By William Davies
"A glowing, unique, and provocative research of neoliberalism... a particular account of the various, occasionally contradictory, conventions and justifications that lend authority to the extension of the spirit of competitiveness to all spheres of social life."
- Professor Bob Jessop, college of Lancaster
"In an international that turns out to lurch from one monetary concern to the following, this publication questions either the sovereignty of markets and the foundations of pageant and competitiveness that lie on the center of the neoliberal project."
- Professor Nicholas Gane, college of Warwick
seeing that its highbrow inception within the Thirties and its political emergence within the Nineteen Seventies, neo-liberalism has sought to disenchant politics by means of changing it with economics.
This agenda-setting textual content examines the efforts and screw ups of financial specialists to make executive and public existence amenable to size, and to re-model society and kingdom by way of pageant. particularly, it explores the sensible use of financial recommendations and conventions via policy-makers, politicians, regulators and judges and the way those practices are being tailored to the perceived failings of the neoliberal version.
by means of picking out aside the defining contradiction that arises from the conflation of economics and politics, this booklet asks: to what volume can economics offer executive legitimacy?
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Additional resources for The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition
Example text
Chapter 3 explores the Chicago Law and Economics movement, which transformed legal and regulatory understanding of competition, in ways that shaped reforms in the USA during the 1980s and in the European Commission from the 1990s onwards. Yet in doing so, it potentially undermines its own authority. Chapter 4 carries out a similar analysis of ‘national competitiveness’ agendas from the 1980s onwards. Nations, regions and cities are re-imagined as competitive actors – like firms – and the question of political decision making is posed as one of strategic navigation of economic uncertainty.
Disenchantment is never quite as successful as that. They borrow elements of the modern authority, which they are outwardly hostile to. The ‘political physics’ of economics adapts to co-exist with the ‘political metaphysics’ of modern political authority, and the normative presuppositions of the policy makers, lawyers, politicians and public actors who are the target of neoliberal rationalization. It follows from this that the economic rationalization of politics and the state is a necessarily heterogeneous, multi-faceted project.
The sense that it might, more importantly, be economically efficient was only taken up subsequently by the Chicago School (Bork, 1978). They are examples of what Mirowski has termed neoliberalism’s ‘anti-intellectual intellectuals’: experts who declare that stable consensus is impossible, but nevertheless assert their capacity to rule over the unstable dissensus that results. What they offer are evaluative techniques through which to quantify different options, rank different candidates, give scores to different agencies.