Neoliberal Turn Research Articles

To Reassemble Capitalism: Economic Sociology and its “Political Unconscious.” On “Political Economy after Neoliberalism” by Neil Fligstein and Steven Vogel

The article offers a commentary on the discussion of the article “Political Economy after Neoliberalism” by Fligstein and Vogel, published in the current issue of the Journal of Economic Sociology. The authors draw the attention of Russian-speaking readers to the fact that the work of American researchers not only problematizes the content of political debates in the United States, but also shapes the basic principles of economic and sociological analysis of various economic systems in their connection with regulation policies and public control. Arguments are given in favor of the fact that the article by Fligstein and Vogel is a kind of manifesto of new economic sociology, demonstrating its “political unconscious”-a number of axiomatic assumptions about the functioning of the capitalist political economy, arising from the research perspective of economic sociology and related disciplines. The structure of the argument proposed in the article includes an analysis of several theoretical and empirical directions: a discussion about the varieties of empirical models of capitalism and statements about the political nature of choice of the institutional architecture of economies, the ways of organizing relations between corporations and society, and the role of the state in the economy. The authors note that the so-called neoliberal turn in social and economic policy in recent years was partly based on the purely intellectual principle in mainstream economic theory that opposes states and markets. Studies in the field of economic sociology, history, and comparative political economy demonstrate the fallacy of this statement, offering a conceptual resource for rethinking modern capitalism.

Ejidos, Urbanization, and the Production of Inequality in Formerly Agricultural Lands, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1975–2020

The ejido is an institution of communal land tenure and governance administered by the Mexican government. This paper assesses the current visual appearance of landscapes and implicit land use in ejidal lands on the periphery of Guadalajara, Mexico, using Google Street View (GSV) images tagged for signs of urban distress. Distressed landscapes are associated with the temporal process of urban expansion—newer settlements tend to be more visibly impoverished. Concentrations of vulnerable housing are correlated with encroached-upon ejidal lands in a process that was underway by the 1970s, well before Mexico’s neoliberal turn. Ejidos on the urban periphery, created to support agricultural communities during Mexico’s radical period of agrarian reform, are now sites of urban sprawl and impoverishment. Nevertheless, these communities remain legally salient as federal entities with respect to the disposition of land. Their presence complicates the historical evolution of land use in the urban periphery in ways that do not fit into classical central place models. We conclude that the presence of ejidos is associated with rapid and chaotic urbanization by migrants and the loss of agricultural capacity in Guadalajara’s periphery.

Situating Right-Wing Populisms and Revisiting The Men and the Boys under the Neoliberal Turn

This exploratory article draws critical insights from Raewyn Connell’s The Men and the Boys (2000) to unpack the gendered nature of neoliberal rightwing populist governance in India and America. Connell’s prescient work targeted towards forging new theoretical inroads in masculinity studies research, on its conception, continues to provide a vital heuristic model to make better sense of the present condition. This article first situates right-wing populist governance in India and America within the rubric of global neoliberal capitalism. It then unpacks Narendra Modi and Donald Trump’s carefully calibrated populist imaging, drawing attention to the surrounding gendered discourses rooted in local and culturally idealized perceptions of hegemonic masculinity. Narendra Modi and Donald Trump’s public figuration falls in the “cult of strongman leader stereotype”, characterized by risk-taking translated into perceived virility. Social media and its affordances further prop up their perceived masculine public personas, while affectively inscribing traditional inscriptions of heteronormative masculinity, such as ideas of dominance, as aspirational. Through preliminary research, this article then considers the effects of political masculinities on adolescent masculinities. In conclusion, this article stresses the theoretical relevance of Connell’s important work twenty years later.

Neoliberal Colonial Capital and Participatory Action Research (PAR) in Terrains of Land/Forest-Based Resistance

British colonization initiated colonial capitalist dispossession of Adivasi-Dalit-Nontribal Forest Dwellers (ADNTFD) in India. Post-independence development continued this trend, accentuated by the neoliberal turn in the early 1990s orchestrated by the then Congress government and intensified by saffron (Hindu nationalist) authoritarian neoliberalism under the recently re-elected Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014 and 2019, leading the National Democratic Alliance regime. Neocolonial continuities and current neoliberal colonial capitalist dispossession and resistance in the forest belt, or India’s contemporary ‘land wars’, are dialectically linked to potential spaces for Participatory Action Research (PAR) with/in ADNTFD struggles. This paper explores the imbrications of the neoliberal agenda, land wars and PAR in India, and by extension, for similar contexts addressing the vicissitudes of neoliberal authoritarian capitalism in the neo-colonies.

Making Sense of Populist Nationalism

ABSTRACT One of the blind spots of political economy in its response to the financial crisis and its aftermath is the tendency to attribute contingency and rationality to long-run economic developments, but to attribute contingency and irrationality to political trends and developments. This reflects the continuing legacy of economism in the political economy tradition. Critical political economists anticipated the financial crisis but not the political responses to the crisis, including the resilience of neo-liberalism and the upsurge of populism and nationalism in many western democracies. The temptation to dismiss the economic policies of these new nationalists as economically irrational and superficial because they interfere with the logic and superior rationality of global capital is reminiscent of some of the political-economic analyses of the neo-liberal turn in the 1970s and 1980s. A critical political economy seeking to make sense of the variety of populist nationalist insurgencies needs to overcome the binary distinction between cultural and economic logics by accepting that there are different rationalities rather than a single homogenous economic rationality on one side and political and ideological irrationalities on the other.

Authoritarian populism and emancipatory politics in the rural United States

• The Democratic Party's neoliberal turn alienated its working-class base. • A white-washed version of “the rural” drives ethno-nationalist populism in the USA. • Historical and contemporary cases of multiracial unity deserve greater attention. • Internal colonialism is key to analyzing racial formation and urban/rural divides. • Uncertainty, when recognized as a shared problem, can build solidarity.

Health Workers on the Frontline Struggle for Health as a Social Common

Through the lens of health workers’ concerns, the article interrogates the impact of the neoliberal turn of the 1980s on the loss of the ideal and pursuit of health as a social common. It highlights the Great Recession as a confirmation of the failure of the neoliberal project but notes that this the project continues with even greater frenzy. Capturing the dynamics which inhibit the World Health Organization, it calls for mass mobilization to reclaim health as a social common.

Financialising the frontier: Harish City

Housing and settlement played a key role in the formation of an Israeli society and its territorial project. While earlier frontier settlement relied on the rural sector and on peripheral development towns, with the liberalisation and privatisation of the local economy it was incorporated in the nationwide suburbanisation process. Eventually, with the neoliberal turn, the state sought to redirect investors, entrepreneurs, developers, and families to frontier areas by creating a real estate market and thus financialising the national territorial enterprise. This paper focuses on Harish, a rapidly developing housing project on the border with the occupied Palestinian West-Bank (the Green-Line). Presenting the geopolitical and societal interests behind its development, as well as the transformations its planning processes went through, this paper shows how the state was able to financialise its frontier and to eventually domesticate its border area. Analysing the spatial characteristics of Harish, this paper explains how the built environment functioned both as the medium and outcome of the alliance between national interests and market economy, merging financial frontiers with economic ones.

The Neoliberal Turn: Libertarian Justice and Public Policy

Abstract In this paper I criticize a growing movement within public policy circles that self-identifies as neoliberal. The issue I take up here is the sense in which the neoliberal label signals a turn away from libertarian political philosophy. The are many import ant figures in this movement, but my focus here will be on Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center, not least because he has most prolifically written against libertarian political philosophy. Neoliberals oppose the idea that the rights that libertarianism claims people have are useful guides for making the world a freer place because they forestall too much governmental/democratic political action that they purport to be necessary for increasing freedom. Wilkinson mistakenly takes libertarianism to be a set of ideal public policies for achieving a perfectly free society. If it were, he would be right to turn away from it. But placing rights to freedom at the center of their theory of justice does not commit libertarians to an all-or-nothing approach to political change. Consequences and strategy matter – particularly in a non-ideal world – without abandoning the idea that each individual has a right to freedom. In mistaking libertarian moral claims as a set of policy prescriptions, Wilkinson complains that idealistic policy prescriptions not only fail to take account of how those who disagree will respond to such policies if implemented, but also thereby undermines the justice of those policies in the first instance. Wilkinson proposes that change in the direction of freedom must go through the proper channels of actually-existing democratic legitimacy. It as this stage that Wilkinson’s project comes into direct conflict with libertarianism. Whilst libertarianism is not committed to any particular method of creating a free society under non-ideal conditions, and therefore does not rule out democratic political activism as one among many means of doing that, it cannot be committed to the permanence of democratic political authority, and this is what Wilkinson’s neoliberalism demands above all else. It turns out that Foucault’s characterization of neoliberalism long ago is still accurate to Wilkinson’s own view: that neoliberalism is not about creating a society of free individuals, it is about designing the state apparatus in ways that are inspired by the workings of free society – it is about legitimizing the chains, not breaking them. Neoliberalism is not a pragmatic alternative to libertarianism, but rather a gross misapplication of it.

Whither Politics, Whither Memory?

The memory boom, a multifaceted process fundamentally consisting in the increasing presence of the past in the present, occurred in practice simultaneously with the ostensible (transnational) stabilization of a neoliberal consensus, itself a complex process informed by deregulation, privatization, the abandonment of the politics of redistribution and the erosion of social and economic rights. By drawing attention to the concurrent characters of the history of the memory boom and the history of neoliberalism, this contribution aims to push towards an engagement with the ways in which economic transformation and memory are intertwined. This should enable us to better understand the critical political and mnemonic juncture that we find ourselves at. The question arising is whether memory has in any way the necessary critical potentialities to underlie the pursuit and realization of a radically democratic present and future. Author’s noteI make a similar argument in an article titled “Towards a Disentanglement of the Links between the Memory Boom and the Neoliberal Turn”, forthcoming in the online journal “Intersections”. The two texts borrow from each other.

Neoliberalism, British Identity, and Brexit

This paper, taking Linda Colley's work on the formation of British identity in the eighteenth century as a starting point, argues that the essentials as she delineated them (of Britain as at once island nation, imperial metropole, trading and naval power, and Protestant society, and in all these antithetical to continental Europe), while considerably and sometimes awkwardly adapted, have endured down to the present. In considering this the focus is on how the neo-liberal (and neoconservative) turn of British politics in the Thatcher era and after reinforced a version of this conception of British identity, and its distinctness from Europe, with implications for economic and social attitudes, and plausibly factoring into the support for British exit from the European Union seen in the historic 2016 referendum.

Towards a Disentanglement of the Links between the Memory Boom and the Neoliberal Turn

The memory boom and the related emergence of cosmopolitan victimhood-centred memories, increasingly criticized for depoliticizing the past and thus contributing to the depoliticization of the present, have been simultaneous with the curtailment of the welfare state, the abandonment of the politics of redistribution, the erosion of social and economic rights, and the growth in social and economic inequalities. Yet if the latter are often being considered to be among the reasons leading to the current right-wing populist wave in Europe and elsewhere or at least are seen as entangled therewith, the relevance of the memory boom for these developments has not been properly interrogated.
 Against this background, this contribution makes a plea for a critical appreciation of the linkages between the memory boom and the global ascension of neoliberalism. It acknowledges the contemporaneity of the two phenomena, which have been fundamentally informing our present age, roughly since the end of the 1970s, and calls for a critical engagement with their interwoven character. In doing this, it argues that scholarship should pay particular attention to the relationship between past, present, and future that the neoliberal turn in its various shapes and guises implies, as well as to the regimes of temporality that underlie various instantiations of the memory boom. It ends by taking heed of recent theorizations in memory studies and by asking to what extent can they be used in order to have a better grasp of the critical juncture we are currently lying at and to contribute to a radical change of the political status quo. Thus, the article makes some preliminary steps towards disentangling the interconnections between the memory boom and the neoliberal turn, and aims to provide a blueprint for a substantial future research project that should look in depth at these entanglements.

From Depoliticisation to Dedemocratisation: Revisiting the Neoliberal Turn in Macroeconomics

ABSTRACT The last decades of the twentieth century saw a liberal turn in macroeconomic policy from government discretion towards policy rules and depoliticisation. Intellectually, this turn was inspired by the wave of the New Classical Macroeconomic (NCM) theory that emerged to eclipse Keynesianism in the 1970s. This paper revisits some of the central papers and models of NCM, including Kydland and Prescott’s 1977 ‘Time Inconsistency Model’, Sargent and Wallace’s 1976 ‘Policy-ineffectiveness proposition’ and the micro foundations of the Lucas-critique from 1976. Through an investigation of the political and economic context inspired by Ellen Meiksins Woods’ social history of political thought, this paper investigates the ideological tenets of the neoliberal turn in macroeconomics associated with NCM. In policy and scholarly debates, NCM has primarily been viewed as a critique of government intervention in the economy. This paper challenges this notion and stresses that NCM is not primarily a critique of government action, but rather a critique of the role of democracy and popular participation in governance. This rereading offers new insights into the relationship between neoclassical economics and neoliberal policy in the 1970s transition and casts new light on our general understanding of the relations between liberal political economy and democratic governance.

Democracy Against Labor Movement: Japan’s Anti-Labor Developmental State and Aftermaths

This paper investigates the labor-controlling orientation of the Japanese developmental state and its consequences today. Developmental state studies has given us a robust epistemological grid whereby we can make non-Western state formation intelligible. Yet, mainstream authors have tended to treat the working class as a mere appendage to state– business relations, relegating labor politics at the analysis of state– society relations. By using democratic Japan—a prime example of this sort of obfuscation—in combination with Marxian state theory, this paper outlines the difficulties, addresses them, and extends the scope of developmental state studies to labor. After identifying main tenets of the literature, the author constructs a theory of labor control as a stabilizer of relative state autonomy. The author applies this to Japanese labor movements since 1945 and interprets events and processes of labor oppression/regulation through which Japanese capitalism subsumed the working class under the aegis of the developmental state. Labor control, emerging out of an “exceptional state” (Poulantzas, 1974), evolved into a refined socio-relational system that insulated developmental goals from labor movements. This Japanese trajectory keenly mobilized big business and elite labor, which transformed labor control into a bilateral and then a tripartite league in defense of industrial policy and its deskilling/reskilling intervention. By the 1970s, this achieved the famous docility of Japanese labor. The historically constructed character of docile labor force was exploited once again when Japan made a neoliberal turn in its post-development phase.

Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in U.S. Public Policy. By Matt Guardino. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 328p. $99.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. - Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class. By Reece Peck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 308p. $99.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in U.S. Public Policy. By Matt Guardino. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 328p. $99.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. - Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class. By Reece Peck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 308p. $99.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.

EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGES FACING SWEDISH PHYSICAL EDUCATION TEACHING IN THE 2020s

Muitos países pelo mundo vivenciaram uma virada neoliberal que fortemente afetou seus sistemas educacionais. Na Suécia, por exemplo, o Estado de Bem-Estar social-democrata foi radicalmente transformado desde a década de 1990, tomando uma direção neoliberal. Numerosas reformas educacionais foram realizadas, sendo estas descritas como as mais extensas em 100 anos do ensino público. Essas mudanças também afetaram a disciplina Educação Física e Saúde (PEH). Há um crescente interesse acerca desse tema e a PEH se tornou uma das áreas mais exploradas da cultura de movimento sueca. Os objetivos deste artigo são indicar as pesquisas recentes, bem como identificar e formular possíveis mudanças educacionais que professores enfrentam hoje enquanto caminhamos em direção à década de 2020. As questões centrais são: o que caracteriza o ensino em PEH? O que os estudantes aprendem nessa matéria? Existe eficácia na avaliação da PEH sueca?

Between conflict and consensus: The Dutch depoliticized paradigm shift of the 1980s

How do deep economic crises reshuffle dominant policy frameworks? Institutionalist scholars such as Peter Hall, Mark Blyth, Vivien Schmidt and Colin Hay have focused particularly on the 1980s. The polarizing ascension of Thatcher and Reagan, characterized by a public battle of ideas, has become the prime example of a broader neoliberal turn. Based on this experience, it is common to assume that a shift in policy paradigm involves a politicized contest over ideas. The Dutch market-oriented reforms of the 1980s have long been described as a counterexample, representing an alternative, consensual trajectory of institutional change. As critics have pointed out, the problem with this account is that there is little evidence for an economic policy consensus in the 1980s. Based on the Dutch case, this paper proposes a third, depoliticized model of institutional change, where policy makers instigate a battle of ideas within the institutions, while politicians depoliticize the reforms in public debate.

A Queer Lack of Success. Discourses on Same-sex Love and Neoliberalism in the Hindi Novel Paṃkhvālī Nāv by Paṃkaj Biṣṭ

Abstract Paṃkhvālī nāv (The winged boat) is a Hindi novel by Paṃkaj Biṣṭ that appeared in installments in Haṃs (2007) and was published as a book in 2009. The protagonist is a homosexual man, and the novel, defined by the author as a “sensitive human tragedy” (Tehelka, 05/12/2012), constructs a highly heterocentered discourse on queerness. Set in India just before the neoliberal turn, the story discusses sexual citizenship not only with reference to Indian society, but also in a global context. In this article I analyze the text, problematizing the notion of gender and the emergence of a queer identity corresponding with the opening up of Indian economy to neoliberal capital. Politics of sexual identity in newly globalizing economies are linked to global discourses on HIV/AIDS prevention, sexual health, sexual rights, and reproductive health. Also the emergence of queer literature in India, and of khuś literature in the Hindi literary field, has to be investigated on the backdrop of global queer identity. Drawing on the ‘anti-social turn’ in Queer Studies, I propose an interpretation of queerness and failure as resistance to capitalism.

Accidents waiting to happen: news coverage of children’s health and safety in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s

This article builds on an ongoing investigation of social constructions of childhood during the neoliberal turn of the late 20th century, and attempts to historicise and contextualise the discursive change that participated in the making of a specific version of intensive parenting culture in Turkey. The research is based on a critical discourse analysis of the news coverage of children’s physical wellbeing in Hürriyet newspaper. It is argued that as these news articles gradually changed their answer to the question of who should be responsible for children’s wellbeing, the newspaper began to invest more time and resources on the twin images of the ‘intensive parent’ and the ‘vulnerable child’, and turned its gaze away from the social and the systemic, and consequently, away from certain groups of ‘less precious’ children.

Capitalism and Christian theology

AbstractChristian theologians who study capitalism with a critical lens have argued that capitalist economics is not just a matter of finance or politics but tends to shape people all the way to the core, including religious beliefs and practices. Different theological approaches not only differ in how they conceive of the relation of religion and capitalism, they also differ in their evaluations of capitalism itself. While some Christian theologians endorse capitalism, others offer critical reflections and propose alternative economic systems, rooted in Christian traditions and practices as well as in broad historical and cultural shifts. Challenges include questions about the neoliberal turn in economics, the role of corporations, economic deregulation, competition and community, the reality of scarcity, the development of financial capitalism, as well as the relation of religion and labor, and the location of agency.