What is Neoliberalism? Different Views on a Complex Subject

Seminar Readings:

Daniel Rodgers, The Uses and Abuses of Neoliberalism, Dissent (winter) 2018 (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/uses-and-abuses-neoliberalism-debate/

Wilson, Julie A., Neoliberalism (New York/London, 2018), pp. 1-18

Suthcliffe-Braithwaite, Florence, Davies, Davies, Alec, Jackson, Ben (eds.), The Neoliberal Age? Britain Since the 1970s (2021), Introduction (library online resources), pp. 1-29.

Lecture Powerpoint: lecture 1

Further Readings:

Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Keating, AnaLouise, Transformation Now! Towards a Postoppositional Politics of Change (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012).

Foucault, Michel, ‘So Is It Really Important to Think?’, in The Essential Foucault, ed. by Paul Rabinour and Niklas Rose (New York: The New Press, 1994).

Steger, Manfred/Roy, Ravi, Neoliberalism, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Cahill, Damien/Konings, Martijn, Neoliberalism, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), pp. 1-18.

 

Seminar Questions:

1. 'Neoliberalism is an based on and response to the changing material conditions of capitalism in the late twentieth century.' Discuss.
2. 'Neoliberalism is too complex to betaken seriously by historians.' Discuss.
3. What approaches have historians used to understand neoliberalism?
4. 'Neoliberalism' should be one, but not the only category used to understand Britain since the 1970s'. Discuss.
5. 'Neoliberalism is a form of governmental rationality in which human subjectivity has been transformed according to the idea of competition and entrepreneurialism'. Discuss.
6. Do you agree that in order to fight neoliberalism and formulate alternatives for future individual and collective life, we need to first be able to 'critique it"?
7. 'Anxiety in neoliberal culture stems from the fact that neoliberalism asks us to be in control of our individual choices in competition. But can individuals alone control their fate in a global, complex capitalist society, no matter how well they compete. Our lives, our well-being, our success, and even our citizenship are defined by impossibility.' Discuss.