Brandon Absher demonstrates that the neoliberalization of higher education has led to a paradigm shift in contemporary philosophy in the United States. Neoliberal philosophy aims to produce human capital and profitable knowledge.
In The Rise of Neoliberal Philosophy: Human Capital, Profitable Knowledge, and the Love of Wisdom, Brandon Absher argues that the neoliberal transformation of higher education has resulted in a paradigm shift in philosophy in the United States, leading to the rise of neoliberal philosophy. Neoliberal philosophy seeks to attract investment by demonstrating that it can produce optimal return. Further, philosophers in the neoliberal paradigm internalize and reproduce the values of the prevailing social order in their work, reorienting philosophical desire toward the production of attractive commodities. The aim of philosophy in the neoliberal university, Absher shows, has become the production of human capital and profitable knowledge.
Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism’s multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones. Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism’s intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.
The fatal embrace of human rights and neoliberalism Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to “civilisation”. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects.
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.
In April 1947, a group of right-leaning intellectuals met in the Swiss Alps for a ten-day conference with the aim of establishing a permanent organization. Named “an army of fighters for freedom” by Friedrich Hayek, they would at times use “neoliberalism” as a description of the philosophy they were developing. Later, many of them would opt for "classical liberalism” or other monikers. Was their liberalism classical or was it new? All new creeds build on previous ones, but the intellectuals in question were involved in an explicit attempt to change liberalism and move beyond both past laissez-faire ideals and the social liberalism popular at the time. This book provides a contextual, historical understanding of the development of neoliberal ideas, by studying its evolution from the first socialist calculation debates in Red Vienna to the founding meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. The author examines key neoliberal conceptions of totalitarianism, market mechanisms and states, and presents a detailed study of the discussions during the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Offering a new perspective on the ideas that have influenced economics and politics since the 1970s, this study appeals to scholars interested in modern and political history, political theory and the history of economic thought. "What is neoliberalism? In search of an answer, Innset’s innovativeintellectual history takes us to a grand hotel overlooking Lake Geneva, and inside the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society. Our journey leaves us with a deeper understanding of the new form of liberalism that is the legacy of this closed society." Edward Nik-Khah, Professor of Economics, Roanoke College “Reinventing Liberalism will put an end to endless debates around whether neoliberalism exists or not. Ola Morris Innset clearly shows that it does and presents a definitive argument for what neoliberalism is. This book is a must read for all those who want to have a solid understanding of the ideology that is framing and increasingly visibly endangering our world....” Marie Laure Salles-Djelic, Sciences Po Paris
Neoliberalism is a doctrine that adopts a free market policy in a deregulated political framework. In recent years, neoliberalism has become increasingly prominent as a doctrine in Western society, and has been heavily discussed in both academia and the media. In The Origins of Neoliberalism, the joint effort of an economist and a philosopher offers a theoretical overview of both neoliberalism's genesis within economic theory and social studies as well as its development outside academia. Tracing the sources of neoliberalism within the history of economic thought, the book explores the differences between neoliberalism and classical liberalism. This book's aim is to make clear that neoliberalism is not a natural development of the old classical liberalism, but rather that it represents a dramatic alteration of its original nature and meaning. Also, it fights against the current idea according to which neoliberalism would coincide with the triumph of free market economy. In its use of both history of economics and philosophy, this book takes a highly original approach to the concept of neoliberalism. The analysis presented here will be of great interest to scholars and students of history of economics, political economy, and philosophy of social science.
George Louis Beer Prize Winner Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year “A groundbreaking contribution...Intellectual history at its best.” —Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again by the relentless change and social injustice that accompanied it. “Slobodian’s lucidly written intellectual history traces the ideas of a group of Western thinkers who sought to create, against a backdrop of anarchy, globally applicable economic rules. Their attempt, it turns out, succeeded all too well.” —Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg Opinion “Fascinating, innovative...Slobodian has underlined the profound conservatism of the first generation of neoliberals and their fundamental hostility to democracy.” —Adam Tooze, Dissent “The definitive history of neoliberalism as a political project.” —Boston Review
The financial and economic collapse that began in the United States in 2008 and spread to the rest of the world continues to burden the global economy. David Kotz, who was one of the few academic economists to predict it, argues that the ongoing economic crisis is not simply the aftermath of financial panic and an unusually severe recession but instead is a structural crisis of neoliberal, or free-market, capitalism. Consequently, continuing stagnation cannot be resolved by policy measures alone. It requires major institutional restructuring. "Kotz's book will reward careful study by everyone interested in the question of stages in the history of capitalism." --Edwin Dickens, Science & Society "Whereas others] suggest that the downfall of the postwar system in Europe and the United States is the result of the triumph of ideas, Kotz argues persuasively that it is actually the result of the exercise of power by those who benefit from the capitalist economic organization of society. The analysis and evidence he brings to bear in support of the role of power exercised by business and political leaders is a most valuable aspect of this book--one among many important contributions to our knowledge that makes it worthwhile." --Michael Meeropol, Challenge
This volume brings four of the various schools of institutional analysis together: rational choice, organisational, historical, and discursive institutionalism, to examine the rise of neoliberalism.