularly thwarted, and the ‘complex unity’ of neoliberalism in its abstracted form, which is plainly not reducible to some Chicago School, Thatcherite, Wall Str...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Preface: Naming Neoliberalism
• Introduction: Approaches to Neoliberalism
• Part I Perspectives
• 1 Actually Existing Neoliberalism
• 2 International Financial Institutions as Agents of Neoliberalism
• 3 Neoliberalism in World Perspective: Southern Origins and Southern Dynamics
• 4 Foucault and the Neoliberalism Controversy
• 5 Neoliberalism as a Class-Based Project
• 6 Ideas and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Europe1
• Part II Sources
• 7 Neoliberal Thought Collectives: Integrating Social Science and Intellectual History
• 8 Planning the ‘Free’ Market: The Genesis and Rise of Chicago Neoliberalism1
• 9 Neoliberal Turn in the Discipline of Economics: Depoliticization Through Economization1
• 10 Embedding Neoliberalism: The Theoretical Practices of Hayek and Friedman
• 11 Neoliberalism: Rise, decline and future prospects
• 12 Gary Becker: Neoliberalism's Economic Imperialist
• 13 The Neoliberal Origins of the Third Way: How Chicago, Virginia and Bloomington Shaped Clinton and Blair
• 14 Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Neoliberalism is not German Ordoliberalism1
• Part III Variations and Diffusions
• 15 Foucault, Neoliberalism and Europe
• 16 The Rise and Fall (and rise again?) of Neoliberalism in Latin America
• 17 China and Neoliberalism: Moving Beyond the China is/is not Neoliberal Dichotomy
• 18 Neoliberalism in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union
• 19 Neoliberalisation of European Social Democracy: Transmissions and Dispositions
• 20 Neoliberalism and Supra-National Institutions
• Part IV The State
• 21 The Neoliberal State: Power Against ‘Politics'
• 22 Neoliberalism, Crime and Criminal Justice1
• 23 CO2 as Neoliberal Fetish: The Love of Crisis and the Depoliticized Immuno-Biopolitics of Climate Change Governance
• 24 Neoliberalizing the Welfare State: Marketizing Social Policy/Disciplining Clients
• 25 Religious Neoliberalism
• 26 Monetary Policy and Neoliberalism
• 27 Neoliberalism and Workfare: Schumpeterian or Ricardian?
• 28 Progressive Politics Under Neoliberalism
• 29 Neoliberalism and Republicanism: Economic Rule of Law and Law as Concrete Order (Nomos)
• 30 Neoliberalism and Democracy: A Foucauldian Perspective on Public Choice Theory, Ordoliberalism, and the Concept of the Public Good
• Part V Social and Economic Restructuring
• 31 The Neoliberal Remaking of the Working Class
• 32 Governing the System: Risk, Finance and Neoliberal Reason
• 33 Neoliberalism, Inequality, and Capital Accumulation
• 34 Corporate Power and Neoliberalism
• 35 Disciplinary Neoliberalism, the Tyranny of Debt and the 1%
• 36 Neoliberalism's Gender Order
• 37 Neoliberalism and the Urban
• 38 Austerity as Tragedy? From Neoliberal Governmentality to the Critique of Late Capitalist Control
• 39 Neoliberalism and Global Health
• Part VI Cultural Dimensions
• 40 Neoliberalism and Media1
• 41 Neoliberalism and the University
• 42 Neoliberalism, the Knowledge-Based Economy and the Entrepreneur as Metaphor
• 43 The Emotional Logic of Neoliberalism: Reflexivity and Instrumentality in Three Theoretical Traditions
• 44 From Neoliberalizing Research to Researching Neoliberalism: STS, Rentiership and the Emergence of Commons 2.0
• Part VII Neoliberalism and Beyond
• 45 Resistance to Neoliberalism Before and Since the Global Financial Crisis
• 46 No More Room in Hell: Neoliberalism as Living Dead1
• 47 Neoliberalism and the Left: Before and After the Crisis
• 48 Neoliberalism, Development and Resilience
• Index