Whether neoliberalism is exiting the scene of history is a question posed anew with each economic and political convulsion; yet it remains some distance from persuasive resolution. Indeed, emphatic diagnostics of neoliberalism’s impending demise have accompanied its entire historical arc, even at the most unlikely of times—e.g., Eric Hobsbawm writing in 1998 that ‘the neo-liberal balloon is visibly deflating’.footnote1 Since the global financial crisis of 2008, such verdicts have proliferated and become louder, seizing upon, inter alia, the Great Recession, Brexit, Trump’s first presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic, the ‘geo-economic’ challenge of China’s rise, ‘Bidenomics’, climate disorder, the Ukraine war and, finally, Trump’s second coming with its attendant trade commotions and military aggressions.
Among noteworthy contributions—centred on the us case—David Kotz has argued in these pages that the neoliberal regime of accumulation has been mired in a structural crisis of stagnation since the 2008 crash, from which only the ‘construction of a new institutional regime’ can possibly effectuate a break.footnote2 Gary Gerstle, in his Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, depicts neoliberalism as a political order—that is, a ‘constellation of ideologies, policies and constituencies’—which eventually fractured along the rocky path leading from the 2008 crisis to the pandemic and the Capitol riots on 6 January 2021.footnote3 More recently, analysing the drivers and likely repercussions of Trump’s trade wars, Lee Jones has written of the ‘accelerating decay’ of the neoliberal order, as evidenced by the United States’s hollowed-out manufacturing base, weakened state capacity and fraying global hegemony.footnote4
On the opposite side of the argument, many interventions have emphasized persistence and adaptation. Colin Crouch and Philip Mirowski each published a memorable book in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, highlighting the neoliberal doctrine’s uncanny tendency to be recast as the very solution to the economic failings and financial disorders caused by the adoption of its precepts.footnote5 In a recent essay, Perry Anderson has observed that ‘the contemporary opponents of neoliberalism are still for the most part whistling in the dark’, as ‘little has changed in the underlying drivers and contradictions of the system it has created’.footnote6 Moreover, an impressive array of qualifiers have been put forward to characterize neoliberalism’s reinvention since 2008: ‘zombie’ neoliberalism (Jamie Peck), ‘authoritarian’ neoliberalism (Ian Bruff), ‘punitive’ neoliberalism (William Davies), ‘mutant’ neoliberalism (William Callison and Zachary Manfredi) and ‘militarized’ neoliberalism (Trissia Wijaya and Kanishka Jayasuriya).footnote7
What, then, are we to make of the present state of ‘the most successful political ideology in world history’?footnote8 The following pages will suggest that the pattern of accumulation—financialized, globalized, elite-driven—birthed by neoliberalism’s ascent in the late twentieth century endures and that it might not be as fragile or decrepit as some of its detractors think. At the same time, however, neoliberalism as a policy doctrine has, by this point, unravelled in the West. The economic precepts and intellectual thematics of neoliberalism have either been jettisoned or have survived only to be hybridized with their opposites, resulting in programmatic and discursive admixtures that are no longer obviously neoliberal (though nor are they Keynesian, laissez-faire, dirigiste or any other term within reach in the historical nomenclature). This process of doctrinal dissolution has come about because Western governing strata, faced with a series of destabilizing developments stretching from 2008 to the present, have taken it upon themselves to discard neoliberal principles and violate neoliberal norms, one after the other, in a succession of political moves aimed above all at preserving the established pattern of accumulation. The resultant loss in intellectual integrity suits dominant corporate and class interests well enough for the time being. Scholars may find the absence of a consistent policy paradigm difficult to accept; accumulators of capital have fewer qualms.
Any attempt to explore neoliberalism’s present-day condition must grapple with the concept’s fraught definitional boundaries. A rich academic literature in intellectual history has traced the genealogies of strands of neoliberal doctrine in early-twentieth-century Germany and Austria, together with their reformulations and transnational paths of diffusion up to the Reaganite and Thatcherite revolutions of the 1980s.footnote9 This is not the place to explore the particularities of neoliberalism’s ideational components, as elaborated in these accounts. Suffice it to say that they are many, spanning several realms from political philosophy (for example, a conception of human liberty rooted in market freedoms) to constitutional design (such as insulating central banking from the political arena), administrative science (regulating markets to ensure neutral competition and a ‘level playing field’), policy advocacy (privatizing state-owned assets or lowering trade barriers), class struggle (anti-unionism and welfare retrenchment), macro-economic phenomena (financialization, globalization) and micro-social subjectivities (as nourished by cultures of entrepreneurialism and consumerism). An important feature to emerge from this broad landscape is that—unlike more classical strands of liberalism, and contrary to popular perception—neoliberal doctrine has aimed less for a weakening or retreat of the state than for its repurposing as an effective guardian of market order, and that this has produced not so much deregulation as ‘reregulation’ of economic life, in conformity with its precepts.footnote10
The attributes constitutive of neoliberalism might be seen as relating to each other according to a Wittgensteinian logic of ‘family resemblance’: none of them, taken individually, is enough to ascertain neoliberalism’s instantiation; yet any combination of a large enough number of them in a particular social formation should make a claim for its existence there plausible. Undoubtedly, neoliberalism’s manifestations across time and place over the past half century have been uneven and variegated.footnote11 At the same time, this ‘family resemblance’ standard implies that, under a certain threshold, the presence of scattered surviving morsels of neoliberalism, failing to cohere into a recognizable whole, should not be confused with the thing itself. Neoliberalism may be ‘mutant’ by its very nature, and it is well to bear in mind that ‘mutants are new life forms seeking to survive a changing environment’.footnote12 Yet, extending the metaphor: as mutations accumulate, species change. It should also be said that neoliberalism is hardly coextensive with capitalism itself. The two operate on different temporal, spatial and ontological scales: capitalism is a mode of production extending over centuries and spanning the entire globe; neoliberalism, at most, denotes a ‘period’ of this mode of production, covering a handful of decades and only parts of the globe.footnote13
Having laid this conceptual groundwork, and for the purpose of exploring what is alive and what is dead in the neoliberalism of the present within the West, three core dimensions should be distinguished. These are, first, political discourses and ideologies; second, economic policies and interventions; and third, the macro-institutional arrangements shaping the broad patterns of capitalist accumulation. The following sections address these in turn.