End of Neoliberalism?

Abstract This concluding chapter turns to the biggest crisis of world society since World War II and asks what role neoliberalism has played in it. Some have argued that the COVID-19 pandemic management’s priority to the protection of life, and the proactive role of the state in it, have ushered in the end of political neoliberalism. This chapter argues against this that authoritarianism, the original political form of neoliberalism, has had a remarkable revival in states’ public health management, consisting of a double strategy of lockdown and quasi-mandatory mass vaccination. Furthermore, among the long-term effects of the pandemic is the accelerated digitalization of social life, which has strengthened the Big Firm–Big State alliance that has marked real-existing neoliberalism from the beginning. Considering the authoritarian pandemic management and control-minded digitalization, one must conclude that freedom is the scarce good of the future, ironically the good that neoliberalism had originally set out to recover.