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This article presents a new account of the relationship between Michel Foucault's work and neoliberalism, aiming to show that the relationship is significantly more complicated than either Foucault's critics or defenders have appreciated in the recent controversy. On the one hand, I argue that Foucault's salutary response to some of Gary Becker's ideas in the lecture course from 1979 should be read together with the argument of Discipline and Punish. By means of this contextualization I show that Foucault's sympathetic response to Becker is limited to the domain of penal practices, specifically concerning the question of how to resist their rationality of normalization, and thus it involves no broader commitment to neoliberal economic theory or its political implications. On the other hand, however, I argue that there is a strategic allegiance between Foucault's work and the ascendance of the neoliberal rationality of governing, although it has nothing to do with his sympathetic engagement with Becker's work. Instead, I explain how Foucault's focus on the political stakes of subjectivity has helped to congeal, in the posthumous neoliberal context, a conception of politics that leaves out the topic of economic equality. To explain how Foucault's work has had this unintended yet lasting effect, I introduce the concept of topical exclusion. It designates a social mechanism of producing ignorance, which operates by directing attention instead of creating false consciousness. The strategic relationship between Foucault's work and neoliberalism today illustrates that this type of explanation is essential in the analysis of power relations. Thus, my account motivates the adoption of topical exclusion as a conceptual supplement that equips the Foucaultian framework to study cases in which relations of power harness, produce, and sustain ignorance, not knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent observers from the financial world have described the current status of the economy as "unhinged" and traversing "unchartered territory." These expressions reflect the unprecedented freeing of capitalism from established conventions, norms, practices, and regulations underway since the 1970s and the ascendence of neoliberalism; a process that is not captured by the allied concepts "unfettered" and financialization. Capitalism has been untethering itself from not just the regulations that curtailed action ("fettered" it) across the twentieth century, but also the established conventions, customs, and practices initially described by Marx in Capital I that guided action into the mid-twentieth century, such as acceptable debt levels and forms of financial manipulation. This essay suggests that we have entered a new phase of capitalism with crucial implications for the status of the state and its intervention in the economy and likelihood or not that the current capitalist hegemonic order can be maintained far into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author explores neoliberalism and the political ideology of liberal democracy. Topics discussed include the recorded deceleration of economic growth following the introduction of neoliberal policies, the acknowledgment of neoliberalism by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and the way the U.S. political system influenced the economic situation in the country.

Across Asia there has been a shift to the right in important democratic polities. This article argues that this conservative or authoritarian shift reflects the emergence of a new form of political regime that Nicos Poulantzas characterised as authoritarian statism. This article presents a theoretical framework - with illustrative case studies of Japan and Korea - to understand the emergence of a distinctive brand of Asian authoritarian statism. These new trajectories of political regimes reflect interconnected political and economic crises of conservative capitalist democracies. These crises are the result of the fracturing of modes and mechanisms of political incorporation due to the transnationalisation of capital. It is argued that the inability of current modes of state intervention or political incorporation to manage these economic and political crises or secure political legitimacy for political projects to deepen market reform has led to a "crisis of crisis management" and the further weakening of the Japanese and Korean states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the face of a failing economy, the left has to think more systemically and tell a different story [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article defines the key parameters of ‘state entrepreneurialism’ as a governance form that combines planning centrality and market instruments, and interprets how these two seemingly contradictory tendencies are made coherent in the political economic structures of post-reform China. Through examining urban regeneration programmes (in particular ‘three olds regeneration’, sanjiu gaizao), the development of suburban new towns and the reconstruction of the countryside, the article details institutional configurations that make the Chinese case different from a neoliberal growth machine. The contradiction of these tendencies gives room to urban residents and migrants to develop their agencies and their own spaces, and creates informalities in Chinese urban transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview is presented with Ted Howard, Co-Founder and President of the Democracy Collaborative. Topics discussed include development of ideas of community wealth building; role of politics in building community wealth building using economic and neoliberal policies; and protecting the rights of poor and disadvantaged people.

The article offers comments on the pamphlet "The Everyday Economy" by Rachel Reeves on Great Britain's political economy. It is a contribution to the debate on how Labour party can build on the success of its 2017 manifesto; problems of economy of wealth extraction rather than wealth creation; and analysis of social democratic consensus of the postwar year underpinned by neo-classical economics and neoliberalism.

There is a new wave of interest in the interplay between commerce and strategy, and ‘geoeconomics’ is again becoming a key concept in policy analysis. In the academia, however, since the emergence of the concept in the early 1990s, geoeconomic analysis has mostly been viewed through very critical lenses. Analysts have portrayed geoeconomics as simplified neorealism, as a neoliberal discourse, and as a securitisation project. This criticism of geoeconomics relies on an incomplete view of IR realism, as well as some oversimplifications of Luttwak, who introduced the term in 1990. This article underscores the relative property of Luttwak’s argument, in which economic means are gaining in importance in relation to military power, and countries are increasingly, but not always, turning to logic of conflict and geoeconomic policies. Luttwak also underscores the role of domestic politics and ideologies in determining whether a country engages in geoeconomic behaviour or not. The article suggests that strategic geoeconomic theory-building, inspired by but not limited to Luttwak, has much to contribute to our contemporary understanding of IR and geography, for example, in the analysis of strategy and the different power capabilities of states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by asking how have elites, who are more fragmented, transitory and precarious than ever, continued to do so well out of discredited, financialised capitalist democracy? One possible answer lies in what I term the new professional econocracy. As the article reveals, an increasing proportion of elite figures at the top of business and government now have educational and/or professional experiences of economics and related disciplines. On the one hand, this provides the basis of a shared professional discourse and accompanying set of norms, values and practices. This unites disparate and mobile elites. On the other hand, such knowledge enables these elites both to move across sectors and to game the economic and accounting systems that they have helped construct. Thus, elites reflexively adapt to, and benefit from, economic rules while also rigidly dictating them to those below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several recent episodes of massive student protests in countries in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, raise the question of whether we are witnessing to a new surge of student protests. This profile offers an interpretation of the socio-economic and political processes that have caused contentious reactions among students, paying special attention to changes in the major characteristics of the higher education sector. In last decades, governments of all colors have enacted laws promoting the outsourcing of personnel, the managerialization of governing bodies, and the introduction of tuition fees as well as cuts to public funding. These changes are inspired by a new paradigm, which promotes the ‘discipline of the market place, the power of the consumer and the engine of the competition.’ In this context, various forms of resistance and opposition can be observed. Here, we focus on three dimensions: (1) financing and autonomy of universities; (2) governance and managerialization; (3) precarization of labor conditions. The profile shows how recent protests in Chile and England are related to changes in the afore-mentioned dimensions. We conclude that the reappearance of students as political actors is related to the emergence of a range of distributional conflicts stemming from the implementation of the neoliberal agenda in the field of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Environmental protection is presumed to damper economic growth and media accounts of resource extraction often portray trade-offs between jobs and the environment. However, there is limited evidence that environmental protection universally costs jobs and heavily polluting industries provide few jobs in comparison to environmental impacts. Therefore, how has media discourse contributed to the taken-for-granted division between the economy and the environment? This paper uses the Keystone XL pipeline controversy as a case of the symbolical conflict between supporters of growth and conservation to explore the role of ideology and power in media discourse. I use frame analysis of newspaper articles to explore the representations of labor and the environment and how hegemonic ideology legitimizes resource extraction. My analysis reveals binary framing that constructed the pipeline as a political controversy over the trade-off between the environment and the economy, which made conflict between workers and environmentalists sensible, and silenced alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Politiques Sociales is the property of Service Social dans le Monde, asbl and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores a possible link between 'neo-democratic' states (the subject of a recent book by the author) and the underlying politico-economic ideology of our post-1989 world, neo-liberalism. Taking the United Kingdom and the United States as examples, it argues that the shift in our way of looking at the world that neo-liberalism represents involves a forsaking of many of the assumptions of the social democratic polity of the 20th century. However, this is not a leap into an unknown future so much as it is a return to a particular past. In the threatened transition to fully fledged neo-liberalism, 'neo-democracy' fulfils a useful role as mask that hides from us the great political, ethical and legal changes entailed in such a move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the re-emergence of populism in Poland. With an all but absent left, the anti-neoliberal position in Poland emerged from the right. The article explores the processes associated with this and critically evaluates the populist turn asking if this is a rejection of neoliberalism or whether recombinant populism is increasingly compatible with contemporary neoliberalism. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with post-communist transition, first through Shock Therapy, second through Europeanization, and more recently through the so-called global financial crisis, former dissidents have been co-opted into the reproduction of neoliberalism. In the absence of a more forceful left response in Poland, the population has proclaimed its outrage with the hardships of post-communism by discovering a captivating message from the populists. The emergence of populist social forces has become one of the mechanisms for the disenfranchised to make sense of the pressures of neoliberalization. Populism, nationalism and neoliberalism can happily co-exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's (EBRD's) place in the gendered political economy of Eastern Central Europe's post-communist transition. We document the gendered modalities surrounding the EBRD's policy strategies for post-communist transition, suggesting that they help to naturalise certain gendered constructions of neoliberal development and market-building. To elaborate these claims we show first, how the EBRD largely ignored gender until the ‘global financial crisis’ when it discovered gender mainstreaming by mobilising the Gender Action Plan (GAP); and then second, how the 2013 revision of the GAP, the Strategic Gender Initiative extended the EBRD's gender aware activities. Both policies illustrate how the EBRD's understanding and application of gender fit firmly within a neoliberal framework promoting transition as a form of modernisation where gender inequality is always posited as external to the market and reproduces uneven and exploitative social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we explore the evolution of neoliberal development theory and practice, its manifestations and impact on the political economy of the state, domestic classes, and the material conditions of populations in emerging economies. Specifically, the article focuses on the modes of resistance to the rollout of neoliberal development practice by citizens, civil society, and NGOs, and, in turn, the responses of international financial institutions such as the World Bank—a process that we argue has forced the reinvention and transformation of neoliberal development policy. Furthermore, we attempt to situate the evolution of neoliberal development policy and the changing modes of resistance to it within a theoretical framework that explains emergent class and material interests in the context of the increasing functionality of pro-market agendas to modes of accumulation that benefit discrete elite and class interests but which also generate substantial and ongoing contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article serves to introduce a number of recent changes in the practices and rationale of British industrial policy since 2008. I observe a shift towards a stronger role for the government and for agencies of industrial policy in the provision of industrial finance, and towards an increasingly discretionary and strategic approach to industrial policy intervention, both of which stand in tension with the neoliberal ‘coordinative discourse’ that continues to structure macroeconomic policy in the post-2008 context. I suggest that this tension is indicative of the emergence of two competing ‘crisis diagnoses’ in government after 2008; one reflecting the neoliberal coordinative discourse that structured economic policymaking prior to 2008, the other at odds with this neoliberal crisis diagnosis. I argue that constructivist analytical frameworks on crisis and political–economic change are insufficiently developed to accommodate these findings. I therefore reflect upon some conceptual and empirical implications that the findings raise for a constructivist analysis of economic policy in the post-2008 context in Britain, before concluding that a more contingent, contested and, crucially, incomplete process of re-alignment in the ideas that structure economic policymaking is underway in Britain than is generally acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neoliberalism died in the financial crisis of 2008. But it has risen from the grave. This uncanny persistence has coincided with an increased interest in gothic themes in the realms of popular culture and critical political economy. This paper presents a psychoanalytic diagnosis of this unsettling scenario. Gothic monsters are identified as symptoms of the Real of Capital as an abstract form of domination. Neoliberalism is then theorised as a form of obsessional neurosis, which evolves through its failed attempts to conceal the traumatic dimensions of the Real of Capital. This argument is illustrated through the strange case of the celebrity development economist Jeffrey Sachs, and his peculiar transformation from Dr Shock into Mr Aid. I conclude with some reflections on the nightmarish phenomenon of zombie neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do historically contingent political accounts help explain the growth in family income inequality in the United States? We use time-series regressions based on 60 years to detect such relationships by assessing interactive associations between the neoliberal departure coincident with Ronald Reagan’s election and the acceleration in inequality that began soon after Reagan took office. We find evidence for this and for a second contingent relationship: stronger unions could successfully resist policies that enhanced economic inequality only before Reagan’s presidency and before the neoliberal anti-union administrations from both parties that followed Reagan. Politically inspired reductions in union membership, and labor’s diminished political opportunities during and after Reagan’s presidency, meant unions no longer could slow the growth in U.S. inequality. Coefficients on these two historically contingent interactions remain significant after many additional determinants are held constant. These findings indicate that political determinants should not be neglected when researchers investigate the determinants of U.S. inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Indian economy suffered a balance of payment crisis in 1991, which provided the context for the rolling out of neoliberal policies, also referred to as the New Economic Policy in India. This paper examines the national and global causes and context of India's economic crisis and adoption of neoliberal policies. While grounding my analysis in historical-geographical materialism, I argue that India's economic crisis was a product of certain contingent conditions. I draw attention to India's pre-neoliberal economic regime and analyse how the earlier-established relationship between revenue generation and expenditure ran into trouble; what changes occurred in the organization and management of revenues and capital; nature of interventions of the state in the circulation of capital; changes in the physical aspects of circulation of commodities, together with foreign trade and the formation of the 'world market'; and the rise of the United States as the only global superpower. I conclude that India's economic crisis of 1990-91, and the neoliberal policies that followed, are products of contingent historical and geographical conditions. A teleological approach towards examining global capitalism and production of economic crisis often neglect such contingencies and provide a set of causalities that may, at best, be classified as incomplete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Berichte zur Wissenschafts-Geschichte is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Highlights: [•] Considers the global and surveillance as assemblages. [•] The global and surveillance together constitute a global surveillant assemblage. [•] Global surveillance functions to support neoliberal goals. [•] Global surveillance helps define the global as the natural scale of neoliberalism. [•] The global surveillant assemblage is necessarily incomplete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that South America’s ‘revolutionary’ left turn can be best explained by its assertion of state property over natural resource extraction. The recent history of the leftist movements in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador relates to the failures of the neoliberal reforms applied in the region decades before, hence the dismantling of core orthodox policies has been critical for them once in power. This has been possible through the expansion of state action in the economy, but mainly through the governance of hydrocarbon extraction and the control of subsoil rents. Resource extraction has been central to the political economy of Andean left-wing revolutionaries, responsible for many of their successes but also their impending challenges. This rearticulation of underground governance is linked to global transformations that give prominence to emerging economies and reinforces these countries’ position in the world economy as providers of primary commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In relating to the politico-economic concept of ‘creative industries’, the paper explores in what way the art field and its actors are discursively repositioned within ‘flexible cultural capitalism’. Through empirical material from the independent Austrian theatre scene, the paper, moreover, illustrates how the ‘culturpreneurial’ transformation of the field affects the specific artistic practices, forms of organizing and conduct. In this regard, it will be shown that the artists’ modes of conduct are, at least to some extent, precarious: due to their ascetic and disciplined self-concept, artists seem to contribute, in parts, to their own marginalization as well as to the strengthening of certain ‘neoliberal orders’ and ‘culturpreneurial subject ideals’ of flexible capitalism – even though they are actually keen to resist current governmental technologies like the promotion of competition and market-determined assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks at the state of higher education in India - in terms of policies and the trajectory that it has taken in the aftermath of neoliberalisation of the economy. Through studying the discourses that construct the edifice of the educational complex in the country, it unravels the dynamics of how economy, politics and education interact. Lastly, it explores the possibilities of countering the neoliberal offensive of capital and create a more egalitarian higher education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented that discusses the relation between debt and discipline in light of philosopher Michel Foucault's notions of governmentality, biopower, and assemblage, which denote instruments of normalization that are not necessarily legal. The author argues that legal changes were used in the U.S. in order to transition away from a Keynesian welfare approach to political economy toward a financialized market.

The author offers a commentary on Marion Maddox’s and Nicolas de Bremond d’Ars’s articles in this journal. He suggests that taking into account macro-level changes in political economy is the key to understanding many current debates in the sociology of religion. He situates the Maddox and de Bremond d’Ars texts in the context of contemporary scholarship on religion and economy and discusses whether a new political economy of religions is emerging with reference to a growing economic reasoning among religions, new forms of religion and Church–State relations. The author raises many questions on the nature of contemporary religious change and the specific role of global capitalism and neoliberalism. He also suggests that religions will both adapt to and take advantage of the new state of affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An exclusive focus on external forces risks the production of an overgeneralized account of a ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for the profusion of local variations that currently comprise the neoliberal project as a series of articulations with existing political economic circumstances. Although the international financial institutions initially promoted neoliberal economics in the global South, powerful elites were happy to oblige. Neoliberalism frequently reveals opportunities for well-connected officials to informally control market and material rewards, allowing them to line their own pockets. It is in this sense of the local appropriation of neoliberal ideas that scholars must go beyond conceiving of 'neoliberalism in general' as a singular and fully realized policy regime, ideological form, or regulatory framework, and work towards conceiving a plurality of 'actually existing neoliberalisms' with particular characteristics arising from mutable geohistorical outcomes embedded within national, regional, and local process of market-driven sociospatial transformation. What constitutes 'actually existing' neoliberalism in Cambodia as distinctly Cambodian is the ways in which the patronage system has allowed local elites to co-opt, transform, and (re)articulate neoliberal reforms through a framework which asset strips public resources, thereby increasing people's exposure to corruption, coercion, and violence. It is to such an 'articulation agenda' that I attend to here as, in seeking to provide a more nuanced reading to recent work on neoliberalism in Cambodia by outlining some of its salient characteristics, a more empirical basis to theorizations of 'articulated neoliberalism' is revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between democracy and capitalism since World War II. It examines the end of international post-war economic growth and rising inflation in the 1970s and comments on unemployment in the 1980s. The author also comments on economic neo-liberialism and financial liberalization, addressing the policies of U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. He reflects on public debt and private debt. Other topics discussed include principles of allocation, labor unions, and the global financial crisis of 2008, also called the "Great Recession."

Information on the Sixth Forum of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE) held in Amherst, Massachusetts from May 27-29, 2011 is presented. Professor Enfu Cheng notes that the recovery in capitalist countries is slow, though each of the major economies set policies against the capitalist crisis. Professor Shinjiro Hagiwara compares the Great Recession and the Great Depression. Michael Perelman realizes the relative growth of constant capital.

In the assessment and critique of ontology and epistemology, few have ventured into the often esoteric realm of economics. One of those few brave souls is Kym Thorne. The focus of his critique is centered on the policies and perspectives of neoliberal expression in economics, as well as its corollaries in public administration. His critical perspective provides a bridge from practice to theory. However, that bridge is not as long as it might have been. Thorne’s analysis provides only an entry into an even deeper critique of neoliberal monetarism, as well as its competing perspectives. This reflection will assess, with brevity, Thorne’s contribution to economic thought, describe its limitations, and extend the bridge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Este segundo artículo aborda la problemática económica, ideológica y política de América Latina luego del triunfo de la Revolución Cubana, cuyo victorioso ejemplo incentivó todas las formas de lucha en la región. Hitos en la evolución del subcontinente, tras la epopeya del Che, fueron las novedosas concepciones de la Unidad Popular de Allende y las consecuencias del triunfo sandinista, que evidenciaron los falsos postulados de la Alianza para el Progreso y pusieron en crisis la aparente fortaleza del fascismo-militar. Luego se analiza el fracaso neoliberal en Argentina y el nuevo ascenso popular ejemplificado en la Revolución Bolivariana así como en el proceso integrador del ALBA, cuyo primer peldaño se alcanzó con el anuncio del trascendental acuerdo entre Venezuela y Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]