A History of Anti-Neoliberalism: US Developmentalism, and Neoliberalism Reconsidered 1970-2005

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

The period from the mid-1970s through the 1990s was critical in translating neoliberalism from a (often incoherent and internally differentiated) ideology and intellectual program into a policy agenda and system of governance. This session examines vital moments in the history of the US developmental state as it mutated away from the Cold War Military Keynesian state across this period. In highlighting areas of continuity, deviations from free market orthodoxy, and political conflict and compromise, this panel will explore the stakes and implications of translating neoliberal ideas into practice in the context of imperial decline. Taken together, these papers suggest a reappraisal of neoliberalism: asking whether it was ever entirely hegemonic, and tracing various strands of resistance to neoliberal policy and politics that emerged even as it became common sense ideologically. In another sense, these papers examine how efforts to challenge neoliberalism by vested interests shaped its articulation in practice and its eventual unraveling. While the academic left has been neoliberalism’s most vocal and visible ideological opponent, very different forces with significantly different interests shaped the struggle against it on the ground. These on the ground forces were more often successful than is presently acknowledged precisely because their success required a complete divorce of narrative from reality. We are reckoning with the effects of this divorce in our politics today.

Rohan Shah will discuss how planning, initially a broad attempt to reckon with limitations to postwar Keynesianism, spawned economic strategies which became incorporated into mainstream neoliberal policy by the 1980s and 1990s. Susannah Glickman, exploring a specific instance of this reappropriation, will examine the political economy of the defense industry and how they and various related industries (like semiconductors and the chemical industry) reacted with different degrees of success to the collapse of the institutions and political economy that sustained them; and how this led to the coherence of a defense-industrial anti-neoliberalism. Marc Aidinof will examine how the computerization of the welfare state in the rural South with the construction of Mississippi’s computer system to administer anti-poverty entitlements was a means both to sustain a racialized rural economic order under neoliberalism and resist it.

Recovering these histories can help work through the sometimes perplexing articulation of neoliberalism and anti-neoliberalism in our present. As a range of politicians embrace language that might be considered “anti-neoliberal” it becomes more vital to re-materialize our understanding of industrial strategy and neoliberalism in practice.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• A Left Depoliticization?: Wassily Leontief and the Initiative Committee for National Economic Planning in the 1970s - Rohan Shah, New York University

• A Defense-Industrial Anti-Neoliberalism (1985-2002) - Susannah Glickman

• Machines Against Progress? The Technological Development of Social Reproduction - Marc Aidinoff, Harvard

Chair

• John Kapusta, University of Rochester

Biographical Information

Susannah Glickman is an assistant professor at Stony Brook University.Her research and teaching focus on the history and political economy of
computation and information through the transformations in global American science that occurred at the end of the Cold War. Relatedly,
she is interested in how institutions deal with the category of the future, history, and the origins of the category “tech.” She has a background in mathematics and anthropology and works between the fields of science and technology studies and history,Her current book project examines the infrastructures which make ever-improving semiconductors and quantum technologies possible historically, with particular attention to how ideology and other kinds of narratives get
translated into policy and granular practices, and how reciprocally those material practices get translated back into ideology.

Rohan Shah is a historian of the 20th century United States from a global perspective, with a focus on political economy and the history of capitalism. His research and teaching interests include the history of economic thought, alternatives to capitalism, the globalization of neoliberalism, US foreign policy, and 20th century social and intellectual history. His current book project, tentatively titled Reluctant Globalists, is a multi-archival investigation of how American workers, citizens, businesses, and policymakers understood and managed accelerating globalization from 1971 to 1992. It explores the US’ fraught place in the emerging global neoliberal order, and traces the evolving relationship between domestic and international political economy and its implications for economic democracy and class power. His writing has appeared in Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Development and Humanitarianism and the Washington Post.

A historian of twentieth-century science, technology, and the state, Marc Aidinoff studies how the state knows the citizenry. By investigating government information technologies, his scholarship explains the transformation of the U.S. welfare state from a localized system of uneven entitlements to a national regime of extraction. Beginning with the aspirational promises and operational realities of information technologies, Aidinoff historicizes seemingly bedrock principles of U.S. public policy, including the liberal social contract, and charts the digitalization of American society.

Aidinoff’s current book project, Rebooting Liberalism: The Computerization of the Social Contract from 1974 to 2004, offers an alternative account of “neoliberalism” anchored in the realities of the late twentieth-century administrative county office where potential welfare recipients struggled to make themselves legible to computerized case management systems. Aidinoff traces the work of liberal policymakers who came to believe that they could make the welfare state popular with white voters by computerizing the mechanisms of governance to reprogram normative policy choices as technological problems. In the U.S. South, especially regions classified as the “internal colonies” of the United States, county bureaucrats, private-sector technicians, local organizers, and politicians, experimented with computerized mechanisms of governance and hardened a racialized social order. These heterogeneous actors did not simply shrink the state, as the dominant narrative of the rise of conservatism argues, but instead developed new paperless tools to discipline and networked mechanisms to punish private citizens, especially citizens of color. Rebooting Liberalism therefore shows how, at a technological level, the welfare state and the carceral state became entwined and unified operational systems.