Neoliberalism: Lunatics Take Over the Asylum
An investigation into the international movement to persuade us there’s just no money left to invest in health, schools, local government, roads or railways. Who master-minded the economic hokum that distorted reality so comprehensively we believe we’ve maxed the national credit card and we have no option but to live in a society without the morality to care for the needy? This is the side of the 1960s and 1970s we’ve never seen before, the crisis that led to the rule of international finance and ‘the twilight of sovereignty.’
Civil liberty is different from individual liberty. Philosophers have known this since at least the 17th Century. We explore the two fundamental fallacies of neoliberalism to show why neoliberal economics can only bring prosperity to the few, and is incapable of predicting financial crashes. Today in the USA those damaged by neoliberalism have been driven to elect an unhinged criminal...
The historiography of Neoliberalism is too vast even to summarise here. So let’s just map our route through it.
We started with Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck and Eric Sheppard (eds.), Contesting Neoliberalism (NY, 2007). Peck’s chapter with Adam Tickell, ‘Conceptualising Neoliberalism, thinking Thatcherism’ makes a useful starting point, and retells the usual story. In this version, neoliberalism was a bundle of economic theories that proved their worth in the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis. They were then spread through a network of intellectuals, working with so-called think tanks. You’ll come across many versions of this tale. See, for example, Steve Davies, ‘Think-tanks, policy formation and the “revival” of classical liberal economics’, The Review of Austrian Economics 33 (2020), pp. 465-79. Or Marie-Laure Salles Dejic, ‘Building an architecture for political influence’, in Christina Garsten and Adrienne Sörbom, Power, Policy and Profit: Corporate Engagement in Politics and Governance (Cheltenham, 2017) pp. 25-40.
We think it’s nonsense.
First, the closer we looked, the more obvious it became that neoliberalism has never worked as economic theory. It’s always been a species of rhetoric. Start with John D Bone, ‘The Neoliberal Phoenix: the big society of business as usual’, Sociological Research Online 17 (2012), pp. 2-11. David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Harvard 2015, and with new preface, 2017) takes this story back into the first half of the twentieth century.
[more to come]