Theorists explain neoliberalism’s cohesion through class interest, phases, or rhetoric.
Evidence
David Harvey propounds the Marxist position that it is straightforwardly a class project masked by various versions of “free market” rhetoric. For him, the ideas are far less significant than the brute function of serving the interests of finance capital and globalized elites in the redistribution of wealth upward. Michael Howard and James King proffer what they term an historical materialist reading, fairly similar to Harvey, one that “stresses the importance of the contradictions inherent in the institutions prevalent in the postwar era, and the crises these contradictions spawned in the 1970s.” Daniel Stedman Jones divides neoliberalism into three phases characterized by dominant political practices: the prehistory up to the first meeting of Mont Pèlerin, a second phase up to the ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher consisting of a monetarist critique of neo-Keynesianism, and a modern phase since the 1980s. Jamie Peck gives greater weight to ideas, suggesting that the fragmentation is real, but still offset by a shared commitment to an unattainable utopian notion of freedom. Nevertheless, he credits success in infiltrating the state as permitting wide latitude in divergent component theories: “Only with the capture of state power could immanent critique become rolling autocritique.” Peter-Wim Zuidhof suggests that the fragmentation is part of a conscious program of rhetoric to empty out any fixed referent for the term “market.” — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 121
Categorization
- XREF: Maps the rival explanatory frameworks (Harvey, Stedman Jones, Peck, Zuidhof) the reader is treating as a thought-collective literature. — connects to: Neoliberalism was both a class-power project and a coherent ideology. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 478; Scholars dispute whether ideas or class interest explain neoliberalism’s internal cohesion — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 121