Our last two meetings provided examples of competing perspectives on the nature and /causes of neoliberalism. It has gradually become clear that the concept or term is used to capture a wide array of processes that transform the nature of the state, the orientation of the subject in society, the proper ends of policy, and the operation of capitalism (&c.) in accordance with ideas of the market, competition, capital accumulation or economic freedom.

While those two meetings explored what might be called “ideas in action,” our next session turns to a more detailed exploration of institutional governance in the “neoliberal era.” Two broad perspectives can be drawn out of these materials. The first is that, contrary to ideological discourses and forms of critique which describe neoliberalism in terms of deregulation, state retreat and individual autonomy, the actual changes to policy, law and institutional practice over the last thirty years are best understood not only as a transformation of regulation but also paradoxically, as an intensification of disciplinary surveillance. On the other hand, there has been a growing strand of research that has put in question both the novelty of institutional practices associated with neoliberalism and, by corollary, whether they are properly thought of as “neoliberal” at all. Depending on your perspective on what is central and peripheral to the neoliberal concept, the changes of the last thirty years can seem either much more neoliberal than at first glance, or not neoliberal at all.

One of the most common characteristics attributed to neoliberal policy is a retreat of the welfare state. The premise is that a neoliberal emphasis on provision of goods through “the market” undermines or displaces the provision of goods by or through government. Discourses which frame these goods as “rights” to be guaranteed by the state would seem incompatible with the neoliberal frame. In his 2014 article, “The World Turned Upside Down? Neo-Liberalism, Socioeconomic Rights, and Hegemony” (2014) 27:01 Leiden Journal of International Law 11, Joe Wills addresses the compatibility of neoliberal orthodoxy with social and economic rights. His conclusion is that the hegemonic power of neoliberal discourse undermines even the progressive power of a counter-discourse like social and economic rights.

John Braithwaite’s Neoliberalism or Regulatory Capitalism, RegNet Occassional Paper ID 875789 (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 2005) [also appears as a chapter in his Regulatory Capitalism: How It Works, Ideas for Making It Work Better (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008)] argues that if neoliberalism is a project of deregulation and state retreat that, in short, it never happened. What has really happened over the last 30 years, he argues, is a significant increase both in regulation directly through state agents, and regulation of behaviour by corporate entities. Thus the best way to speak of our current age is as one of “Regulatory Capitalism.”

Finally, the paper by Laura Kipnis (“Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy, or Technologies of Governing?” (2008) 35:2 American Ethnologist 275) engages with dominant narratives about the rise of reporting, ranking, indicators, and performance-based governance in public policy and institutional management. The managers of commercial businesses (ideally?) face the threat that their fickle customers will depart for cheaper, higher quality or otherwise more attractive alternatives if they do not innovate, adapt, improve–thus their performance is disciplined indirectly by competition from competitors, and directly by price-demand response. Critiqued in anthropological studies of so-called “audit cultures”(see Strathern, below), many changes to public administration (some of it under the rubric of new public management) has been explicitly implemented as an attempt to reproduce institutional competition, price signalling or consumer sovereignty in the decision context of various once-public institutions. While these efforts have been inconsistently successful and had unforeseen consequences, Kipnis uses ethnographic work in Chinese public schools to interrogate the boundary between neoliberal governance reforms and the broader category of accountability mechanisms within bureaucratic, rule-bound contexts.

Additional Readings

1. Steven Vogel, Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Countries (Ithaca  N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).
2. David Singh Grewal & Jedediah Purdy, eds., Symposium on Law and Neoliberalism (2014) 77 Law & Contemp Probs .
3. Fleur Johns, “On Failing Forward: Neoliberal Legality in the Mekong River Basin” (2015) 48 Cornell Int 347.
4. Alasdair Roberts, The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the Architecture of Government (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
5. Marilyn Strathern, ed, Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy, European Association of Social Anthropologists (London New York: Routledge, 2000).
6. Bernard E Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011).
7. Andrew Lang, World Trade Law After Neoliberalism: Re-Imagining the Global Economic Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).