Abstract
It is often asserted that neoliberalism is on the wane, with mainstream political parties and international agencies who had once so vociferously embraced it now appearing to break with consensus. Through an analysis of political rhetoric, public policies and social attitudes in the UK, this chapter seeks to determine whether neoliberalism is currently being diluted. Assuming that the strength of neoliberalism can be measured by the strength of corporate power, it suggests that the project, although on shaky ground, has shown itself to be eminently capable of evolving and adapting to changing circumstances to ensure its survival, no matter what the political hue of the government in power. Just as neoliberalism is itself a process, constantly being made and remade through the dialectical tension between theory and practice, its overthrow may ultimately be a long-term process requiring a favourable local and global, political and cultural, conjuncture.
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Notes
- 1.
Although, as we suggest below, we should not necessarily equate a rejection of free markets with a rejection of neoliberalism per se.
- 2.
Historically, neoliberal thought crystalised in the 1930s and 1940s as a research programme into the institutional conditions necessary to ensure the stability, efficiency and fairness of capitalism. This meant identifying the permanent legal and constitutional rules as well as the temporary governmental interventions most conducive to controlling inflation, enhancing competition and mitigating inequality. The third objective was quickly abandoned in the 1950s, since early neoliberals felt that the welfare states implemented by developed countries in the aftermath of the Second World War had widely overshot the comparatively modest social measures they had initially countenanced. The other two objectives, however, have remained the central pillars of neoliberal economic thinking and policy worldwide. In the field of competition policy, the second key objective, neoliberal thinkers originally favoured state intervention to curb market power but subsequently reversed this earlier position on the grounds that state intervention would actually entrench market power. The reason is that government regulators would be ‘captured’ (i.e. corrupted) by the dominant players within the industries they were supposed to oversee, thereby leaving market leaders free to consolidate their power. From this and other theoretical developments (e.g. Friedrich Hayek’s ‘dynamic’ alternative to the static model of perfect competition), neoliberals concluded that competition was actually at its most efficient when the market was left to its own devices, undisturbed by government interference. At the risk of oversimplification, one can argue that neoliberals issued a blank cheque for corporations to act as they please.
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Bell, E., Christoph, G. (2020). The Slow Retreat of Neoliberalism in Contemporary Britain?. In: Dawes, S., Lenormand, M. (eds) Neoliberalism in Context . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26017-0_2
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