Varieties of Neoliberalism in the Anglo-American World

Abstract

Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies. By Jonathan Swarts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. 293 pp., $70 hardback (ISBN-13: 978-1-4426-4646-9). The global financial crisis opened up an incredible amount of intellectual space to write about neoliberalism and to actually see those writings come out in print—in fact, it created a real hunger for explanations about what went wrong with the world. Such an opportunity, however, has meant that it can often be difficult, as an author, to be heard above the baying of other critics, let alone hope to influence debates about what exactly neoliberalism is, how it is manifested, who is driving it, and so on. While Constructing Neoliberalism does not offer a new understanding of neoliberalism per se—nor does it necessarily seek to do so (pp. 3–4)—it does represent a useful contribution to current academic debates through a close examination of the neoliberal transformations of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Consequently, it is worth reading by anyone interested in a detailed analysis of the transformations of these countries. It would be difficult to do justice to current debates on neoliberalism here, considering the space available. Suffice to say, Swarts’ book fits into existing work on the importance of ideas, discourses, and epistemological communities in our understanding of neoliberalism, although not from a Foucauldian perspective. He is very much concerned with “the social construction of political and economic change,” emphasizing that neoliberalism is “an ideational and discursive construction—what I shall call a ‘political-economic imaginary’” (p. 5). He explicitly draws on constructivist literature to make his case, meaning that Constructing Neoliberalism draws on and follows Mark Blyth's (2002) Great Transformations in its focus on “neoliberal” ideas and their constitutive influence (p. 12). Yet, …