Neoliberalism

Abstract

Neoliberalism as a political economic philosophy emerged from a long history of over fifty years of debate within a transnational “thought collective” of scholars, think tank researchers, business and political leaders, and journalists most notably associated with the Mont Pèlerin Society (see Mirowski and Plehwe 2015 under Historical Works). Over time, their deliberations resulted in principles and associated policy instruments designed to produce and protect a stable global market. Key tenets of neoliberalism include an emphasis on competition, free trade, flexible labor, the reorganization of the state based on techno-managerial approaches to governance, the privatization of state enterprises, the legal protection of property rights, and the moral virtue of self-governance based in individual freedom and “choice.” These principles crystallized in the “free-market revolution” of the 1980s that followed the global macroeconomic crises of the late 1970s. Neoliberal doctrines were embraced and enshrined in Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s national policies and in “Washington Consensus” development strategies, which the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank introduced worldwide. The “triumph of global capitalism” after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991 further fueled the global circulation and influence of market fundamentalist principles, policies, and projects as well as the anthropological study of these transformations. The concept of neoliberalism has been ubiquitous in anthropological research for nearly thirty years. This bibliography, then, is necessarily selective, presenting only a sampling of work representing central approaches and key topics found in this literature. What is most evident, perhaps, across this vast body of work is the absence of a single definition of or referent for neoliberalism as well as a lack of consensus on what an “anthropology of neoliberalism” might entail. The term neoliberal often appears in anthropological work, not as an object of analysis, but rather as a label marking a historical period (i.e., the neoliberal era). As an object of study, neoliberalism can variously refer to an ideology, policy, or form of governance that elevates the role of the market in relation to the state in political economic processes and approaches to reform. The concept “neoliberalization” captures the dynamic and unfinished nature of neoliberal projects. Given controversies over the concept’s analytic value as well as conflicting ideological assessments of neoliberal reforms, some anthropologists avoid the concept altogether, using terms such as late capitalism or advanced capitalism in analyzing similar phenomena.