Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Periodization and Critique

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

Abstract Neoliberal economic policies and its radical conception of society have been a great benefit to economic and political elites but undermined that standard of living of the middle, working-class, and the poor. Neoliberalism, I will be argued undermines democracy and civil society because it prioritizes the free market over all of social life. Neoliberalism recasts the entire social and political field accordance the image of the market. It reconfigures critical institutions to service the needs of the markets. However, neither the neoliberalism economic agenda nor it cultural dominance could have succeeded without the aid and support of the neoliberal state. One of the primary ways the state supports neoliberalism is that it actively works to create markets and protect them from alternative discourses while helping to shape society into the image of the market. Neoliberalism has not only captured our political system, sat the national agenda, but is also what sociologist Loic Wacquant call a new mode of governance. Entailing a shift from the welfare to a carceral state that is less concerned with hyper-incarceration than it is with precarious sectors of marginal populations working outside of the markets brought in-line to become self-regulating, self-responsibilized neoliberal subjects. Finally, I will argue that the hollowing out of democracy has had the effect of unleashing illiberal forces both in the mature democracies of the U.S. and Europe that will have far-reaching consequences for both.

Abstract Neoliberal economic policies and its radical conception of society have been a great benefit to economic and political elites but undermined that standard of living of the middle, working-class, and the poor. Neoliberalism, I will be argued undermines democracy and civil society because it prioritizes the free market over all of social life. Neoliberalism recasts the entire social and political field accordance the image of the market. It reconfigures critical institutions to service the needs of the markets. However, neither the neoliberalism economic agenda nor it cultural dominance could have succeeded without the aid and support of the neoliberal state. One of the primary ways the state supports neoliberalism is that it actively works to create markets and protect them from alternative discourses while helping to shape society into the image of the market. Neoliberalism has not only captured our political system, sat the national agenda, but is also what sociologist Loic Wacquant call a new mode of governance. Entailing a shift from the welfare to a carceral state that is less concerned with hyper-incarceration than it is with precarious sectors of marginal populations working outside of the markets brought in-line to become self-regulating, self-responsibilized neoliberal subjects. Finally, I will argue that the hollowing out of democracy has had the effect of unleashing illiberal forces both in the mature democracies of the U.S. and Europe that will have far-reaching consequences for both.

2012

"There are many key questions concerning the current status of the notion of neoliberalism. What is it? Is it an appropriate concept to describe a political and intellectual movement or form of state? What are its prospects as a framework of public policy after the global financial crisis? The article proposes a way of answering these questions by regarding neoliberalism as a definite ‘thought collective’ and a regime of government of and by the state. It exemplifies these by shifts within neoliberalism regarding the question of monopoly, its relationship to classical liberalism and its approach to crisis management. In regard to the latter, it further proposes an emergent rationality of the government of and by the state concerning the fostering of resilience in the anticipation of catastrophe."

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

Antipode, 2017

Radical History Review, 2012

2015

Beginning from 1970s, significant transformations have taken place both in the developed countries of the West and the underdeveloped countries. With the change in the global economic conditions through the oil crisis, transnationalization of capital, increasing global competition, etc., the neoliberal ideology, which had been advocated

Finance and Space, 2024

Contrary to prevailing assumptions, the emergence of new state capitalism does not inherently oppose neoliberalism; rather, the two coexist and intertwine. Analysing the evolving relationship between both, this article makes three interrelated arguments. First, notwithstanding long historical lineages, some of the main contemporary dimensions of the new state capitalism are a product of neoliberalism and its contradictions, instabilities, crises and conflicts. The new state capitalism is, thus, both deeply shaped by neoliberal path-dependencies and institutional legacies, and the deepening of neoliberalisation, albeit through new modalities. Second, the new state capitalism constitutes a form of evolving and mutating neoliberalism, rather than an alternative to it (at least for now). That said, neoliberal mutations, like greater accommodation of state ownership and enhanced statist interventionism within the neoliberal mainframe, are themselves the source of major fault lines within neoliberalism, exacerbating geoeconomic antagonisms and the geopoliticisation of economic relations. Third, the new state capitalism accelerates the development of neoliberal forms of economic nationalism. Scalar contradictions are thus exacerbated through the tensions produced by the nationalist promotion of competitive corporate champions amid (an evolving) global neoliberal architecture.

Handbuch Kritische Theorie, 2016

Neoliberalization is a distinctive economic, political, and social project that promotes profit-oriented, market-mediated accumulation as the primary axis of societalization. This might suggest that neoliberalism promotes the primacy of the economic but, since its extension and reproduction require continuing state support and, indeed, involve what Weber called political capitalism, one might also argue that it entails a primacy of the political. To address this paradox, my article offers a baseline definition of neoliberalism and identifies four idealtypical historical forms thereof; relates neoliberalism to the world market, geopolitics and global governance; disambiguates the primacy of the economic; and addresses the role of the political in promoting neoliberalism and handling its contradictions and crisis-tendencies. It illustrates this exercise in critical theory from the North Atlantic Financial Crisis and how its (mis)management has strengthened the neoliberal project, enabled its main promoters and beneficiaries to escape the need to learn from their mistakes, and even enabled them to further enrich themselves.

The rise of authoritarian forms of neoliberalism is now well documented in the political economy literature even though the focus has been on various reforms that remove key decision-making arenas from democratic control. As Ian Bruff (2014) skilfully highlights, this is not a new process but rather the continuation of a key characteristic of neoliberal governance. While recognizing the return of authoritarian forms to European states is crucial to understand the current crisis management strategies of states and capital, we still need a deeper understanding of the concrete forms in which this authoritarian turn is being developed, deepened, and, more importantly, challenged and contested. In this chapter, we explore the ways in which authoritarian neoliberalism finds expression in and against labour and how labour’s agency shapes, contests and subverts such strategies.

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.