Neoliberalism Revisited

The term neoliberalism is widely used to name efforts to make market competition the basis of economic coordination, social distribution, and personal motivation. Over time the “neo” in the term has come to index the many ways in which neoliberalism keeps evolving into new hybrids of market rule. Their names now are as radically revisionist as they are varied: including “authoritarian neoliberalism,” “progressive neoliberalism,” “neocolonial neoliberalism,” “nationalist neoliberalism,” “zombie neoliberalism,” “nihilistic neoliberalism,” and “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.” While they share family resemblances as real‐world examples of actually existing neoliberalism, they are all also departures from the “one‐size fits all” market‐fundamentalism of famous neoliberal thinkers. Increasingly they are therefore seen as “mutant neoliberalisms” that have evolved situationally as remixes of free market ideology, with sometimes countervailing policy commitments and populist pronouncements provoked by socioeconomic crises caused by preceding periods of market rule. Studying such mutations therefore reveals how the successful failures of neoliberalism have led to repeated rounds of reform that are as provisional as they are relentlessly pro‐market. As a result, neoliberalism keeps coming back socially and politically as well as in scholarly debate, and for the same reasons it is in turn necessary to keep revisiting the questions of how and with what consequences.