Neoliberalism

For neoliberalism in international relations, see Liberal institutionalism.
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Neoliberalism[1] is both a political philosophy and a term used to signify the late-20th-century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism.[2][3][4][5][6][7] The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is often used pejoratively.[8][9] In scholarly use, the term is often left undefined or used to describe a multitude of phenomena.[10][11][12] However, it is primarily employed to delineate the societal transformation resulting from market-based reforms.[13]

Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy that originated among European liberal scholars during the 1930s. It emerged as a response to the perceived decline in popularity of classical liberalism, which was seen as giving way to a social liberal desire to control markets. This shift in thinking was shaped by the Great Depression and manifested in policies designed to counter the volatility of free markets.[14] One motivation for the development of policies designed to mitigate the volatility of capitalist free markets was a desire to avoid repeating the economic failures of the early 1930s, which have been attributed, in part, to the economic policy of classical liberalism. In the context of policymaking, the term neoliberalism is often used to describe a paradigm shift that followed the failure of the post-war consensus and neo-Keynesian economics to address the stagflation of the 1970s.[15][1] The collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War also facilitated the rise of neoliberalism in the United States and around the world.[16][17]

The term neoliberalism has become increasingly prevalent in recent decades.[18][19][20][21][22][23] It has been a significant factor in the proliferation of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them.[24][25] Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, consumer choice, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending. These policies are designed to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.[26][27][28][29][30] Additionally, the neoliberal project is oriented towards the establishment of institutions and is inherently political in nature, extending beyond mere economic considerations.[31][32][33][34]

The term is rarely used by proponents of free-market policies.[35] When the term entered into common academic use during the 1980s in association with Augusto Pinochet's economic reforms in Chile, it quickly acquired negative connotations and was employed principally by critics of market reform and laissez-faire capitalism. Scholars tended to associate it with the theories of economists working with the Mont Pelerin Society, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and James M. Buchanan, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Greenspan.[10][36][37] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism became established as common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused into the English-language study of political economy.[10] By 1994 the term entered global circulation and scholarship about it has grown over the last few decades.[19][20]

  1. ^ a b Vincent, Andrew (2009). Modern Political Ideologies. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 337. ISBN 978-1405154956 – via Google Books.
  2. ^ Peck, Jamie (2017). "Neoliberalism". International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology: 1–12. doi:10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0688. ISBN 978-0-470-65963-2.
  3. ^ Carlquist, Erik; Phelps, Joshua (2014). "Neoliberalism". Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. pp. 1231–1237. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_390. ISBN 978-1-4614-5582-0.
  4. ^ Morningstar, Natalie (2020). "Neoliberalism". The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology. doi:10.29164/20neolib.
  5. ^ Mudge, S. L. (2008). "What is neo-liberalism?". Socio-Economic Review. 6 (4): 703–731. doi:10.1093/ser/mwn016. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0012-4899-8.
  6. ^ Haymes, Vidal de Haymes & Miller (2015), p. 7.
  7. ^ Bloom, Peter (2017). The Ethics of Neoliberalism: The Business of Making Capitalism Moral. Routledge. pp. 3, 16. ISBN 978-1138667242.
  8. ^ Babb, Sarah; Kentikelenis, Alexander (2021). "Markets Everywhere: The Washington Consensus and the Sociology of Global Institutional Change". Annual Review of Sociology. 47 (47): 521–541. doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-090220-025543. ISSN 0360-0572. S2CID 235585418.
  9. ^ Mirowski & Plehwe (2009), p. 428: "[W]e have thus far neglected to "define" neoliberalism. This is because the premier point to be made about neoliberalism is that it cannot adequately be reduced to a set of Ten Commandments or six tenets or (N-1) key protagonists"
  10. ^ a b c Boas & Gans-Morse (2009).
  11. ^ (Springer, Birch & MacLeavy 2016, p. 1): "Neoliberalism is a slippery concept, meaning different things to different people. Scholars have examined the relationships between neoliberalism and a vast array of conceptual categories."}}
  12. ^ Rutar, Tibor (2023). "What is neoliberalism really? A global analysis of its real-world consequences for development, inequality, and democracy". Social Science Information. 62 (3): 295–322. doi:10.1177/05390184231202950.
  13. ^ Springer, Birch & MacLeavy (2016), p. 2.
  14. ^ Mirowski & Plehwe (2009), pp. 14–15.
  15. ^ Palley, Thomas I. (May 5, 2004). "From Keynesianism to Neoliberalism: Shifting Paradigms in Economics". Foreign Policy in Focus. Retrieved March 25, 2017.
  16. ^ Gerstle (2022), p. 10.
  17. ^ Bartel, Fritz (2022). The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press. pp. 5–6. ISBN 9780674976788.
  18. ^ Boas & Gans-Morse (2009): "Neoliberalism has rapidly become an academic catchphrase. From only a handful of mentions in the 1980s, use of the term has exploded during the past two decades, appearing in nearly 1,000 academic articles annually between 2002 and 2005. Neoliberalism is now a predominant concept in scholarly writing on development and political economy, far outpacing related terms such as monetarism, neoconservatism, the Washington Consensus, and even market reform."
  19. ^ a b Springer, Birch & MacLeavy (2016), p. 1: "Neoliberalism is easily one of the most powerful concepts to emerge within the social sciences in the last two decades, and the number of scholars who write about this dynamic and unfolding process of socio-spatial transformation is astonishing."
  20. ^ a b Wilson, Julie (2017). Neoliberalism. Routledge. p. 6. ISBN 978-1138654631. In recent decades, neoliberalism has become an important area of study across the humanities and social sciences.
  21. ^ Castree, Noel (2013). A Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford University Press. p. 339. ISBN 9780199599868 – via Google Books. 'Neoliberalism' is very much a critics' term: it is virtually never used by those whom the critics describe as neoliberals.
  22. ^ Stedman Jones (2014), p. 13; "Friedman and Hayek are identified as the original thinkers and Thatcher and Reagan as the archetypal politicians of Western neoliberalism. Neoliberalism here has a pejorative connotation".
  23. ^ Hartwich (2009), p. [page needed]; "People rarely call themselves 'neoliberal'." [verification needed]
  24. ^ Haas, Eric (2011). "The News Media and the Conservative Heritage Foundation". In Hill, Dave; Kumar, Ravi (eds.). Global Neoliberalism and Education and its Consequences. Routledge. pp. 172–175. ISBN 978-0415507110.
  25. ^ Hickel, Jason (2016). "Neoliberalism and the End of Democracy". In Springer, Simon; Birch, Kean; MacLeavy, Julie (eds.). The Handbook of Neoliberalism. Routledge. p. 144. ISBN 978-1138844001 – via Google Books. The Reagan/Bush and Thatcher/Major administrations eventually came to power on platforms that promised to enhance individual freedoms by liberating capitalism from the 'shackles' of the state – reducing taxes on the rich, cutting state spending, privatising utilities, deregulating financial markets, and curbing the power of unions. After Reagan and Thatcher, these policies were carried forward by putatively progressive "Third Way" administrations such as Clinton in the United States and Blair in the UK, thus sealing the new economic consensus across party lines.
  26. ^ Springer, Birch & MacLeavy (2016), p. 2; Boas & Gans-Morse (2009); Duménil & Lévy (2004), p. [page needed]; Arac (2013), pp. xvi–xvii.
  27. ^ Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003
  28. ^ "Neo-Liberal Ideas". World Health Organization. 2004. Archived from the original on August 6, 2004.
  29. ^ Jones, Parker & Bos (2005), p. 100; "Neoliberalism represents a set of ideas that caught on from the mid to late 1970s, and are famously associated with the economic policies introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States following their elections in 1979 and 1981. The 'neo' part of neoliberalism indicates that there is something new about it, suggesting that it is an updated version of older ideas about 'liberal economics' which has long argued that markets should be free from intervention by the state. In its simplest version, it reads: markets good, government bad."
  30. ^ Hathaway, Terry (2020). "Neoliberalism as Corporate Power". Competition & Change. 24 (3–4): 315–337. doi:10.1177/1024529420910382.
  31. ^ Slobodian, Quinn (2018). Globalists: The End of Empire and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0674979529. In fact, the foundational neoliberal insight is comparable to that of John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi: the market does not and cannot take care of itself. The core of twentieth-century neoliberal theorizing involves what they called the meta-economic or extra-economic conditions for safeguarding capitalism at the scale of the entire world. I show that the neoliberal project focused on designing institutions—not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy, to create a framework to contain often-irrational human behavior, and to reorder the world after empire as a space of competing states in which borders fulfill a necessary function.
  32. ^ Whyte, Jessica (2019). The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Verso Books. p. 8. ISBN 978-1-78663-311-8. What distinguished the neoliberals of the twentieth century from their nineteenth-century precursors, I argue, was not a narrow understanding of the human as homo economicus, but the belief that a functioning competitive market required an adequate moral and legal foundation.
  33. ^ Biebricher, Thomas (2018). The Political Theory of Neoliberalism. Stanford University Press. pp. 26–7. ISBN 9781503607835. What all neoliberals share is the problem of how to identify the factors indispensable to the maintenance of functioning markets, since the option of simply leaving them to themselves is no longer on the table ... What exactly it is that ensures the functioning of markets is a matter of continued dispute between different neoliberal thinkers and varieties of neoliberal thought ... [N]eoliberalism must be understood as a discourse in political economy that explicitly addresses the noneconomic preconditions of functioning markets and the interactive effects between markets and their surroundings ... [A]ddressing these questions obviously and inevitably leads into genuinely political territory, which is the reason I have argued that the neoliberal problematic is an inherently political problematic
  34. ^ Mirowski & Plehwe (2009), p. 436. "A primary ambition of the neoliberal project is to redefine the shape and functions of the state, not to destroy it ... they are inclined to explore new formats of techno-managerial governance that protect their ideal market from what they perceive as unwarranted political interference ... One should not confuse marketization of government functions with shrinking the state, however: if anything, bureaucracies become more unwieldy under neoliberal regimes. In practice, 'deregulation' cashes out as 're-regulation', only under a different set of ukases".
  35. ^ Rowden, Rick (July 6, 2016). "The IMF Confronts Its N-Word". Foreign Policy. Retrieved August 25, 2016.
  36. ^ Springer, Birch & MacLeavy (2016), p. 3.
  37. ^ Gerstle (2022), p. 73.