Neoliberalism’s intellectual history challenges the orthodox Marxist reading of it as a capitalist fix.

Evidence

There is now a fine set of intellectual histories of neoliberalism, including Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason; Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World (New York: Verso, 2014); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (New York: Verso, 2013); and Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Each of these works contributes to an appreciation of neoliberalism as emerging from several streams of dissident thought in the postwar period, eventually taking shape as a governing rationality that drew on and diverged from these waters. Each also contributes something distinctive to theorizing the novel powers and categories of neoliberal political regimes and subjectivities. Together, these studies implicitly contest a more orthodox Marxist view, exemplified by David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), that neoliberalism was a reformatting of capitalism in response to the falling rate of profit in the 1970s. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 444

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader reading of Foucault and the governmentality school; David Harvey’s falling-rate-of-profit thesis directly grounds the Marxist reading the reader is tracking. — connects to: History has overshadowed key neoliberal figures besides Friedman and Hayek. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 23
• SEED: Angle: the intellectual-history versus structuralist debate as a historiographical fork — how one explains neoliberalism’s rise determines what kind of resistance one imagines.