The Discourse of Neoliberalism: An Anatomy of a Powerful Idea (Discourse, Power and Society) - Softcover

Springer, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178348652X ISBN 13: 9781783486526

Verlag: Rli, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Explores the internal workings of neoliberalism by dissecting the diverse interpretations that have been advanced in academia. Using a critical geographical approach the book arrives at a discursive understanding of neoliberalism by combining interpretations from political economy with poststructuralist thought.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Simon Springer is professor of human geography at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

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The Discourse of Neoliberalism

An Anatomy of a Powerful Idea

By Simon Springer

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2016 Simon Springer
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-652-6

CHAPTER 1

Expansions, Variegations and Formations

Within human geography, the word 'neoliberalism' – a term that generally refers to a new political, economic and social arrangement emphasising market relations, minimal state responsibility or intervention and individual responsibility – seems to be on the tip of virtually everyone's tongue. From concerns centring on how neoliberalism shapes processes of policy revision and state reform to growing interest in neoliberalism's intersections with subject formation, the idea of 'neoliberalism' has captured the imagination of a discipline. Outside of geography, the social science and activist literatures have likewise seen neoliberalism replace earlier labels that referred to specific politicians or political projects (Larner 2009). Among activists, it was the Zapatistas' series of 'encounters' with neoliberalism in Chiapas, Mexico, beginning with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 that first placed the term in global circulation. 'Neoliberalism' has since become a means of identifying a seemingly ubiquitous set of market-oriented policies as being largely responsible for a wide range of social, political, ecological and economic problems.

This explosion of interest emerged in ways that were unforeseeable only a decade ago. Economic geographers were engaged in debates over globalisation, economic disparity, structural adjustment, growth poles and privatisation, while social geographers concerned themselves with homelessness, racism, gender, sexuality and subjectivities. However, none of these themes were linked together under the ostensibly all-encompassing banner of 'neoliberalism' as appears to be the case in contemporary human geography. The deployment of neoliberalism among activists and the academy is thus a very recent phenomenon. As Peck, Theodore and Brenner (2009) have noted, 'of the 2500 English-language articles in the social sciences that cite "neoliberalism" as a keyword, 86% were published after 1998'. So while, as we shall see, neoliberalism is hardly new, its recent expansion into a field of academic inquiry has been nothing short of meteoric. The domains in which analyses of neoliberalism are deployed have also expanded, proliferating across multiple contexts as academics are increasingly keen to investigate its relational connections and disruptions across space, and also to highlight its multiscalar (dis)continuities in examining how macrolevel discussions of global economic change connect with microlevel debates on subjectivities. Geographers are now examining the relationships between neoliberalism and a vast array of conceptual categories, including cities (Hackworth 2007; Leitner, Peck and Sheppard 2007), gender (Brown 2004; Oza 2006), citizenship (Ong 2006; Sparke 2006a), sexualities (Oswin 2007; Richardson 2005), labour (Aguiar and Herod 2006; Peck 2002), development (Hart 2002; Power 2003), migration (Lawson 1999; Mitchell 2004), nature (Bakker 2005; McCarthy and Prudham 2004), race (Haylett 2001; Roberts and Mahtani 2010), homelessness (Klodawsky 2009; May, Cloke and Johnsen 2005) and violence (Springer 2009; 2011; 2016) to name but a few.

I begin this chapter with an analysis of neoliberalism's expansions, both as an intellectual idea and in terms of its diffusion across various institutional frameworks and geographical settings. I trace the origins of the concept from its beginnings as a marginalised ideal seeking to remake laissez-faire economics in the face of Keynesian dominance through to its rise to prominence as the primary economic doctrine of our age. In the following section, I attend to the geographies of neoliberalism more thoroughly through an engagement with the variegations that this economic orthodoxy has encompassed in its unfolding. Here, I look to the contributions geographers have made to the literature in terms of recognising how neoliberalism is never a pure or finished project, but instead represents a dynamic, ongoing process. Existing political economic arrangements and institutional frameworks necessarily have implications for the uptake and unfolding of neoliberalism in various spatial settings, and, as such, to speak of neoliberalism in the sense of a singular idea is an abstraction. In line with the most recent thinking among geographers, I encourage readers to engage the concept of 'neoliberalisation' as more appropriate to geographical theorisations insofar that it recognises neoliberalism's hybridised and mutated forms as it travels around our world. In the third section I move on to consider neoliberalism's formations around three principal theorisations that have emerged in the literature: (1) neoliberalism-as-ideological hegemonic project; (2) neoliberalism-as-policy; and (3) neoliberalismas-governmentality. Here I provide an overview of each interpretation and point to some of the emerging contributions among geographers that hint at an overlap between neoliberalism's theoretical formations, an intellectual task that seems imperative to the struggle for social justice. Finally, in the conclusion, I summarise the key ideas presented in this chapter and suggest that while they open up important and necessary critiques of neoliberalism, vigilance to the larger imperatives of capitalism is still required to enable a possible future that refuses this particular transitory moment as a preordained 'end of history' (Fukuyama 1992).

EXPANSIONS: THE RISE OF NEOLIBERALISM

It was only over the course of a number of false starts and setbacks that neoliberalism as a fringe utopian idea (Peck 2008) was able to emerge as an orthodox doctrine that has coagulated as a divergent yet related series of neoliberalisations (Hart 2008; Ward and England 2007). The ideas and policies that are now standard practice in the contemporary neoliberal toolkit surely seemed incomprehensible sixty years ago as the dust settled in the aftermath of World War II. At that time the Global North was enamored with Keynesian economics, while the ideologies of the political right, owing to the Nazis, became completely anathema to the spirit of the time. This makes the contemporary dominance of neoliberalism all the more surprising. So what happened in the intervening years to allow neoliberalism to become the contemporary 'planetary vulgate'? (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001). Scholars like Duménil and Lévy (2004), George (1999) and Harvey (2005) have all sketched the unfolding of neoliberalism, while Peck (2008) has provided a detailed analysis of the 'prehistories' of 'protoneoliberalism'. The common theme among all of these accounts is an acceptance of a historical lineage to the development of neoliberalism, that it came from somewhere (thus implying a geography of neoliberalism), and that its trajectories were largely purposeful.

The roots of neoliberalism can be traced back to 'multiple beginnings, in a series of situated, sympathetic critiques of nineteenth-century laissez-faire' (Peck 2008: 3). A key starting point would be to look to the 'Colloque Walter Lippmann' of 1938, when a group of twenty-six prominent liberal thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Michael Polanyi, Louis Rougier, Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow met in Paris to discuss Lippmann's (1937/2005) book, The Good Society, with the aim of reinvigorating classical liberalism and its emphasis on individual economic freedoms. Participants discussed names...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rli
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 178348652X
• ISBN 13: 9781783486526
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 156
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland