neoliberalism — Bunk History

Jimmy Carter in the 1970s visiting a town in Brazil that commemorates Confederate expats.

Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024

As an individual, Jimmy Carter stood as a rebuke to our venal and heartless political class. As a politician, his private virtues proved to be public vices.

by Tim Barker via Origins of Our Time on January 1, 2025

A view of Wall Street and Federal Hall in the Financial District in New York City.

In the 1970s, the Left Put a Good Crisis to Waste

In "Counterrevolution," Melinda Cooper reads the 1970s economic crisis as an elite revolt rather than proof of the New Deal order’s unsustainability.

by Scott Aquanno, Stephen Maher via Jacobin on October 24, 2024

Scale with hundred-dollar bills weighing down one side.

Markets and the Law

Neoliberalism isn’t just a set of economic precepts—it’s also an architecture of laws passed to reinforce those precepts. Those laws must be changed.

by Amy Kapczynski via Democracy Journal on June 24, 2024

bags of money

Survival of the Wealthiest: Joseph E. Stiglitz on the Dangerous Failures of Neoliberalism

In which “the intellectual handmaidens of the capitalists” are taken to task.

by Joseph Stiglitz via Literary Hub on April 24, 2024

Tank on the street of Santiago, Chile.

How Pinochet's Chile Became a Laboratory for Neoliberalism

The Chicago Boys and the tragedy of the Chilean coup.

by Vincent Bevins via The Nation on November 14, 2023

Protesters and tenants facing displacement hold placards as they attend a rally against private equity-backed firm Greenbrook Partners in Brooklyn, New York on October 15, 2021.

Shared Terrain

The neoliberal order has been exposed as fraudulent, inefficient, and inequitable. Yet it hardly lies in the dustbin of history.

by Julia Ott via Dissent on September 19, 2023

Friedrich Hayek listens to the president of the Centro de Estudios Públicos in Chile, Jorge Cauas, speak in April 1981.

Neoliberal Economists Like Milton Friedman Cheered on Augusto Pinochet’s Dictatorship

Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman helped devise Pinochet's economic agenda and endorsed the brutal repression that was needed to force it through.

by Jessica Whyte via Jacobin on September 11, 2023

Axe chopping down columns

The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism

The free market used to be touted as the cure for all our problems; now it’s taken to be the cause of them.

by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on July 17, 2023

Bill Clinton in the background, another man in the foreground.

What the 1990s Did to America

The Law and Economics movement was one front in the decades-long advance of a revived free-market ideology that became the new American consensus.

by Henry M. J. Tonks via Public Books on May 17, 2023

Agosto Pinochet and Milton Friedman edited to appear as two sides of the same coin.

When Milton Friedman Met Pinochet

Chicago economists had free rein in Chile. The country is still recovering.

by Patrick Iber via The New Republic on May 15, 2023

President Bill Clinton speaks about the North American Free Trade Agreement at a town hall meeting in 1993.

The Logic of Capitalist Accumulation Explains Neoliberalism

Gary Gerstle’s new book tackles important questions of the last century about democracy, economy, and war. But it fails to answer a basic question.

by Colin Gordon via Catalyst on February 6, 2023

Ronald Reagan pointing at a graph explaining his tax policy.

Inflation Opened the Door to American Neoliberalism

An excerpt from "The Hidden History of Neoliberalism."

by Thom Hartmann via HNN on September 11, 2022

Photo of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton laughing together.

Will Neoliberalism Ever End?

A new history shows how neoliberalism took power during a period of crisis, which leaves open the question of whether it can be forced out as a result of one.

by Steven Hahn via The Nation on August 22, 2022

A worker sits with his head in his hands on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 24, 2008, as the markets endured losses.

How The Neoliberal Order Triumphed — And Why It’s Now Crumbling

Historian Gary Gerstle lays out an era's policies and ideologies, and what undermined them.

by Mario Del Pero via Washington Post on May 6, 2022

Couple kissing at the opening of the Berlin Wall

Has Neoliberalism Really Come to an End?

A conversation with historian Gary Gerstle about understanding neoliberalism as a bipartisan worldview and how the political order it ushered in has crumbled.

by Gary Gerstle, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins via The Nation on April 13, 2022

"What difference would another world make?", Sam Pulitzer, 2021.

New Left Review

Who did neoliberalism?

by Erik Baker via n+1 on March 8, 2022

Milton Friedman poses with a sculpture of himself.

Colossus Wears Tweed

A number of recent books blame the rise of neoliberalism on economists. But the evidence suggests it is still capital that rules.

by Quinn Slobodian via Dissent on December 1, 2020

Black and white photo of people in formal clothing sitting in chairs

When Neoliberalism Hijacked Human Rights

Neoliberals refashioned the idea of freedom by tying it to the free market, and turning it into a weapon to be used against anticolonial projects worldwide.

by Jeanne Morefield via Jacobin on January 5, 2020

Neoliberalism’s World Order

Neoliberalism set out not to demolish the state, but to create an international order strong enough to override democracy in the service of private property.

by Adam Tooze via Dissent on July 1, 2018

The Market Police

In neoliberalism, state power is needed to enforce market relations, but the site of that power must be hidden from politics.

by J. W. Mason via Boston Review on June 1, 2018

Worlds Apart

How neoliberalism shapes the global economy and limits the power of democracies.

by Patrick Iber via The New Republic on April 23, 2018

The Uses and Abuses of 'Neoliberalism'

Does the term clarify or confuse our understanding of capitalism today?

by Daniel T. Rodgers via Dissent on December 13, 2017

Barack Obama and Shinzo Abe at the Lincoln Memorial.

Technocratic Vistas: The Long Con of Neoliberalism

How "liberal democracy" emerged from the wreckage of World War II and became the dominant ideology of our times.

by Jackson Lears via The Hedgehog Review on November 13, 2017

President Jimmy Carter seated at desk in Oval Office, hands steepled.

Jimmy Carter Held the Door Open for Neoliberalism

His unwillingness to take a radical stance forced him to respond to events by imposing austerity and doing little to strengthen labor.

by Sean T. Byrnes via Jacobin on December 29, 2024

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton giving a talk together at Queen's Univesity Belfast.

The Age of Class Dealignment

Over the course of decades, social democracy abandoned workers. Then workers abandoned social democracy.

by Bhaskar Sunkara via Jacobin on November 21, 2024

Advocates of student loan forgiveness protest outside the Supreme Court.

Reflections on the Geopolitical Roots of U.S. Student Loan Debt

The emergence of student loan debt in the late 1960s can be situated within a broader shift towards neoliberal governance.

by Britain Hopkins via Process: A Blog for American History on October 29, 2024

Senator J.D. Vance and Patrick Deneen at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Toward a Christian Postliberal Left

A truly Christian postliberalism would imagine and enact an alternative modernity with a different standard of progress.

by Eugene McCarraher via Commonweal on October 22, 2024

White settlers traveling west in Conestoga wagons.

America as Filibuster Society

American expansionism goes beyond territory.

by Nick Burns via American Affairs on August 20, 2024

Factory cloth samples.

Chinese Production, American Consumption

The convergence of economy and politics in the Sino-US relationship via Jonathan Chatwin’s “The Southern Tour” and Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson’s “Made in China.”

by Kate Merkel-Hess via Los Angeles Review of Books on July 28, 2024

Textile workers in Massachusetts Striking for Wages.

Forces of Labor: The Minimum Wage

The federal minimum wage has not risen in over 15 years. We analyze why.

by Esha Krishnaswamy via Historic.ly on July 26, 2024

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