What Is Neoliberalism Revisiting The Question

The term neoliberal has been in wide academic use for decades but only fairly recently entered the conversation—and quickly become controversial as a result. Back in 2019 Nader Elhefnawy took up this controversy in his book What is Neoliberalism? In this follow-up he revisits the question, offering a new consideration of the word's different meanings, especially how neoliberalism has restructured the world economy and the model of growth policymakers follow in regard to it; the economic record that has followed from it, from what it has meant for international development to what it has meant for the middle class; and how neoliberalism has shaped our thinking about the world, extending even to the idea of the future itself.

This ambitious work provides a history and critique of neoliberalism, both as a body of ideas and as a political practice. It is an original and compelling contribution to the neoliberalism debate.

From the rise of far-right regimes to the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent years have brought global upheaval as well as the sedimentation of longstanding social inequalities. Analyzing the complexities of the current political moment in different geographic regions, this book addresses the paradoxical persistence of neoliberal policies and practices, in order to ground the pursuit of a more just world. Engaging theories of decoloniality, racial capitalism, queer materialism, and social reproduction, this book demonstrates the centrality of sexual politics to neoliberalism, including both social relations and statecraft. Drawing on ethnographic case studies, the authors show that gender and sexuality may be the site for policies like those pertaining to sex trafficking, which bundle together economics and changes to the structure of the state. In other instances, sexual politics are crucial components of policies on issues ranging from the growth of financial services to migration. Tracing the role of sexual politics across different localities and through different political domains, this book delineates the paradoxical assemblage that makes up contemporary neoliberal hegemony. In addition to exploring contemporary social relations of neoliberal governance, exploitation, domination, and exclusion, the authors also consider gender and sexuality as forces that have shaped myriad forms of community-based activism and resistance, including local efforts to pursue new forms of social change. By tracing neoliberal paradoxes across global sites, the book delineates the multiple dimensions of economic and cultural restructuring that have characterized neoliberal regimes and emergent activist responses to them. This innovative analysis of the relationship between gender justice and political economy will appeal to: interdisciplinary scholars in social and cultural studies; legal and political theorists; and the wide range of readers who are concerned with contemporary questions of social justice.

Neoliberal economic reforms over the last four decades have altered the economic cartography of emerging market economies such as India, particularly in the context of international trade, investment and finance, and in terms of their effects on the real economy. This book examines the issues of financialization, investment climate and the impact of trade liberalization. By analysing these three features of neoliberal reform the book is unique, since it accommodates both a mainstream neoclassical approach and a non-mainstream political economy approach. The major questions answered by this book, cover three basic lines of enquiry pertaining to neoliberal reforms. They are (a) how financialization as a new process affects the real economic health of emerging market economies characterized by globalization; (b) how the changing form of international trade in the new regime impacts upon the informal economy, and employment and trade potential in the home country; and (c) how global investment has shaped the real economy in emerging countries like India. The book will be extremely useful for postgraduate students of international economics, particularly development economics and political economy, including researchers with a keen interest in India.

How free-market fundamentalists have shifted the focus of higher education to competition, metrics, consumer demand, and return on investment, and why we should change this. A new philosophy of higher education has taken hold in institutions around the world. Its supporters disavow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and argue that the only knowledge worth pursuing is that with more or less immediate market value. Every other kind of learning is downgraded, its budget cut. In Knowledge for Sale, Lawrence Busch challenges this market-driven approach. The rationale for the current thinking, Busch explains, comes from neoliberal economics, which calls for reorganizing society around the needs of the market. The market-influenced changes to higher education include shifting the cost of education from the state to the individual, turning education from a public good to a private good subject to consumer demand; redefining higher education as a search for the highest-paying job; and turning scholarly research into a competition based on metrics including number of citations and value of grants. Students, administrators, and scholars have begun to think of themselves as economic actors rather than seekers of knowledge. Arguing for active resistance to this takeover, Busch urges us to burst the neoliberal bubble, to imagine a future not dictated by the market, a future in which there is a more educated citizenry and in which the old dichotomies—market and state, nature and culture, and equality and liberty—break down. In this future, universities value learning and not training, scholarship grapples with society's most pressing problems rather than quick fixes for corporate interests, and democracy is enriched by its educated and engaged citizens.

Having unilaterally opened its borders to international competition and foreign investment in the mid-1980s, Mexico has become one of the world's leading proponents of economic liberalization. Nevertheless, as the recent uprising of native peoples in Chiapas has made clear, economic reforms are not universally welcomed. This book addresses the challenges brought about by the restructuring of the Mexican economy at a time when-multiple organizations of civil society are demanding a democratic political transition in a system that has been dominated by one party for nearly seventy years. The contributors identify the key social and political actors—both domestic and international—involved in promoting or resisting the new economic model and examine the role of the state in the restructuring process. They explore such questions as: In what ways is the state itself being reconstituted to accommodate the demand for change? How have Canada and the United States responded to the increased internationalization of their economies? What are the challenges and prospects for transnational grassroots networks and labor solidarity? Answers are provided by scholars from anthropology, economics, history, political science, and sociology, all of whom promote interdisciplinary approaches to the issues. Each chapter traces the structural transformations within the central social relationships in Mexican society during the last decade or so and anticipates future consequences of today's changes.

Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.

The worldwide spread of neoliberalism has transformed economies, polities, and societies everywhere. In conventional accounts, American and Western European economists, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, sold neoliberalism by popularizing their free-market ideas and radical criticisms of the state. Rather than focusing on the agency of a few prominent, conservative economists, Markets in the Name of Socialism reveals a dialogue among many economists on both sides of the Iron Curtain about democracy, socialism, and markets. These discussions led to the transformations of 1989 and, unintentionally, the rise of neoliberalism. This book takes a truly transnational look at economists' professional outlook over 100 years across the capitalist West and the socialist East. Clearly translating complicated economic ideas and neoliberal theories, it presents a significant reinterpretation of Cold War history, the fall of communism, and the rise of today's dominant economic ideology.