An Indigestible Meal: Understanding Post-Neoliberalism in Neoliberal Imes, or Understanding Neoliberalism in Post-neoliberal times?

• In Event: 366 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session II
  In Refereed Roundtable: B. Table 15. Theory II

Abstract

The academic use of the term “neoliberalism” has grown exponentially in the last decade, undergoing conceptual stretching and risking its potential to inform relevant sociological analysis. To redeem the concept’s theoretical currency, I review different approaches to neoliberalism, highlighting both its agentic and ideological dimensions. Combining social movement theory, Kuhnian epistemology, and Gramscian analysis, I characterize neoliberalism as a transnational movement of organic intellectuals that played a paramount role in organizing the actual hegemony of global capitalist elites. To accomplish this hegemonic work, neoliberals a) mobilized a transnational network-infrastructure against state-centered forms of national development, b) seized the political opportunities opened by the crisis tendency of postwar capitalism, and c) undertook and all-encompassing ideological project consisting in i) exploiting the emancipatory potential of the New Social Movements (second wave feminism in particular), ii) rendering capitalism indispensable for market efficiency (which discredited socialist alternatives that combined markets with diverse regimes of social property), and iii) promoting a restrictive version of democracy that undermined politics as expression of class conflict. The outcomes of this process of transnational mobilization and ideological contention was the formation of a new “common sense” that destabilized accepted notions of “leftness” and “rightness” as such. I touch upon the emergence of the European Third Ways and the diffusion of ECLAC neo-structuralism among the contemporary Latin American Left to exemplify the current ascendancy of neoliberalized political doxa. My analysis provides critical insights into what today conventional wisdom designates as a transition to a still incipient and undefined post-neoliberal era.

Author

• Gabriel Chouhy, University of Pittsburgh