Against neoliberalism as a concept

Abstract

Neoliberalism is a slippery concept, neither intellectually precise nor political useful. It is used so widely, to mean such different things, that it becomes almost impossibly vague, while dissimilar international experiences of social change undermine the sweeping designation provided by most presentations of neoliberalism. The term is too often used as a catch-all category or as a category that catches selectively whatever a particular author chooses and disapproves. It is a word of the academic ‘left’, accepted neither by our opponents, the supposed neoliberals, nor in popular discourse, and its use perpetuates a self-referential world of our own. There is little new or liberal in the ideas or practices of ‘neoliberalism’. The term is politically unhelpful, little use in identifying strategic priorities. A tendency to reproduce a binary, which posits the state as good and market as bad, is particularly unhelpful.

Still Neoliberalism?

“…There had long been criticism, not least from those occupying free-market think tanks, that neoliberal was no more than a critics' term and empty slogan, commonly serving as a "leftist version of the secret handshake," with practically no currency outside of university seminar rooms and certain parts of the antiglobalization movement (Norton 2001: 65). In the aftermath of the 2008 crash, however, while the political class largely reverted to its default position of never uttering the word, in some of those university seminar rooms the concept of neoliberalism has come under renewed attack, including renewed proposals to outlaw its usage or at least to strictly rein in its zones of application (see Boas and Gans-Morse 2009;Flew 2014;Venugopal 2015;Dunn 2017;Rodgers 2018). For these critics, the concept of neoliberalism is variously too promiscuous and too "structural," a cover for all manner of slippages and political sins.…”

“…It makes economics the model of everything [including the] economization of democracy." Against the recurrent charge that the term neoliberal should not be used because neoliberals do not acknowledge or apply it to themselves (Dunn 2017;Rodgers 2018), there are at least two responses. First, there is a basic distinction to be made between analytical concepts and everyday language, or what are sometimes called folk concepts.…”

The Electronic Monitoring of Offenders in Context: From Policy to Political Logics

“…Such useful engagements with EM policy and politics consist mainly of micro-analyses of the transactions between local political actors and policy networks. The political conditions of EM policy are often subsumed under the "neoliberal" heading in ways that fail, at least in part, to capture continuity and change, constitutive tensions and unexpected alliances in politics (Dunn 2017;Rose 2017).…”

Social psychology and neoliberalism: A critical commentary on McDonald, Gough, Wearing, and Deville (2017)

“…Venugopal, (, p. 170) points to an “over‐stretched and ill‐defined signifier.” Neoliberalism can be deployed to mean a more or less coherent philosophy, ideology, common sense, political beliefs, economic policy, a rationality, discourse, institutions, and so on. Moreover, the concept is variously used in mutually contradictory ways, as, for example, it may signify both less and greater state intervention (Dunn, , p. 439–440). To our mind, a fundamental limitation is that neoliberalism is now predominantly used by those on the critical “left” and most often in a pejorative manner.…”