The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis

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

About the Book The recent, devastating and ongoing economic crisis has exposed the faultlines in the dominant neoliberal economic order, opening debate for the first time in years on alternative visions that do not subscribe to a 'free' market ethic. In particular, the core contradiction at the heart of neoliberalism – that states are necessary for the functioning of free markets – provides us with the opportunity to think again about how we want to organise our economies and societies. The Rise and Fall of Neloberalism presents critical perspectives of neoliberal policies, questions the ideas underpinning neoliberalism, and explores diverse response to it from around the world. In bringing together the work of distinguished scholars and dedicated activists to question neoliberal hegemony, the book exposes the often fractured and multifarious manifestations of neoliberalism which will have to be challenged to bring about meaningful social change. Table of Contents 1. Introduction: A World Turned Right-Way Up - Kean Birch and Vlad Mykhnenko Part 1: The Rise of Neoliberalism 2. How Neoliberalism Got Where It Is: Elite Planning, Corporate Lobbying and the Release of the Free Market - David Miller 3. Making Neoliberal Order in the United States - Kean Birch and Adam Tickell 4. Neoliberalism, Intellectual Property and the Global Knowledge Economy - David Tyfield 5. Neoliberalism and the Calculable World: The Rise of Carbon Trading - Larry Lohmann 6. Tightening the Web: The World Bank and Enforced Policy Reform - Elisa van Waeyenberge 7. The Corruption Industry and Transition: Neoliberalising Post-Soviet Space? - Adam Swain, Vlad Mykhnenko and Shaun French 8. Remaking the Welfare State: From Safety Net to Trampoline - Julie MacLeavy Part 2: The Fall of Neoliberalism 9. Zombieconomics: The Living Death of the Dismal Science - Ben Fine 10. From Hegemony to Crisis? The Continuing Ecological Dominance of Neo-Liberalism - Bob Jessop 11. Do It Yourself: A Politics for Changing Our World - Paul Chatterton 12. Dreaming the Real: A Politics of Ethical Spectacles - Paul Routledge 13. Transnational Companies and Transnational Civil Society - Leonith Hinojosa and Anthony Bebbington 14. Defeating Neo-liberalism: A Marxist Internationalist Perspective and Programme - Jean Shaoul 15. Conclusion: The End of an Economic Order? - Vlad Mykhnenko and Kean Birch

New Political Science, 2018

This article argues that the common understanding of neoliberalism as a set of state policies emerges out of the problematic characterization of power within dominant mainstream and critical paradigms. Working from critical realist social theory and Marxian state theory, it presents an alternative theoretical framework to properly account for the complex unfolding of objective history. From this Institutional Marxist perspective, neoliberalism is theorized as a trend in the institutional organization of interlocking state and corporate power.

This article takes as its starting point the observation that neoliberalism is a concept that is 'oft-invoked but ill-defined'. It provides a taxonomy of uses of the term neoliberalism to include: (1) an all-purpose denunciatory category; (2) 'the way things are'; (3) an institutional framework characterizing particular forms of national capitalism, most notably the Anglo-American ones; (4) a dominant ideology of global capitalism; (5) a form of governmentality and hegemony; and (6) a variant within the broad framework of liberalism as both theory and policy discourse. It is argued that this sprawling set of definitions are not mutually compatible, and that uses of the term need to be dramatically narrowed from its current association with anything and everything that a particular author may find objectionable. In particular, it is argued that the uses of the term by Michel Foucault in his 1978-9 lectures, found in The Birth of Biopolitics, are not particularly compatible with its more recent status as a variant of dominant ideology or hegemony theories. It instead proposes understanding neoliberalism in terms of historical institutionalism, with Foucault's account of historical change complementing Max Weber's work identifying the distinctive economic sociology of national capitalisms.

Mpra Paper, 2006

Neoliberal discourse often produces the impression that the world has undergone a wholesale shift towards laissez-faire, and that this shift has produced economic prosperity. This chapter examines national economic data to discern the degree to which (1) governments have in fact retreated from the market, and (2) countries have enjoyed increasing economic prosperity over a period in which they have supposedly been liberalizing. The evidence is mixed on both counts. Although international interconnectedness appears to have grown over the past two decades, there is little evidence of a substantial scaling back of governments. Over the same period, countries have not experienced any appreciable improvement in growth, cross-national equality, employment or national debt loads, although there is some evidence of improved price stability near the end of the 1990s.

Over the last thirty years a growing body of scholarship across the social sciences has deployed and developed the concept and terminology of neoliberalism. Since exploding in the early 1990s, its usage has not only surpassed related terms (“libertarian” “Washington Consensus” “financialization”) in academic research but has enjoyed exceptional success in public discourses as well (Venugopal 2015) The term has been identified with a variety of large-scale processes and seemingly contradictory trends. As a policy agenda of liberalization and regulatory retrenchment, its implementation over the last thirty years has entailed a massive increase in the volume and complexity of legal rules (Vogel 1996, Braithwaite 2008). As a discourse rooted in the valorization of individual freedom, it has facilitated the consolidation of collective power and, in some contexts, justified the expansion of incarceration and surveillance (Brown 2015, Harcourt 2011) As a political project associated most often with Reagan and Thatcher's efforts to lower taxes and weaken labour power (Harvey 2005), its advance has coincided with a paradoxical combination of rising national inequality measures and a flattening of the global inequality distribution (Milanovic 2012). What initially appeared as disagreements about the origins and causes of the neoliberal ascendance have now come into view as more fundamental divides over the nature of the concept itself. For some, neoliberalism is a set of economic policies enacted all over the world since the 1970s; for Marxists, the result of the resurgent power of global financial elites; for readers of Foucault, it names transformations of political rationality and subjectivity corresponding to an economization of all social life. (Flew 2014) These conceptualizations are nonetheless united by an implied periodization. Neoliberalism promises to mark off the present from the past, emphasizes the underlying continuity of capitalism, and evokes nostalgia for a post-WWII Golden Age. Given this unifying thread, differences in usage may reflect deeper differences about the salient aspects of social order, the nature of social change and proper governance of political order. Thus, debates over “neoliberalism” may serve as a proxy for more fundamental divisions over theory and norm, method and discipline. Recent years have witnessed a number of countervailing trends. A growing genre of research has developed critiques of the concept's theoretical fungibility and drawn on the multiplicity of its valences in practice to seriously question its explanatory value. (Venugopal 2015, Boas & Gan-Morse 2009) Research depending on the concept has nonetheless continued to intensify, and to jump further across disciplinary lines, becoming a centre point of symposia and special collections in a number of fields (Grewal Purdy 2014, Birch Springer 2016) Finally, scholars have increasingly reached into the past, long before the crisis of the 1970s, to find institutional, philosophical and conceptual precursors of today's neoliberal practices. (Gane 2012, Kipnis 2008) In the context of these trends, this workshop offers a momentary opportunity for methodological reflexivity. In an interdisciplinary group that includes historians and sociologists, legal scholars and moral philosophers, political scientists and others, participants will be invited to present, reframe and contextualize their own work in a way that reflects on the analytical, normative and critical value of “neoliberalism.” What insights does the term bring to sites of research left undertheorized by other concepts? Beyond naming and identifying aspects of the world, concepts draw things together and keep other things from view. What analytical connections does “neoliberalism” facilitate, and what processes does it obscure? What new spaces of understanding does the concept open up, and how? On the other hand, what are the risks and pitfalls of leaning too heavily on the term? When might it be time, to borrow a phrase, “to take a break from neoliberalism?” (c.f. Halley 2006). By providing a setting to compare approaches across methodological differences, we hope to not only map the uses of neoliberalism (Ferguson 2010), but to learn something about the origins of the present and, more broadly, about the promises of critically engaged social science.

Among critical social scientists and progressive activists alike, analysis of neoliberalism has become inseparable from the examination of the crisis that has engulfed the global economy since 2007. When the crisis began, it was interpreted by many, not least the mainstream media and even some of the staunchest advocates of neoliberalism, as a crisis of the model of capitalism that had dominated global economic policy for the previous two-and-a-half decades. Moreover, neoliberal policies promoting financialization were widely held to be responsible for the onset of crisis. As states responded to the crisis with (what appeared to be) new restrictions on finance capital and the nationalization of some of the world's largest banks and financial corporations, many thought it reasonable to conclude that the neoliberal era was coming to an end. Yet, as the global economic crisis continues, so does the rollout of recognizably neoliberal policies of austerity, privatization, deregulation and more and more features of the welfare states built in the postwar era. They have been used as tools of crisis management, even as states have experimented with new forms of economic regulation, such as quantitative easing. Particularly in those countries worst hit by recession, such tools have deepened and (provisionally) channelled abroad the economic crisis, instead of resolving it, while contributing to the stagnation of demand and miring ordinary people in perpetual austerity. It is perhaps unsurprising then that contestation over post-crisis neoliberalism is evident in many of the recent seismic political developments across the globe. Most obviously, the rise of radical left-wing parties in Greece, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere, and the popularity of leaders such as British Labour's Jeremy Corbyn, or Bernie Sanders in the USA, are direct reactions to the devastating effects of enforced neoliberal austerity. These follow earlier political movements against some of the harshest forms of neoliberalism in the Global South – such as the so-called 'Pink Tide' that carried a series of (more-or-less radical) left-wing parties to government across Latin America. But the echoes of dissent against neoliberalism, however distorted, can also be heard in the successful 'leave' campaign in the British referendum on its EU membership, in some of Donald Trump's economic policies (even as he is so obviously one of the world's leading beneficiaries of neoliberalization), and in the rise of the National Front, in France, alongside the mobilization of racial prejudices and national imaginaries in many countries. The premise of this special issue of Critical Sociology is that an understanding of neoliberalism since the crisis is crucial for comprehending the contradictions, conflicts and social forces reshaping the contemporary global political economy. Despite scholarship on, about and around neoliberalism having burgeoned since the onset of the global crisis, a settled definition of neoliberalism remains

Neoliberalism has had an interesting trajectory. It was initially formulated as an intellectual-cum-political project in 1938; enjoyed growing acceptance as an economic and political strategy in the 1970s; witnessed panic-stricken meetings in New York and Washington a generation later at the height of the global financial crisis; and, most recently, seems to be undergoing a return to business as usual. There have been many efforts over these long decades to promote (or defend) ‘neoliberal’ institutions and practices as the best basis for economic, legal, political, social, and moral order in complex social formations. There is an even wider range of commentaries and criticisms concerned with neoliberalism, its core features, social bases of support, and its impact on various sites and scales from the local to the global. This contribution addresses some of these issues. It has five main aims: to offer a baseline definition of neoliberalism; to discuss different social scientific approaches to neoliberalism; to distinguish four main types of neoliberalism from a critical political economy viewpoint and relate them to the world market, geopolitics, and global governance; to review the contradictory aspects of neoliberalism in actually existing capitalism; and to assess its prospects after the first global financial crisis and first great recession of the 21st century.

The aim of this special issue is to revisit and rethink neoliberalism as an abstract concept and as an empirical object. We invite contributors to critically evaluate dominant conceptions of neoliberalism, to examine how we use neoliberalism as an analytical and methodological framework, and to offer new ideas about how to productively (re)conceptualize neoliberalism. Below we outline some broad questions that contributors might like to engage with, although others are welcome: • How conceptually useful is neoliberalism in different disciplines? • How has the concept of neoliberalism evolved over time? • Does neoliberalism represent a useful or critical way of understanding the current state of the world? • What are the limitations to our use of neoliberalism? • Does neoliberalism need updating as a critical concept in ways that take us beyond hybridity and variegation? • What is missing from debates on neoliberalism in contemporary scholarship? • What makes neoliberalism such a popular analytical framework? call for papers | 2 • Are there alternative ways to conceptualize neoliberalism? • Are we in need of finding alternative conceptions that break with the language of ‘neoliberalism’ altogether? • What might new visions beyond neoliberalism yield in terms of our collective political future?

Clover for helping me to think about the material below.) This paper is a very cursory exploration of neoliberalism as a concept. It is impossible to survey the vast amount of work on this topic. There are three things I hope to do instead: mention some key currents, articulate where I find the term more and less useful as an attempt to grasp contemporary social reality, and consider what the rise of reference to neoliberalism itself indexes.