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Neoliberalism[1] is both a political philosophy and a term used to signify the late-20th-century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism.[2][3][4][5][6][7] The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is often used pejoratively.[8][9] In scholarly use, the term is often left undefined or used to describe a multitude of phenomena.[10][11][12] However, it is primarily employed to delineate the societal transformation resulting from market-based reforms.[13]
Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy that originated among European liberal scholars during the 1930s. It emerged as a response to the perceived decline in popularity of classical liberalism, which was seen as giving way to a social liberal desire to control markets. This shift in thinking was shaped by the Great Depression and manifested in policies designed to counter the volatility of free markets.[14] One motivation for the development of policies designed to mitigate the volatility of capitalist free markets was a desire to avoid repeating the economic failures of the early 1930s, which have been attributed, in part, to the economic policy of classical liberalism. In the context of policymaking, the term neoliberalism is often used to describe a paradigm shift that followed the failure of the post-war consensus and neo-Keynesian economics to address the stagflation of the 1970s.[15][1] The collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War also facilitated the rise of neoliberalism in the United States and around the world.[16][17][18]
The term neoliberalism has become increasingly prevalent in recent decades.[19][20][21][22][23][24] It has been a significant factor in the proliferation of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them.[25][26] Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, consumer choice, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending. These policies are designed to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.[27][28][29][30][31] Additionally, the neoliberal project is oriented towards the establishment of institutions and is inherently political in nature, extending beyond mere economic considerations.[32][33][34][35]
The term is rarely used by proponents of free-market policies.[36] When the term entered into common academic use during the 1980s in association with Augusto Pinochet's economic reforms in Chile, it quickly acquired negative connotations and was employed principally by critics of market reform and laissez-faire capitalism. Scholars tended to associate it with the theories of economists working with the Mont Pelerin Society, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and James M. Buchanan, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Greenspan.[10][37][38] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism became established as common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused into the English-language study of political economy.[10] By 1994 the term entered global circulation and scholarship about it has grown over the last few decades.[20][21]
Without the looming threat of a rival superpower, the last thirty years of global neoliberalism have witnessed a rapid shriveling of social programs that protect citizens from cyclical instability and financial crises and reduce the vast inequality of economic outcomes between those at the top and bottom of the income distribution.
In recent decades, neoliberalism has become an important area of study across the humanities and social sciences.
'Neoliberalism' is very much a critics' term: it is virtually never used by those whom the critics describe as neoliberals.
The Reagan/Bush and Thatcher/Major administrations eventually came to power on platforms that promised to enhance individual freedoms by liberating capitalism from the 'shackles' of the state – reducing taxes on the rich, cutting state spending, privatising utilities, deregulating financial markets, and curbing the power of unions. After Reagan and Thatcher, these policies were carried forward by putatively progressive "Third Way" administrations such as Clinton in the United States and Blair in the UK, thus sealing the new economic consensus across party lines.
In fact, the foundational neoliberal insight is comparable to that of John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi: the market does not and cannot take care of itself. The core of twentieth-century neoliberal theorizing involves what they called the meta-economic or extra-economic conditions for safeguarding capitalism at the scale of the entire world. I show that the neoliberal project focused on designing institutions—not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy, to create a framework to contain often-irrational human behavior, and to reorder the world after empire as a space of competing states in which borders fulfill a necessary function.
What distinguished the neoliberals of the twentieth century from their nineteenth-century precursors, I argue, was not a narrow understanding of the human as homo economicus, but the belief that a functioning competitive market required an adequate moral and legal foundation.
What all neoliberals share is the problem of how to identify the factors indispensable to the maintenance of functioning markets, since the option of simply leaving them to themselves is no longer on the table ... What exactly it is that ensures the functioning of markets is a matter of continued dispute between different neoliberal thinkers and varieties of neoliberal thought ... [N]eoliberalism must be understood as a discourse in political economy that explicitly addresses the noneconomic preconditions of functioning markets and the interactive effects between markets and their surroundings ... [A]ddressing these questions obviously and inevitably leads into genuinely political territory, which is the reason I have argued that the neoliberal problematic is an inherently political problematic