Violent Neoliberalism explores the complex unfolding relationship between neoliberalism and violence. Employing a series of theoretical dialogues on development, discourse and dispossession Cambodia, this study sheds significant empirical light on the vicious implications of free market ideology and practice.
Neoliberalism has become a dirty word. In political discourse, it stigmatizes a political opponent as a market fundamentalist; in academia, the concept is also mainly wielded by its critics, while those who might be seen as actual neoliberals deny its very existence. Yet the term remains necessary for understanding the varieties of capitalism across space and time. Arguing that neoliberalism is widely misunderstood when reduced to a doctrine of markets and economics alone, this book shows that it has a political dimension that we can reconstruct and critique. Recognizing the heterogeneities within and between both neoliberal theory and practice, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism looks to distinguish between the two as well as to theorize their relationship. By examining the views of state, democracy, science, and politics in the work of six major figures—Eucken, Röpke, Rüstow, Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan—it offers the first comprehensive account of the varieties of neoliberal political thought. Ordoliberal perspectives, in particular, emerge in a new light. Turning from abstract to concrete, the book also interprets recent neoliberal reforms of the European Union to offer a diagnosis of contemporary capitalism more generally. The latest economic crises hardly brought the neoliberal era to an end. Instead, as Thomas Biebricher shows, we are witnessing an authoritarian liberalism whose reign has only just begun.
Why did Albania enjoy some of the most successful anti-corruption programs and institutions along with what appeared to be growing levels of corruption during the period 1998-2005? Looking at corruption through a post-structuralist discourse analysis perspective this book argues that the dominant corruption discourse in Albania served primarily to institute the neoliberal order rather than eliminate corruption. It did so in four interrelated ways. First, blaming every Albanian failure on corruption avoided a critical engagement with the existing neoliberal developmental model. Second, the dominant articulation of corruption as abuse of public office for private gain consigned it to the public sector, transforming neoliberal policies of privatisation and expanding markets into anticorruption measures. Third, international anticorruption campaigns reproduced an asymmetric relationship of dependency between Albania and the international institutions that monitored it by articulating corruption as internal to the Albanian condition. Finally, against corruption international and local actors could articulate a neoliberal order that was free of internal contradictions and fully compatible with democratization. As a rare example of post-structuralist discourse analysis of corruption this book can be useful for future research on discourses of corruption in other countries of the region and beyond.
This volume serves as a critical examination of the discourses at play in the higher education system and the ways in which these discourses underpin the transmission of neoliberal values in 21st century universities. Situated within a Critical Discourse Analysis-based framework, the book also draws upon other linguistic approaches, including corpus linguistics and appraisal analysis, to unpack the construction and development of the management style known as managerialism, emergent in the 1990s US and UK higher education systems, and the social dynamics and power relations embedded within the discourses at the heart of managerialism in today’s universities. Each chapter introduces a particular aspect of neoliberal discourse in higher education and uses these multiple linguistic approaches to analyze linguistic data in two case studies and demonstrate these principles at work. This multi-layered systematic linguistic framework allows for a nuanced exploration of neoliberal institutional discourse and its implications for academic labor, offering a critique of the managerial system in higher education but also a larger voice for alternative discursive narratives within the academic community. This important work is a key resource for students and scholars in applied linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, sociology, business and management studies, education, and cultural studies.
Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David Harvey, author of 'The New Imperialism' and 'The Condition of Postmodernity', here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. While Thatcher and Reagan are often cited as primary authors of this neoliberal turn, Harvey shows how a complex of forces, from Chile to China and from New York City to Mexico City, have also played their part. In addition he explores the continuities and contrasts between neoliberalism of the Clinton sort and the recent turn towards neoconservative imperialism of George W. Bush. Finally, through critical engagement with this history, Harvey constructs a framework not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
AcheraIou analyzes hybridity using a theoretical, empirical approach that reorients debates on métissage and the 'Third Space', arguing for the decolonization of postcolonialism. Hybridity is examined in the light of globalization, indicating how postcolonial discourse could become a counter-hegemonic ethics of resistance to global neoliberal doxa.
Against a background of the ongoing crisis of global capitalism and the fracturing of the neoliberal project, this book provides a detailed account of the ways in which language is profoundly imbricated in the neoliberalising of the fabric of social life. With chapters from a cast list of international scholars covering topics such as the commodification of education and language, unemployment, and the governmentality of the self, and discussion chapters from Monica Heller and Jackie Urla bringing the various strands together, the book ultimately helps us to understand how language is part of political economy and the everyday making and remaking of society and individuals. It provides both a theoretical framework and a significant methodological "tool-box" to critically detect, understand, and resist the impact of neoliberalism on everyday social spheres, particularly in relation to language. Presenting richly empirical studies that expand our understanding of how neoliberalism as a regime of truth and as a practice of governance performs within the terrain of language, this book is an essential resource for researchers and graduate students in English language, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and related areas.
This book investigates neoliberalism in education and explains how it is a complex phenomenon which takes on local characteristics in diverse geopolitical, economic and cultural settings, while retaining a core commitment in all its manifestations to market fundamentalism. Neoliberalism - that set of beliefs and practices which has become the economic orthodoxy of global preference since the 1980s - appears remarkably resilient despite the US financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent implementation of austerity in the massively indebted nations of the European Union. This book addresses the phenomenon of neoliberalism in education and focuses on school and higher education settings in Ireland, the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. Specifically, it addresses the role of language and semiosis in the reconfiguration of global educational practices along increasingly marketised lines. At the same time, the nature of the counter-hegemonic discourses also in circulation in these sectors is also considered. Collectively, the chapters in the book seek to shed light on the possibilities for resistance and the prospect of change from a variety of theoretical and (inter)cultural perspective. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal, Language and Intercultural Communication.
Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.
Understanding the various meanings given to human and citizenship rights in Argentina is an important task, particularly so given the nation's prominence in global discussions. An "exporter" of tactics, ideas, and experts, Argentina has become a site of innovation in the field of human rights. This book investigates two prominent Buenos Aires protest organizations—Memoria Activa and the BAUEN workers' cooperative—to consider how each has framed its demands within a language of rights. Fundamentally, this book is concerned with the complex interrelationship between the discourse of human rights and the neoliberal project. In exploring the way in which "rights talk" is used and adapted locally by various activist groups, the book looks at the mutually formative and contentious interactions between ideas of human rights, rights of citizenship, and the concrete and envisioned social relationships that form the basis for social activism in the wake of neoliberalism.