Comments on: Is Neoliberalism Dead?

By: Thomas Streeter

Thomas Streeter — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 18:44:10 +0000

One more thought: maybe it’s a safe generalization to say that neoliberalism has always had a kind of surface-level existence, something that’s seemed more coherent on the level of sweeping political rhetoric, but that has never really accounted for all of political economic action. The fact that Keynesiasm resurfaced as if whole-formed during the banking crisis — there was never any actual debate about it in the US, Bush and then Obama just dove in — suggest that Keynesianism never really disappeared, it just hid out in the bureaucratic corners of economic thinking, not in full view, but still there.

By: Thomas Streeter

Thomas Streeter — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:32:02 +0000

Thanks Terry. There’s always a question of when and how to totalize. It’s easy to say “it’s all a bunch of different things,” e.g., practices, ideologies, political movements, cultural trends, none of which can be reduced to the other. But part of the usefulness of the idea of neoliberalism — when it was, imho, useful — was that it allowed drawing connections across domains. The flip side of such a move is that it can quickly become reductive, which I fear is happening a little too often these days.

By: Terry

Terry — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 10:19:28 +0000

Tom
Thanks for the nice words at the bottom. In relation to your friend’s incident at a party, is it an either/or issue. is neoliberalism either the dominant ideology of global capitalism or it is dead? Could it be an element, but one of many, in the intellectual statum of a social formation?
Also, it strikes me that in the US, you tend to get an equation of “Everything People Loathe About the Republican Party” = neoliberalism = “Everything People Loathe About the Republican Party”. I’m not saying your wrong about the Republican Party, but a ,ot of it does not make sense to call it neoliberlaism. As an Australian spending a little bit of time in the US at Indiana U. in 2008, one of the things that struck me was the complete disinterest of the Bush Administration in the size of the budget deficit, to a degree that is inconceivable nowadays in Australia.
That is partly to do witht eh relative weighting of each currency, of course, but the US situation would have rankled with the German neoliberals that Foucault discusses, whose point of differentiation from the Keynesian/planners/social democrats ascendant in the rest of europe was precisely their commitment to sound finance. That has remained a constant in Germany since 1945, under both Christian Democrat and Social democrat governments, and has coexisted with a quite interventionist and regulatory state and a strong role for unions in corporate decision-making.
You would perhaps also be aware that The Economist has been repeatedly drawing attention to what it saw as the very un-neoliberal tendency in both the US and Britain to keep expanding the size of government in the economy over the course of the 2000s:
http://www.economist.com/node/15328727
Anyway, let’s talk further.