Downloaded from https://doi.org/10.1017/S0145553200011561 Special Section: https://www.cambridge.org/core Chronologies and Complexities of Western Neoliberalism Val Marie Johnson . IP address: 170.106.33.14 Introduction , on 02 Oct 2021 at 11:49:15 What is that hedonistic world, that realm of pure political economy, ever kept in view by the adepts of Neo- liberalism when they attack us and cry triumphantly, “You will never get further nor do better!” This hedonistic world is that in which free competition will reign; . where every indi- , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at vidual will be conversant with his true interests . ; where everything will be carried on by genuinely free contract . [, by] a bargaining where neither violence, nor fraud, nor lies, nor ignorance, nor dependence . will come in to upset so delicate an operation: a world where the law of supply and demand will bring about the maximum of utility for both individual and society. Where is that world? Nowhere save in the inaccessible regions of abstract thought. (Charles Gide, “Has Co- operation Introduced a New Principle into Economics?”) As a recent call for papers on the history of neoliberalism points out, confu- sion with regard to its meaning and currency in part stems from the fact that its proponents and critics “too often naturalize” neoliberalism (H-Net 2010): https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms it is framed as inevitable or an all- purpose concept that ultimately defines nothing (ibid.; see also Rose 1996; Lemke 2002). The essays in this section seek to rectify this by looking carefully in various ways at the history of neo- Social Science History 35:3 (Fall 2011) DOI 10.1215/01455532-1273330 © 2011 by Social Science History Association . Downloaded from https://doi.org/10.1017/S0145553200011561 324 Social Science History liberalism and other forms of liberalism, thus denaturalizing the ideas and https://www.cambridge.org/core practices that they encompass in the present. In a testament to the perceived reach of neoliberal practice and thought, neoliberalism has in the last two decades been the subject of scholarly inves- tigations too diverse and extensive to summarize briefly, in fields includ- ing international relations (Overbeek 1993; Simon 1995; Wook Lee 2008), international development (Dello Buono and Bell Lara 2008; Mensah 2008), social geography and urban studies (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Harvey . IP address: 2005), environmental studies (Heynen et al. 2007), history (Thompson 2007; Hamilton 2009), sociopolitical theory (Barry et al. 1996; Lemke 2002; Brown 170.106.33.14 2003), and criminology and law (Hannah- Moffat and O’Malley 2007; Social Justice 2007). Bringing together the work of the political sociologists Stephanie Lee , on Mudge and John Krinsky and the urban sociologist Christopher Mele, this 02 Oct 2021 at 11:49:15 section highlights how neoliberalism can be fruitfully analyzed both through a broad comparative method of the sort Mudge deploys and through fine- grained case studies centered on the sort of more localized issues and scales found in Mele’s and Krinsky’s essays. Mudge’s 1945–2004 survey of politi- cal programs from 22 Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Devel- , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at opment (OECD) nations documents a shift to neoliberal emphases in these programs across Continental, Nordic, and Anglo- liberal countries with increasing uniformity from the 1970s on. Mele and Krinsky trace the devel- opment of neoliberal urban political economies back into the post–World War II histories of a small and a large US city, respectively. Mele scrutinizes industrial and postindustrial urban development in Chester, Pennsylvania, and Krinsky considers union participation in consecutive New York City governing regimes. We begin here by examining the complexities involved in the definition and chronology of different forms of liberalism, including neo- liberalism, and how these play out in scholarship and contemporary events. We then turn to an overview of the section essays and their contributions. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms Even a brief foray into historical and contemporary questions around neoliberalism reveals the recurring tensions and confusions surrounding it and other forms of liberalism. Neoliberalism is now commonly understood to be the intellectual child of neoclassical liberal economists working in the Ger- man and Austrian schools beginning in the 1930s and in connection with the (University of) Chicago school from the 1950s on. These economists’ advo- cacy of individual freedom, private property, and competitive markets as the . Downloaded from https://doi.org/10.1017/S0145553200011561 Introduction 325 ultimate values of government, and their critique of collectivism and state- led https://www.cambridge.org/core social organization,1 were marginal into the 1960s because social or welfare lib- eral ideas and tactics advocated by economists such as John Maynard Keynes held sway (assigning significant roles to state regulation of markets, public expenditure, and so on). At least as early as the 1970s, however, various fac- tors—including a series of local, national, and international capitalist crises— led to the gradual ascendance of previously marginalized neoclassical ideas (Cockett 1995; Harvey 2005; Foucault 2008; Mudge in this section). In their . IP address: emerging neoliberal forms, tactics to promote individual freedom and choice and critiques of welfare methods were informed by perceptions of the eco- 170.106.33.14 nomic and moral costs of socialized government (Rose 1996; Foucault 2008). In part through the national political leadership of figures such as Mar- garet Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Deng Xiaoping and the development of , on international organizations and agreements such as the World Trade Organi- 02 Oct 2021 at 11:49:15 zation and the North American Free Trade Agreement, from the late 1970s through the 1990s neoliberalism was forged globally into a new economic orthodoxy and majoritarian politics. By the first decade of the 2000s thinking and governing through tools conducive to the production of choice, compe- tition and profit (deregulation of markets, privatization of services, empha- , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at sis on individual responsibility, and so on) were well institutionalized in and beyond the formal economic realm (Stiglitz 2002; Brown 2003; Harvey 2005). In the context of the recent and ongoing global economic crisis, there has been much popular speculation about a shift in dominant thought and prac- tice away from neoliberalism and back toward a welfare liberal approach to defining and solving problems, including prominently those created by capi- talism. According to this speculation, in the face of the crisis, “We are [again] all Keynesians now” (Boston Globe 2008; see also Fox 2008; Meacham and Thomas 2009). History provides considerable material that inspires caution in the face of oversimplified chronologies of “rise and fall” and definitions of neolib- https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms eralism and its relations with other forms of liberalism. The Oxford Eng lish Dictionary entries for neo- liberal and neo- liberalism credit the first Eng lish- language use of these terms to an 1898 publication by the French econo- mist and economics historian Charles Gide. As in the epigraph above, Gide chided the Italian Maffeo Pantaleoni and other neoclassical economists in his era for their blind adherence to the abstract principles of competitive free market capitalism and for their rejection of “co- operative” principles. Downloaded from https://doi.org/10.1017/S0145553200011561 326 Social Science History He argued that the latter principles were “children” of liberty that might be https://www.cambridge.org/core used “to restore the free play of supply and demand” when it was disturbed and yet neoliberals treated them as a “poor relation” in the family of liberal political economy (Gide 1898: 491, 494). Gide (ibid.: 492) dubbed such thinkers “new Liberals” because, he argued, their adherence to these abstract principles (also espoused by clas- sical liberals) was motivated by “scientific” considerations rather than by “a narrow conservatism” or “the a priori desire to justify the existing economic . IP address: order.” Here we have an early version of the construction of economists as professional experts, detached from politics and economic interests, that 170.106.33.14 was essential to the eventual rise of both economists as technocratic political actors and neoliberalism as majoritarian politics (see Babb 2004; Mudge in this section).2 , on But Gide (1898: 491–92) underscored as well that there was much that 02 Oct 2021 at 11:49:15 was not new about neoliberal ideas in his era, when French economists were “accustomed for over half a century to hear the highest authorities in the political economy we call libérale declaring . that co- operation” was a delusional approach. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, conflict and interchange between advocates of ideas and tactics aspiring to a , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at “pure political economy” of competing individuals and those seeking more “co- operative” arrangements have been prominently associated with histori- cal developments from the Depression and the two world wars forward. Gide reminds us that these struggles were part of the history of Western liberal- ism, and of politics and economics more broadly, well before the twentieth century. His critique of the “inaccessible” and “hedonistic” qualities of neo- liberal “pure political economy” (in response to the neoliberal framing of cooperative economics as delusional) is also prescient of very recent analyses of how fantasy plays a key role in the workings of contemporary neoliberal- ism (Dean 2008, 2009). abandonment Newsweek In recent speculation about the of neoliberalism, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms proclaimed on its February 7, 2009, cover that “we are all socialists now” above an agitprop image of a red hand and a blue hand (Republican and Democrat) locked in embrace.