I have intended a diary on the topic for ages. I usually don’t have much in the way of spare time at my disposal, and don’t have spare time now, but as a primer on neoliberalism strikes me as one of the more useful things we could manage on a Democratic/Democratic-leaning blog, I thought I’d make some attempt. A bit more about my motivation and some recommended reading can be found below the fold.
My motivation: I am convinced that an honest discussion of neoliberal theory might be of some use. Regrettably, that is often not what happens on blogs like ours (or Daily Kos or elsewhere) or on social media. Neoliberal and neoliberalism are often used as pejorative terms, and I have learned the hard way that it is best not to trust the intentions of those who bandy about these words. Basically, even though I am not a political economist by any stretch of the imagination, I have read some of the very basic scholarly work (both critical and favorable) about neoliberalism and found most conversations about it on this blog frustrating for the reasons I mentioned before. My scholarly knowledge may be minimal, but it is just enough to suss out that “neoliberalism” is badly misused to the point of being rendered meaningless.
Regrettably, too much “knowledge” about the topic seems to come from opinion pieces in the popular press (as much as I may like to glance at the Guardian, at the end of the day, an opinion piece is merely an opinion piece and no more), and too often those opinion pieces do little more than muddy the waters. So when I see yet another comment that is just patently stupid (e.g., Candidate X is just another neoliberal – which is slightly more sophisticated than poopy-head, I suppose), my inclination is to dismiss whatever is being said as being offered in bad faith.
Now to the good stuff: I think a good starting point is this paper by Thorsen and Lie. This is the non-paywall version available as a pdf file. Thorsen would shortly complete his doctoral thesis on neoliberalism, and this work provided some of the basis for his doctoral work, as I understand it (I have not read his doctoral thesis as of this time). This paper seems to get cited quite a bit if Google Scholar is any indication, and the references at the end of the paper should give anyone interested a running start if they wish to delve into the scholarly research on the topic. The service Thorsen provides is his effort to come up with a neutral definition for a term that has, for better or (more likely worse) become highly emotionally loaded. Maybe neoliberalism amounts to a loose set of theories and concepts that espouse how our governments and the markets are related, and presumably one in which there would be an increased transfer of power from government to the private sector, a shift from thinking and acting in terms of political processes to economic processes, and a shift from legislative power to power elsewhere (perhaps the judiciary essentially “legislating”?). I highly recommend this paper, as Thorsen appears to be asking the right questions and appears fairly skeptical of the critical literature on the phenomenon. In the process, Thorsen asks a valuable question: do we really live in a neoliberal era, or are such claims a bit overstated? I don’t think he offers an absolute answer, but he does suggest some healthy skepticism.
One of the better critical books on the topic is David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism. As the title suggests, it’s a quick read, and unlike a lot of academic writers, Harvey goes out of his way to be readable. Then again, David Harvey is a scholar who is perhaps as close to being the Carl Sagan of Das Kapital as any Marxist scholar might be (he actually posted a series of lectures on YouTube breaking down that complex tome into something more digestible). But I digress. You don’t have to be a Marxist to get something out of Harvey’s book, and as far as I’m concerned it might actually help if one is not. Thankfully, his intention appears to have been to write a scholarly book for a relatively broad audience. Keep in mind that he’s a Geographer by training, so his book is organized around a very geographic framework.
I’d start with Thorsen and Lie first, though, and then work backwards from there. Hopefully this particular diary is helpful to a few folks on this blog who have a genuine interest in the theory. I have a hunch that many of us have read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, and although her work serves as a semi-useful entry point, it is not the end of the journey if we are genuinely interested in knowing more.
