8

Neoliberalism
Matthew Eagleton-Pierce

Introduction
Neoliberalism has become a common, if still contested, conceptual frame of
reference for International Political Economy (IPE) scholars to better under-
stand the governance of the global economy. With its theoretical roots in the
1930s, the term has been called upon to represent, clarify, or, through norma-
tive arguments, denounce a wide variety of things. If there is a connecting
theme which unites users of the term, it concerns how to think about the
patterns of capitalism since the 1980s, with particular reference to commodi-
fication tendencies, the special role of finance, and wider socio-economic
inequalities. This chapter offers an overview of the theoretical debates in IPE
and allied disciplines on the subject of neoliberalism. It situates the meanings
and disputes of scholars in relation to how the empirical environment of the
world economy has changed over the past four decades. In examining this
complex terrain, the argument begins by offering four prominent starting
points for the analysis of neoliberalism: (1) as a history of intellectual ideas;
(2) as a system of enhanced capitalist power in which marketisation is stressed;
(3) as a cultural examination of everyday conduct; and (4) as a more generic
post-Marxist expression to denote the current zeitgeist. With this foundation
in mind, the discussion proceeds to map neoliberalism through three major
‘acts’: (1) from the late 1970s to the early 1990s; (2) from the mid-1990s to
the mid-2000s; and (3) from the late 2000s to the present. While noting the

M. Eagleton-Pierce (*)
International Political Economy, SOAS University of London, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 119

T. M. Shaw et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary International Political
Economy, Palgrave Handbooks in IPE, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-45443-0_8
120 M. Eagleton-Pierce

difficulty of chiselling history into such temporal forms, it, nonetheless,

remains helpful for better grasping of some of the major trends and preoccu-
pations that have come under the heading of neoliberalism.

Four Starting Points on Neoliberalism

Since the 1980s, use of the concept of neoliberalism has taken off in academic
dialogues; in addition, within many countries, the term is found as a framing
device to mobilise actors on the political left. Similar to other applications in
the social sciences, such as in heterodox economics, geography, sociology, and
anthropology, ‘neoliberalism’ in the field of IPE has been adopted as a kind of
catch-all for the current capitalist age or even modernity itself. As the meaning
of the expression has been stretched across different spaces, institutions, and
domains, the notion has unsurprisingly become a rather ‘unstable signifier’
which, over time, appears to be ‘becoming even-more plastic, porous, and
promiscuous’ (Peck 2010: 31). It is still possible, nonetheless, to point towards
four starting points on how to theorise neoliberalism which can guide us
through understanding political economy.
The first—and arguably most coherent meaning—is to understand neolib-
eralism as a movement of intellectual ideas. In this context, from the 1930s
to the 1960s, neoliberalism had an earlier gestation when the word was used
in a positive sense by a network of economists, philosophers, and political
thinkers, such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Wilhelm Röpke.
These critics had different ideas on why liberalism could or should be given
the prefix of ‘neo’. In one respect, they drew inspiration from the Victorian
liberalism of the nineteenth century but, at the same time, saw a need to not
only manage so-called collectivist threats, notably state socialism but also
Nazism and corporate monopolies, which impeded their vision of economic
and political ‘freedom’ (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009; Jackson 2010; Peck
2010; Jones 2012). Organised around the Mont Pèlerin Society, these early
neoliberal intellectuals were against the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
vision of laissez-faire which, in light of a radically different and turbulent
socio-­political order, was read by one prominent member as a ‘grotesque’
basis for future policymaking (Lippmann 2009[1937]: 186). In contrast to
some cliché depictions of these writers, many were keen to advocate a strong
state, underpinned by the rule of law, as the surest foundation for a viable
commercial system (Hayek 2008[1944]). Unsurprisingly, there were dis-
agreements within this wider ‘neoliberal thought collective’ (Mirowski and
Plehwe 2009), such as so-called ordoliberals, like Röpke, who advocated
 Neoliberalism 121

stricter state intervention to facilitate a social market economy, a position not

shared by all in the Austrian school (Cerny 2016; Bonefeld 2017). From the
late 1970s, as an adaptable body of ideas, one which was disseminated
through particular think tanks and departments of economics, neoliberal
political economy began to move from the margins to mainstream policy,
particularly in the UK, the US, and France.
It is around this time that the second and now dominant meaning of neo-
liberalism enters the discourse: an economic (or economistic) reading of ‘rule’,
‘discipline’, or even ‘tyranny’ by markets (Bourdieu 2003; Harvey 2005;
Brenner et al. 2010; Peck et al. 2012). It is useful to recall that the main source
of this sense was not found in academia but in social activist circles, such as in
the opposition to Augusto Pinochet’s rule in Chile (Boas and Gans-Morse
2009). Within the Marxist tradition, David Harvey’s (2005) contribution
stands as an important touchstone for many. For Harvey (2005: 22), neolib-
eralism can be defined as a theory of political economic practice focused on
the pursuit of ‘entrepreneurial freedom’ within an institutional framework
that calls for ‘private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered mar-
kets and free trade’. Particular attention has been devoted to the role of finan-
cial capital or financialisation as a distinctive feature of the neoliberal era
(Krippner 2011; Fine and Saad-Filho 2017). Against socialist, neocorporatist,
and certain Keynesian tools of policy management, the primary logic of neo-
liberalism is, in Harvey’s view, to reshape and reconsolidate elite class power,
in both its national and transnational configurations (also see Saad-Filho and
Johnston 2004; Duménil and Lévy 2011). From the 1990s, this basic pattern
of defining neoliberalisation as dictation by privatising ‘market forces’ found
currency in the work of many IPE theorists, including earlier work by Stephen
Gill (1995, 1998), as well as more recent applications, such as Stuart Shield’s
(2012) analysis of post-Communist transition in Eastern Central Europe;
Adam Morton’s (2011) Gramscian-infused dissection of Mexico’s post-1970s
makeover; and Huw Macartney’s (2011) unpacking of ‘variegated’ forms of
neoliberal rule within the EU, to name but three notable projects.
At the same time, one clearly does not need to be within a neo-Marxist
mould to appreciate how dominant ideas and material interests are often
coiled together. This leads us to a third starting point for understanding the
appropriation of neoliberalism as a term in IPE: the literature found within
constructivist and cultural political economy. For some theorists, neoliberal
policy ideas, such as those around capital account liberalisation, can be objec-
tified, measured, and weighted, with a view to assessing what precise role
they play in policymaking (Chwieroth 2010). Another group of related theo-
rists have explored how neoliberal financialisation has become embedded in
122 M. Eagleton-Pierce

ordinary life, generating important study enquiries (Hobson and Seabrooke

2007). Other theorists have preferred a ‘messier’, post-positivist view of neo-
liberalism, one inspired by Foucault (1980, 2008), which treats neoliberal-
ism ‘as a flowing and flexible conglomeration of calculative notions, strategies
and technologies aimed at fashioning populations and people’ (Wacquant
2012: 69). As argued by neo-Foucauldians (Dean 2010; Dardot and Laval
2013), this latter approach tries to elucidate a more diffuse, networked theo-
risation of capitalist power and its affective forms, including the ongoing
remaking of a so-called neoliberal subjectivity. Within this conceptualisation,
IPE scholars such as Paul Langley (2008) have been attentive to novel forms
of cultural normativity claimed to be reflective of neoliberalism, such as the
idea of the ‘everyday investor’.
The increasing use of the concept of neoliberalism by IPE theorists can also
be explained by larger intellectual trends in the social sciences, the socio-­
political reasons of which often pass underexplored (Eagleton-Pierce 2016).
This brings forward a fourth starting point—which shares some overlapping
features with the second and third positions earlier—around how the concept
has been used within post-Marxist debates. From the 1980s, the general
weakening of Marxism and, in turn, the rise of other agendas, particularly
around identity politics (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.), led to a search for alter-
native concepts to ‘capitalism’. As Boltanski and Chiapello (2007: xi) have
argued in sociology:

Dethroned from its status of key concept of the 1970s, ‘capitalism’ has been
reduced to an inferior status – a somewhat indecent swearword – because it
implied a Marxist terminology that many sociologists wished to forget, but also
because it referred to something too ‘large’, too ‘bulky’ to be immediately observ-
able and describable via the observation of specific situations.

Thus, for some academics at least, ‘neoliberalism’ is helpful because it allows

those who use it to speak about capitalist phenomena—such as commodity
exchange, financialisation, or consumerism, among many other topics—but
without recourse to a Marxist vocabulary and set of theories that may be
viewed as ‘unfashionable’ or insufficient. Elsewhere, one could also suggest
that ‘globalisation’, one of the dominant terms of the 1990s, lost a degree of
conceptual and policy lustre around the turn of the millennium, probably due
to the tarnishing of the word via the alter-globalisation movement. This effect
possibly encouraged other scholars to turn to the notion of neoliberalism as a
way to refresh scholarly agendas but around an expression that had acquired a
sharper critical bite.
 Neoliberalism 123

As outlined in the introduction to this book, we can see how the theorisa-
tion of neoliberalism, similar to other conceptual traditions in IPE, has
evolved in relation to commercial changes in the world economy, along with
more autonomous academic debates. It is necessary to now discuss this his-
torical relationship between these material and symbolic structures in order to
grasp the uses and potential value of neoliberalism as an analytical device.
Overall, it can be noted how there has been an increased tendency to view
neoliberalisation as a highly complex, often unsteady, and crisis-prone process
of institutional regulation, one which has spawned different ‘geographies,
modalities and pathways’ over successive ‘waves’ of policy reform (Brenner
et al. 2010: 182). Given this highly complicated history since the late 1970s,
one should caution against not only being misled by clichéd, ideological
depictions of ‘neoliberalism as free markets’ but also the possibility of chisel-
ling a precise definition that can illuminate such diverse conditions and out-
comes (Clarke 2008; Venugopal 2015; Eagleton-Pierce 2016). To adopt a
different metaphor, if neoliberalism is a moving target, then scholarship needs
to be equally adept at moving with it.

Neoliberalism Act I: Late 1970s–Early 1990s

In many accounts of the development of the mainstream neoliberal policy era,
attention is devoted to the particular political context within the UK and US
from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. It is important to note that ‘the New
Right’—one of the more common phrases to encapsulate such shifts at the
time—did not emerge as a calculated and codified plan by its chief advocates.
Although one can always identify certain Machiavellian ‘free market purists’
at the point of conception, the actual making of ‘hegemonic neoliberalism’
(Rupert 1990, 1995; Gill 1995) was spawned out of a set of unpredictable
socio-economic dislocations and often confusing political struggles. For
instance, in the UK, in part inspired by Hayek and Milton Friedman, the first
major experiment with privatisation was under Prime Minister Thatcher’s
administration (1979–90). In the first Thatcher term (1979–83), however,
the Tory vision of privatisation was not well-articulated and tended to pro-
ceed cautiously and haphazardly, often justified as a quick, revenue-raising
mechanism to meet financial needs. After 1983, the rationale became clearer
in response to disillusionment with the performance of nationalised indus-
tries, particularly coal, rail, and telecoms, which were claimed to ‘lack effi-
ciency’ and ‘competition’ (Parker 2009). Thatcher’s confrontation with the
coal miners’ strike (1984–85), in particular, was one of the most serious
124 M. Eagleton-Pierce

industrial disputes in UK history. In the US, under President Reagan

(1981–89), a neoliberal agenda proceeded in different ways, notably via
reducing tax on high earners (from 70 to 28 per cent); engineering non-­
inflationary monetary policy; promoting business-friendly initiatives, such as
the Commission on Industrial Competitiveness; and facing down union
movements, epitomised by the firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981
who refused to work (Krugman 1995a). One can consider these examples as
illustrative of the second major meaning of neoliberalism I outlined earlier.
The turn to neoliberal ideas within Anglo-Saxon capitalist countries was, at
the same time, also reshaping the policy orthodoxy elsewhere, shifts that were
often led by particular intellectuals (see Beeson (Chap. 13), this volume).
Arguing against Keynesian-inspired perspectives, critics such as Deepak Lal
(1983), Peter Bauer (1981), and Anne Krueger (1990) helped to usher in ‘a
counter-revolution in development theory and practice’ (Toye 1987: vii).
According to these experts, poorer developing countries were not radically
distinct from those found in the richer North. Rather, the basic insights of
neoclassical economics—notably, conceiving of all agents, both producers
and consumers, as rational calculating individuals that respond to price sig-
nals—could be applied to all sorts of post-colonial nations across Africa, Asia,
and South America. In this sense, history and geography were deemed less
important. Similar to arguments heard in the UK and the US, such countries
were criticised for ‘over-extending’ the public sector and channelling resources
into grandiose projects that appeared designed by, and for, elites. It was argued
that government controls on the economy often worked against trade and
financial openness, resulting in negative effects on private enterprise and
growth. According to this logic, if poor development performance was found,
it was the fault of developing country governments for implementing the
wrong policies (Toye 1987). In turn, these ideas progressively found a home
at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an impor-
tant consequence since such institutions could offer conditionality loans, as
well as shape the ‘common sense’ on development policy advice (Harrison
2004; Chwieroth 2010).
During this first act of neoliberalism, IPE theorists offered a number of
contributions for understanding how the global political economy was evolv-
ing. These debates often pivoted around how to grasp the larger relationship
between state power and commercial markets. In respect to the UK, Andrew
Gamble’s (1979, 1994) work was significant for offering an empirically rooted
and subtle reading of how neoliberalism—which, at the time, he referred to
as a ‘social market economy’ model—required a ‘strong state’ to function.
Although Thatcherism marked a major reconfiguration of power towards
 Neoliberalism 125

capital, deep cuts to public spending were politically difficult to accomplish,

while trade union organising remained robust into the 1990s (Gamble 1994).
It is germane to note that the precise phrase ‘states versus markets’, and even
the looser expression ‘states and markets’—defining conceptual anchors in
many debates on neoliberalism—only became more widely uttered following
the end of the Cold War. As noted by many, Susan Strange (1988) was impor-
tant for helping to fashion an IPE agenda around such macro-questions and,
in particular, alerting scholars and other interested readers to how financial
markets were evolving into a major ‘structure’ of power. Strange (1988, 1996)
argued that the ‘market-authority nexus’ was undergoing a troubling develop-
ment, particularly when it appeared by the early 1990s that governments were
losing discretionary freedom in the face of pressure from transnational finan-
cial elites. In short, during this period, the term neoliberalism tended to be
deployed by IPE scholars as a way to chart and dissect the changing forms of
global economic restructuring, including how to explain the evolution of wel-
farism and the expanding opportunities for capitalism in the context of the
post-Bretton Woods monetary order and the later collapse of the Cold War
(Cox 1987; Gill and Law 1989; Gill 1994).

Neoliberalism Act II: Mid-1990s–Mid-2000s

From the mid-1990s, when invoked as a critical reference for enhanced capi-
talist power and ‘free market’ ideology, the notion of neoliberalism became
increasingly common in IPE and related social science fields. With such use,
however, the notion became something of ‘conceptual Swiss Army knife’ for
unpicking a bewildering variety of problems across territories and scales
(Eagleton-Pierce 2016: xiii). It is in relation to this ‘mature’ sense of neoliber-
alism—or neoliberalisation as an unfolding variegated process—that we can
now turn to. These uses, in other words, tended to gravitate around the sec-
ond core meaning outlined earlier, but they also included the fourth sense,
that is, as a basic signifier for the present.
When examining major global policymaking trends and commercial shifts
around the turn of the millennium, different forms of evidence can be invoked
to characterise the entrenchment of neoliberalisation. For instance, privatisa-
tion agendas gathered pace during this time, particularly in Western Europe
and Latin America, before spreading to all other regions. Policies associated
with privatisation varied immensely within these experiments, from the total
government withdrawal of certain responsibilities, to restrictions in the vol-
ume or quality of public services, to the transfer of public assets into private
126 M. Eagleton-Pierce

hands. Worldwide, the estimated government-derived revenue from all priva-

tisation projects rose from US$ 80 billion in 1995 to US$ 180 billion in 2000
(Megginson and Netter 2001). The trend continued after 2000 but tended to
shift from secondary-share public offerings in Western Europe to divestment
projects in emerging economies, particularly China (Megginson 2018). In
relation to world trade and liberalisation policies, this period featured strong
growth and political commitment via the newly established World Trade
Organization (WTO), especially in relation to North America and developing
Asia trade. From 1995 to 2000, world merchandise exports grew annually by
around 7 per cent in volume terms. By 2005, around 31 per cent of world
trade was captured by developing countries as a group, up from 20 per cent in
the early 1990s. The internationalisation of production led to increasingly
complex global value chains (GVCs): by 2011, nearly half of world trade in
goods and services took place within GVCs, a rise from 36 per cent in 1995
(Hoekman and Kostecki 2009; WTO 2015).
With the implementation of these agendas, however, neoliberalisation
brought forward fresh tensions, disturbances, and contradictions. If such
problems had in part been caused by the destructive, ‘rollback’ of elements of
the state under early neoliberalism, the period since the mid-1990s can be
defined, for some observers, as a more creative ‘roll-out’ of state agencies (Peck
and Tickell 2002). Depending upon the particular power configurations
involved in each context, such struggles took different forms. For instance,
through the World Bank, the turn to the larger ‘governance’ agenda with
recipient countries can be highlighted. As argued by Dani Rodrik (2007), the
new orthodoxy on development policy is a kind of ‘augmented Washington
Consensus’, one which still contains the core ‘Victorian virtue’ of ‘free mar-
kets and sound money’ (Krugman 1995b: 29) but now incorporates a range
of ‘second generation reforms’ (Serra and Stiglitz 2008; see also Bernards
(Chap. 20), this volume). By the early 2000s, for the World Bank, the success
of a neoliberal economy also depended upon the quality of the rule of law,
state effectiveness, the control of corruption, voice and accountability, and
general political stability. But this problematisation of early neoliberalism was
also stimulated by a critique of the gap between neoliberal rhetoric or ideol-
ogy and how successful countries actually developed. This critique existed in
three forms, from its milder versions that called for ‘human development’
(Sen 1999), through the comparative benefits of the East Asian model of capi-
talism, where governments played a larger role in the market (Wade 2004)
and, onwards, to the stronger attacks issued by public activists within the
alter-globalisation movement (Chomsky 1998).
 Neoliberalism 127

Within this period, IPE scholars advanced more sophisticated analyses of

how to plot neoliberalisation. Three themes can be highlighted. First, build-
ing upon earlier studies, there was a deeper examination of how neoliberal
policies did not entail the retreat of the state but rather its reconstitution,
consolidation, or even advancement in particular areas. ‘Deregulation’, when
uttered in a taken-for-granted manner, was therefore a distracting misnomer,
as expressed in Steven Vogel’s (1998) larger argument that ‘freer markets’
meant ‘more rules’. Drawing upon a Polanyian sense of political economy,
other theorists in IPE and adjacent fields suggested that ‘embedded neoliber-
alism’—anchored around ‘regulatory’, ‘managed’, and ‘social’ properties—
offered a better description of the ‘common sense’ of the early twenty-first
century (Cerny 2008: 2–3). Such debates were closely associated with how to
conceptualise the so-called competition state, that is, the remaking of gov-
ernment, in particular, the welfare state, to make it fit for transnational capi-
talism (Cerny 1997; Jessop 2002). Second, aided via the larger popular
discourse on ‘globalisation’, there was renewed attention on how the lattice
of laws, rules, and norms was forming a global ‘constitutional’ order in the
service of large corporate enterprises (Gill 1998; see also Froese (Chap. 4),
this volume). Within these discussions, there was a notable spotlight on how
international organisations were propagating neoliberal practices and the
forms of resistance this generated, such as at the World Bank (Harrison
2004) and the WTO (Wade 2003; Gallagher 2008; Eagleton-Pierce 2013).
A third theme—one which would quickly assume even greater intellectual
significance as the global financial crisis struck—concerned the ties between
finance and neoliberalism, particularly in respect to US hegemony and the
reshaping of the international financial architecture but also in reference to
how financialisation, notably debt, had become increasingly normalised
(Soederberg 2004; Thirkell-White 2007; Langley 2008; Panitch and Konings
2008).
As is evident, IPE theorists made a number of key theoretical and empirical
contributions within this period. However, the most intense conceptual inter-
rogation of neoliberalism was conducted by geographers and sociologists, the
leading figures of which have been noted (Peck and Tickell 2002; Harvey
2005; Brenner et al. 2010; Peck 2010; Peck et al. 2012; Wacquant 2012). As
the global economy was roiled by the financial crisis of 2007–08, the idea of
neoliberalism underwent further academic scrutiny in IPE, resulting in not
only new empirical insights but also the start of a critical discussion on
whether the concept has now outlived its analytical usefulness.
128 M. Eagleton-Pierce

Neoliberalism Act III: Late-2000s–Present

Given its historical significance and manifold impacts, the global financial
crisis now casts a shadow over many debates within IPE. Triggered by rising
delinquencies in the US subprime-mortgage market, by September 2008, the
crisis entered an acute phase with the collapse of the investment bank Lehman
Brothers before generating a major world recession and unfolding set of socio-­
economic dislocations. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, a number of
commentators and policymakers suggested that the event signalled a water-
shed moment for neoliberalism, or even its ‘endpoint’ (Stiglitz 2008). As
French President Nicolas Sarkozy boldly declared, ‘laissez-faire is finished’
(quoted in Erlanger 2008). However, these initial judgements now appear
overcooked, with IPE scholars offering more nuanced examinations on what
has changed and how to read financialisation. For instance, Eric Helleiner
(2014) has argued that continuity and incremental policy change marks the
post-crash institutional landscape, largely as a result of the structural power
position of the US. For others, the financial crisis may have shaken some of
the material and ideological scaffolding of neoliberalism, but this does not
constitute a new era; rather, the latest phase is one where social contradictions
have only deepened with an absence of any counter-hegemonic alternative
(Overbeek and van Apeldoorn 2012; Major 2012; Van Der Pijl and Yurchenko
2015). At the same time, as policy reforms began to be enacted, the crisis
sparked fresh thinking on the overall viability of neoliberalism as an organis-
ing concept. For example, Martjin Konings (2009) has critiqued how debates
still tend to conflate ‘ideological discourse’ with actually existing ‘neoliberal
practices’, whereas the latter is often messier than the former.
Beyond financialisation, other IPE debates which conceptually deploy neo-
liberalism as an anchor have emerged within recent years. Empirical concerns
have tracked the roiling waves of the world economy, with a particular interest
in understanding geographical diversity beyond Euro-America heartlands. In
relation to the WTO, Kristen Hopewell (2016) has dissected how China,
India, and Brazil adapted to the trading system through a conscious deploy-
ment of neoliberal rhetoric, ideals, and practices, such as via critiques of US
protectionist policies in agriculture. Elsewhere, in reference to South America,
Tom Chodor (2015) has used a neo-Gramscian framework to chart the so-­
called Pink tide of left-leaning governments in the region and analyse the
extent to which revolts against neoliberal rules have been generating more
substantive social change. If class-centric approaches have tended to have a
historical prominence in IPE accounts of neoliberalism, more recent work has
 Neoliberalism 129

interrogated gender as another key category (for an overview, see Bedford and
Rai 2010). For instance, Penny Griffin (2009) and Elizabeth Prügl (2017)
have debated the World Bank’s contested relationship with gender analysis,
including how it has sought to establish a positive link between gender equal-
ity and growth, along with the various gendered silences and biases in its
wider development discourse. A particular debate has focused on critiquing
the rise of a so-called neoliberal feminism within business and wider settings
(Elias 2013; Roberts 2015; on context, see Fraser 2009). Some of these latter
empirical applications of the idea of neoliberalism can, therefore, be housed
under my third and fourth major meanings.
At the same time, however, recent years have seen increasing levels of scep-
ticism and worry regarding the utility of the concept of neoliberalism, a con-
versation that has featured IPE theorists and others in the social sciences.
Today, the term has, in some ways, become a victim of its success. Neoliberalism
often appears as a ubiquitous and often omnipotent experience, a presumed
‘force’, which potentially envelops everything (Clarke 2008; Venugopal 2015).
This effect of conceptual stretching—including the many oblique, casual and
ironic uses of the word—certainly gives the term a ‘troubled’ status (Peck
2010: 15). Two problems, in particular, can be noted. First, as the concept has
been deployed across multiple territories and spaces, scholars have tended to
claim that neoliberal practices take hybridised, rather than ‘pure’, patterns.
While this is often a valuable route of enquiry, it can lead to difficulties in not
only stabilising any kind of core analytical meaning of neoliberalism but in
comparing objects of analysis that may be very different in history and form.
A second problem concerns how scholars interpret the concept in relation to
social change and how, ‘paradoxically, despite failures, doubts, and cynicism,
the neoliberal vocabulary often refreshes itself or, at the very least, becomes so
normalised that users struggle to imagine what an alternative discourse could
look like’ (Eagleton-Pierce 2016: xiv). Such usage patterns lead one to ques-
tion if neoliberalism, as a single frame of reference, may be trying to accom-
plish too much, prompting some to suggest that scholars would be better
addressing the complexity of modern capitalism via other conceptual catego-
ries operating at lower levels of abstraction.

Conclusion
This chapter has offered a brief empirical and theoretical history of how neo-
liberalism has been understood within IPE and adjacent fields. It began by
offering four major readings on the concept: as a history of ideas with origins
130 M. Eagleton-Pierce

found in the 1930s; as a system of enhanced capitalist power; as a set of cul-

tural practices or modes of everyday conduct; and as a generic expression to
denote the current era. The discussion explored the theorisation of neoliberal-
ism in light of the evolution of the world economy. Such periodisation inevi-
tably comes with caveats on the difficulty of neatly bundling together complex
socio-political relations. The ‘acts of neoliberalism’ outlined here feature
blurred edges and, moreover, the conditions of one phase cannot be under-
stood without situating debates in relation to a longer history. As a moving
target, neoliberalism requires IPE theorists to be attentive to the labyrinthine
forms of power in the global economy. Only through disentangling the rich
tapestry of neoliberalism can we grasp how it manifests itself across time and
space and how, despite crises and disturbances, it continues to find degrees of
resilience.

References
Bauer, P. 1981. Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Bedford, K., and S. Rai. 2010. Feminists Theorise International Political Economy:
The State of the Field. Signs 36 (1): 1–18.
Boas, T.C., and J. Gans-Morse. 2009. Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy
to Anti-Liberal Slogan. Studies in Comparative International Development 44 (2):
137–161.
Boltanski, L., and E. Chiapello. 2007. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.
Bonefeld, W. 2017. The Strong State and the Free Economy. London: Rowman &
Littlefield International.
Bourdieu, P. 2003. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2. London: Verso.
Brenner, N., J. Peck, and N. Theodore. 2010. Variegated Neoliberalization:
Geographies, Modalities, Pathways. Global Networks 10 (2): 182–222.
Cerny, P.G. 1997. Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of Political
Globalization. Government and Opposition 32 (2): 251–274.
———. 2008. Embedding Neoliberalism: The Evolution of a Hegemonic Paradigm.
The Journal of International Trade and Diplomacy 2 (1): 1–46.
———. 2016. In the Shadow of Ordoliberalism: The Paradox of Neoliberalism in
the 21st Century. European Review of International Studies 3 (1): 78–92.
Chodor, T. 2015. Neoliberal Hegemony and the Pink Tide in Latin America: Breaking
up with TINA? Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chomsky, N. 1998. Profit over people: Neoliberalism and the Global Order. New York:
Seven Stories Press.
Chwieroth, J.M. 2010. Capital Ideas: The IMF and the Rise of Financial Liberalization.
Princeton University Press: Princeton.
 Neoliberalism 131

Clarke, J. 2008. Living with/in and without Neo-Liberalism. Focaal – European

Journal of Anthropology 51: 135–147.
Cox, R.W. 1987. Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of
World History. Columbia: Columbia University Press.
Dardot, P., and C. Laval. 2013. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society.
London: Verso.
Dean, M. 2010. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage.
Duménil, G., and D. Lévy. 2011. The Crisis of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Eagleton-Pierce, M. 2013. Symbolic Power in the World Trade Organization. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
———. 2016. Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts. Abingdon: Routledge.
Elias, J. 2013. Davos Woman to the Rescue of Global Capitalism: Postfeminist
Politics and Competitiveness Promotion at the World Economic Forum.
International Political Sociology 7 (2): 152–169.
Erlanger, S. 2008. Sarkozy Stresses Global Financial Overhaul. New York Times,
September 25, 2008.
Fine, B., and A. Saad-Filho. 2017. Thirteen Things you Need to Know about
Neoliberalism. Critical Sociology 43: 4–5 685–706.
Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972–1977. London: Harvester Press.
———. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979.
Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fraser, N. 2009. Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History. New Left Review
56: 97–117.
Gallagher, K.P. 2008. Understanding Developing Country Resistance to the Doha
Round. Review of International Political Economy 15 (1): 62–85.
Gamble, A. 1979. The Free Economy and the Strong State. The Socialist Register 16:
1–25.
———. 1994. The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism.
Houndmills: Palgrave.
Gill, S. 1994. Knowledge, Politics, and Neo-Liberal Political Economy. In Political
Economy and the Changing Global Order, ed. Richard Stubbs and Geoffrey
R.D. Underhill. New York: St Martin’s Press.
———. 1995. Globalisation, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 24 (3): 399–423.
———. 1998. New Constitutionalism, Democratisation and Global Political
Economy. Pacifica Review: Peace, Security & Global Change 10 (1): 23–38.
Gill, S., and D. Law. 1989. Global Hegemony and the Structural Power of Capital.
International Studies Quarterly 36 (4): 475–499.
Griffin, P. 2009. Gendering the World Bank: Neoliberalism and the Gendered Foundations
of Global Governance. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harrison, G. 2004. The World Bank and Africa: The Construction of Governance States.
London: Routledge.
132 M. Eagleton-Pierce

Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Helleiner, E. 2014. The Status Quo Crisis: Global Financial Governance After the 2008
Meltdown. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hobson, J.M., and L. Seabrooke, eds. 2007. Everyday Politics of the World Economy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hoekman, B.M., and M.M. Kostecki. 2009. The Political Economy of the World
Trading System: The WTO and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hopewell, K. 2016. Breaking the WTO: How Emerging Powers Disrupted the Neoliberal
Project. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Jackson, B. 2010. At the Origins of Neo-liberalism: The Free Economy and the
Strong State, 1930–1947. The Historical Journal 53 (1): 129–151.
Jessop, B. 2002. The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Jones, S.D. 2012. Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal
Politics. Princeton University Press: Princeton.
Konings, M. 2009. Rethinking Neoliberalism and the Subprime Crisis: Beyond the
Re-Regulation Agenda. Competition and Change 13 (2): 108–127.
Krippner, G. 2011. Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Krueger, A.O. 1990. Government Failures in Development. Journal of Economic
Perspectives 4 (3): 9–23.
Krugman, P. 1995a. Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of
Diminished Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
———. 1995b. Dutch Tulips and Emerging Markets: Another Bubble Bursts.
Foreign Affairs, July–August 1995, 28–44.
Lal, D. 1983. The Poverty of ‘Development Economics’. London: Institute of Economic
Affairs.
Langley, P. 2008. The Everyday Life of Global Finance: Saving and Borrowing in Anglo-­
America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lippmann, W. 2009 [1937]. The Good Society. New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers.
Macartney, H. 2011. Variegated Neoliberalism: Convergent Divergence in EU Varieties
of Capitalism. Abingdon: Routledge.
Major, A. 2012. Neoliberalism and the New International Financial Architecture.
Review of International Political Economy 19 (4): 536–561.
Megginson, W.L. 2018. Privatization, State Capitalism, and State Ownership of
Business in the 21st Century. Hanover: Now Publishers Inc.
Megginson, W.L., and J.M. Netter. 2001. From State to Market: A Survey of
Empirical Studies on Privatization. Journal of Economic Literature 39 (2): 321–389.
Mirowski, P., and D. Plehwe, eds. 2009. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of
the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Morton, A.D. 2011. Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of
Uneven Development. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Overbeek, H., and B. van Apeldoorn, eds. 2012. Neoliberalism in Crisis. Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan.
 Neoliberalism 133

Panitch, L., and M. Konings, eds. 2008. American Empire and the Political Economy
of Global Finance. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Parker, D. 2009. The Official History of Privatisation: Volume I: The Formative Years
1970–1987. Abingdon: Routledge.
Peck, J. 2010. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peck, J., and A. Tickell. 2002. Neoliberalizing Space. Antipode 34 (3): 380–404.
Peck, J., N. Theodore, and N. Brenner. 2012. Neoliberalism Resurgent? Market Rule
After the Great Recession. The South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (2): 265–288.
Prügl, E. 2017. Neoliberalism with a Feminist Face: Crafting a New Hegemony at
the World Bank. Feminist Economics 23 (1): 30–53.
Roberts, A. 2015. The Political Economy of “Transnational Business Feminism”.
International Feminist Journal of Politics 17 (2): 209–231.
Rodrik, D. 2007. One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and
Economic Growth. Princeton University Press: Princeton.
Rupert, M.E. 1990. Producing Hegemony: State/Society Relations and the Politics
of Productivity in the United States. International Studies Quarterly 34 (4):
427–456.
———. 1995. Producing Hegemony: The Politics of Mass Production and American
Global Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Saad-Filho, A., and D. Johnston, eds. 2004. Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sen, A. 1999. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Serra, N., and J.E. Stiglitz, eds. 2008. The Washington Consensus Reconsidered: Towards
a New Global Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shields, S. 2012. The International Political Economy of Transition: Neoliberal Hegemony
and Eastern Central Europe. Abingdon: Routledge.
Soederberg, S. 2004. The Politics of the New International Financial Architecture:
Reimposing Neoliberal Domination in the Global South. London: Zed Books.
Stiglitz, J.E. 2008. The End of Neo-Liberalism? Project Syndicate, July 7.
Strange, S. 1988. States and Markets: An Introduction to International Political
Economy. London: Pinter.
———. 1996. The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Theorell-White, B. 2007. The International Financial Architecture and the Limits to
Neoliberal Hegemony. New Political Economy 12 (1): 19–41.
Toye, J. 1987. Dilemmas of Development: Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in
Development Theory and Policy. Oxford: Blackwell.
Van Der Pijl, K., and Y. Yurchenko. 2015. Neoliberal Entrenchment of North
Atlantic Capital: From Corporate Self-Regulation to State Capture. New Political
Economy 20 (4): 495–517.
Venugopal, R. 2015. Neoliberalism as Concept. Economy and Society 44 (2): 165–187.
Vogel, S.K. 1998. Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial
Countries. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
von Hayek, F.A. 2008 [1944]. The Road to Serfdom. Abingdon: Routledge.
134 M. Eagleton-Pierce

Wacquant, L. 2012. Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing

Neoliberalism. Social Anthropology 20 (1): 66–79.
Wade, R.H. 2003. What Strategies Are Viable for Developing Countries Today? The
World Trade Organization and the Shrinking of “Development Space”. Review of
International Political Economy 10 (4): 621–644.
———. 2004. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in
East Asian Industrialization. Princeton University Press: Princeton.
World Trade Organization. 2015. International Trade Statistics 2015. Geneva: World
Trade Organization.