Neoliberalism in denial

Geography Compass, 2010

The pervasiveness of neoliberalism within the field of human geography is remarkable, especially when we consider its virtual absence from the literature less than a decade ago. While the growing attention afforded to neoliberalism among geographers is new, the phenomenon of neoliberalism is not. This paper traces the intellectual history of neoliberalism and its expansions across various institutional frameworks and geographical settings. I review the primary contributions geographers have made to the literature, and specifically their recognition for neoliberalism’s variegations within existing political economic matrixes and institutional frameworks. Contra the prevailing view of neoliberalism as a pure and static end-state, geographical inquiry illuminates neoliberalism as a dynamic and unfolding process. The concept of ‘neoliberalization’ is thus seen as more appropriate to geographical theorizations insofar as it recognizes neoliberalism’s hybridized and mutated forms as it travels around our world. I also consider some of the most salient ways that neoliberalism has been theorized among human geographers. In particular, I highlight understandings of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, as a policy-based approach to state reform, and as a particular logic of governmentality, arguing that while there are significant differences between these various formations, it may also be important to work beyond methodological, epistemological, and ontological divides in the larger interest of social justice.

L'analyse de la diffusion spatiale des discours exprimés sur le néolibéralisme depuis les années 1930 permet de mettre en évidence une série de transpositions géographiques associées à des ruptures sémantiques récurrentes. Apparue en France pour désigner un mouvement d'idées européen, la référence au néolibéralisme a ensuite été appliquée à des ensembles géographiques différents (Allemagne de l'Ouest, États latino-américains, monde) pour qualifier des fonctionnements politiques eux-mêmes contrastés. Ces décalages géosémantiques successifs ont abouti à rendre cette étiquette polysémique, confuse et contradictoire. Dans ces conditions, il apparaît nécessaire de chercher à mieux préciser la variété des formes de néolibéralismes qui structurent aujourd'hui l'organisation politique des territoires et des sociétés qui les habitent. A Geo-history of neoliberalism Rethinking the meanings of a malleable and shifting intellectual label Abstract: Analysing how discourse on " neoliberalism " has spread spatially since the 1930s brings to light a series of geographical transpositions linked to recurrent semantic splits. The reference to "neoliberalism", which first appeared in France and designated a European school of thought, has since been applied to various geographic areas (West Germany, the Latin American states, the world) to qualify contrasting political practices. These successive geo-semantic shifts have resulted in a polysemic, confusing and contradictory label. In these conditions, it seems necessary to try and better define the various forms of neoliberalism that structure the political organisation of different places and the societies that inhabit them.

2016

'The Discourse of Neoliberalism: An Anatomy of a Powerful Idea' explores the internal workings of capitalism’s most infamous contemporary offspring by dissecting the diverse interpretations of neoliberalism that have been advanced in academia. Using a critical geographical approach to pierce the heart of neoliberal theory, the book arrives at a discursive understanding wherein political economic approaches to neoliberalism are sutured together with poststructuralist interpretations in an attempt to overcome the ongoing ideological impasse that prevents the articulation of a more vibrant solidarity on the political left. Reading neoliberalism as a discourse better equips us to understand the power of this variegated economic formation as an expansive process of social-spatial transformation that is intimately bound up with the production of poverty, inequality, and violence across the globe. In examining how imaginative geographies are employed to discursively bind neoliberalism’s attendant violence to particular places and thereby blame its victims, this vivisection of neoliberalism reveals the concealment of an inherently bloodthirsty character to an ever-mutating process of socio-spatial transformation that simply refuses to die.

Although as a political and economic project neoliberalism operates across global space, this is not, of course, the only scale at which its practices are manifested and felt, for whilst there are many constants to neoliberalism across the planet (such as how its ascendance is linked to working-class political defeats; Carroll 2005), there are also important differences in how neoliberalism is operationalized in different places (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Castree 2005). Put another way, neoliberalism is a spatial project that is spatially projected because, despite the rhetoric of how neoliberal globalization is purportedly producing a flat and borderless world Ohmae 1990) in which distance and geography no longer matter, the sway of place still shapes how political praxis is imagined and articulated in these neoliberal times-the histories of social struggles and their institutional memories are very much tied up in the spatialities of the global economy and greatly influence how neoliberalism is being implemented locally and nationally (Brenner and Theodore in Keil 2002:582).

Book Review, Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers, Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, Eric S. Sheppard (eds). The Guilford Press, New York and London, 2007, 340 pp., ISBN 1593853213, US$30 (pbk), ISBN 1593853211, US$55 (hbk).

Sheppard E. et al (eds) The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology, New York: Wiley. , 2023

This essay elaborates a critical geographical perspective on neoliberalism that emphasizes (a) the path-dependent character of neoliberal reform projects and (b) the strategic role of cities in the contemporary remaking of political-economic space. We begin by presenting the methodological foundations for an approach to the geog-raphies of what we term " actually existing neoliberalism. " In contrast to neoliberal ideology, in which market forces are assumed to operate according to immutable laws no matter where they are " unleashed, " we emphasize the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks , policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles. An adequate understanding of actually existing neoliberalism must therefore explore the path-dependent, contextually specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emergent neoliberal, market-oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales. These considerations lead to a conceptualization of contemporary neolib-eralization processes as catalysts and expressions of an ongoing creative destruction of political-economic space at multiple geographical scales. While the neoliberal restructuring projects of the last two decades have not established a coherent basis for sustainable capitalist growth, it can be argued that they have nonetheless profoundly reworked the institutional infrastructures upon which Fordist-Keynesian capitalism was grounded. The concept of creative destruction is presented as a useful means for describing the geographically uneven, socially regressive, and politically volatile trajectories of institutional/spatial change that have been crystallizing under these conditions. The essay concludes by discussing the role of urban spaces within the contradictory and chronically unstable geographies of actually existing neoliberalism. Throughout the advanced capitalist world, we suggest, cities have become strategically crucial geographical arenas in which a variety of neoliberal initiatives—along with closely intertwined strategies of crisis displacement and crisis management—have been articulated.

Environment and Planning A, 2005

Drawing on recent research and critical analysis, this rich collection of papers addresses the uneven geographies of neoliberalism and their contestation in six diverse countries, that range from the large industrial powerhouses of Mexico and Brazil through to the predominantly rural and informal economies of Bolivia and Nicaragua, and the resource-exporting countries of Peru and Ecuador. As the editors state in their introduction, the papers``interrogate the particular geographies of neoliberalism in Latin America, throwing into sharp relief the production of neoliberal landscapes and livelihoods in a diversity of ... contexts'' (Perreault and Martin, page 194). In their diverse ways, the authors grapple with the recent debates in geographyö found among economic, political, feminist, and other geographers öto go beyond the reduction of neoliberalism to a``monolithic exogenous force that transforms places from the outside'' (Martin, page 205). Too frequently in the past, analysts have presented a view from nowhere of neoliberalism or globalization as if it were always materialized and operationalized identically across the world. As Nagar et al (2002) and others have argued, neoliberalism operates only through multiple scales, actors, and institutions, many of which are invisible in standard accounts. Recent debates have called for detailed empirical work on the informal sector, households, rural areas, and the diverseöoften marginalizedöactors within those spaces, in order to understand the processes by which neoliberalism works its way acrossöand simultaneously constructsöscales. The papers in this issue start from the premise that it is necessary to go beyond the boardrooms of big business and the policy headquarters of the international financial institutions to understand neoliberalism in practice. In addition to documenting national government policy and political economic trends, the papers focus on less visible arenas such as rural and nonmetropolitan urban areas, on households, and indigenous populated areas. Latin American countries' application of neoliberal macroeconomic policies and the reorientation of nationalism and social policies around them have a number of intended and unintended consequences for the geographies of development in the region. As the papers document in relation to their specific case studies, neoliberalism simultaneously globalizes and localizes, a process that generates a rescaling of economic, political, and social institutions, responsibilities, and costs (Perreault and Martin). The papers document in detail the processes and actors involved in this rescaling and reorganization of geographies in different countries (usually by focusing on subnational regions). While Latin America has long been characterized by its uneven patterns of wealth and poverty, resource exploitation, fixing of ethnic identities, and industrial^urban development, the papers show how the mid-20th-century geographies of impact substituting industrialization (ISI), corporatist politics and resource use have been radically transformed by the imposition of neoliberal policies over the past ten to fifteen years. One aspect of this historical^geographical transformation

Global Networks, 2010

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, 'neoliberalism' appears to have become a rascal concept -promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding the sources, expressions and implications of contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider the handling of 'neoliberalism' within three influential strands of heterodox political economy -the varieties of capitalism approach; historical materialist international political economy; and governmentality approaches. While each of these research traditions sheds light on contemporary processes of market-oriented regulatory restructuring, we argue that each also underplays and/or misreads the systemically uneven, or 'variegated', character of these processes. Enabled by a critical interrogation of how each approach interprets the geographies, modalities and pathways of neoliberalization processes, we argue that the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post-1970s capitalism. Our approach emphasizes the cumulative impacts of successive 'waves' of neoliberalization upon uneven institutional landscapes, in particular: (a) their establishment of interconnected, mutually recursive policy relays within an increasingly transnational field of market-oriented regulatory transfer; and (b) their infiltration and reworking of the geoinstitutional frameworks, or 'rule regimes', within which regulatory experimentation unfolds. This mode of analysis has significant implications for interpreting the current global economic crisis.

Environment and Planning A, 2006