Expansions, Variegations and Formations

Within human geography, the word 'neoliberalism' – a term that generally refers to a new political, economic and social arrangement emphasising market relations, minimal state responsibility or intervention and individual responsibility – seems to be on the tip of virtually everyone's tongue. From concerns centring on how neoliberalism shapes processes of policy revision and state reform to growing interest in neoliberalism's intersections with subject formation, the idea of 'neoliberalism' has captured the imagination of a discipline. Outside of geography, the social science and activist literatures have likewise seen neoliberalism replace earlier labels that referred to specific politicians or political projects (Larner 2009). Among activists, it was the Zapatistas' series of 'encounters' with neoliberalism in Chiapas, Mexico, beginning with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 that first placed the term in global circulation. 'Neoliberalism' has since become a means of identifying a seemingly ubiquitous set of market-oriented policies as being largely responsible for a wide range of social, political, ecological and economic problems.

This explosion of interest emerged in ways that were unforeseeable only a decade ago. Economic geographers were engaged in debates over globalisation, economic disparity, structural adjustment, growth poles and privatisation, while social geographers concerned themselves with homelessness, racism, gender, sexuality and subjectivities. However, none of these themes were linked together under the ostensibly all-encompassing banner of 'neoliberalism' as appears to be the case in contemporary human geography. The deployment of neoliberalism among activists and the academy is thus a very recent phenomenon. As Peck, Theodore and Brenner (2009) have noted, 'of the 2500 English-language articles in the social sciences that cite "neoliberalism" as a keyword, 86% were published after 1998'. So while, as we shall see, neoliberalism is hardly new, its recent expansion into a field of academic inquiry has been nothing short of meteoric. The domains in which analyses of neoliberalism are deployed have also expanded, proliferating across multiple contexts as academics are increasingly keen to investigate its relational connections and disruptions across space, and also to highlight its multiscalar (dis)continuities in examining how macrolevel discussions of global economic change connect with microlevel debates on subjectivities. Geographers are now examining the relationships between neoliberalism and a vast array of conceptual categories, including cities (Hackworth 2007; Leitner, Peck and Sheppard 2007), gender (Brown 2004; Oza 2006), citizenship (Ong 2006; Sparke 2006a), sexualities (Oswin 2007; Richardson 2005), labour (Aguiar and Herod 2006; Peck 2002), development (Hart 2002; Power 2003), migration (Lawson 1999; Mitchell 2004), nature (Bakker 2005; McCarthy and Prudham 2004), race (Haylett 2001; Roberts and Mahtani 2010), homelessness (Klodawsky 2009; May, Cloke and Johnsen 2005) and violence (Springer 2009; 2011; 2016) to name but a few.

I begin this chapter with an analysis of neoliberalism's expansions, both as an intellectual idea and in terms of its diffusion across various institutional frameworks and geographical settings. I trace the origins of the concept from its beginnings as a marginalised ideal seeking to remake laissez-faire economics in the face of Keynesian dominance through to its rise to prominence as the primary economic doctrine of our age. In the following section, I attend to the geographies of neoliberalism more thoroughly through an engagement with the variegations that this economic orthodoxy has encompassed in its unfolding. Here, I look to the contributions geographers have made to the literature in terms of recognising how neoliberalism is never a pure or finished project, but instead represents a dynamic, ongoing process. Existing political economic arrangements and institutional frameworks necessarily have implications for the uptake and unfolding of neoliberalism in various spatial settings, and, as such, to speak of neoliberalism in the sense of a singular idea is an abstraction. In line with the most recent thinking among geographers, I encourage readers to engage the concept of 'neoliberalisation' as more appropriate to geographical theorisations insofar that it recognises neoliberalism's hybridised and mutated forms as it travels around our world. In the third section I move on to consider neoliberalism's formations around three principal theorisations that have emerged in the literature: (1) neoliberalism-as-ideological hegemonic project; (2) neoliberalism-as-policy; and (3) neoliberalismas-governmentality. Here I provide an overview of each interpretation and point to some of the emerging contributions among geographers that hint at an overlap between neoliberalism's theoretical formations, an intellectual task that seems imperative to the struggle for social justice. Finally, in the conclusion, I summarise the key ideas presented in this chapter and suggest that while they open up important and necessary critiques of neoliberalism, vigilance to the larger imperatives of capitalism is still required to enable a possible future that refuses this particular transitory moment as a preordained 'end of history' (Fukuyama 1992).

EXPANSIONS: THE RISE OF NEOLIBERALISM

It was only over the course of a number of false starts and setbacks that neoliberalism as a fringe utopian idea (Peck 2008) was able to emerge as an orthodox doctrine that has coagulated as a divergent yet related series of neoliberalisations (Hart 2008; Ward and England 2007). The ideas and policies that are now standard practice in the contemporary neoliberal toolkit surely seemed incomprehensible sixty years ago as the dust settled in the aftermath of World War II. At that time the Global North was enamored with Keynesian economics, while the ideologies of the political right, owing to the Nazis, became completely anathema to the spirit of the time. This makes the contemporary dominance of neoliberalism all the more surprising. So what happened in the intervening years to allow neoliberalism to become the contemporary 'planetary vulgate'? (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001). Scholars like Duménil and Lévy (2004), George (1999) and Harvey (2005) have all sketched the unfolding of neoliberalism, while Peck (2008) has provided a detailed analysis of the 'prehistories' of 'protoneoliberalism'. The common theme among all of these accounts is an acceptance of a historical lineage to the development of neoliberalism, that it came from somewhere (thus implying a geography of neoliberalism), and that its trajectories were largely purposeful.

The roots of neoliberalism can be traced back to 'multiple beginnings, in a series of situated, sympathetic critiques of nineteenth-century laissez-faire' (Peck 2008: 3). A key starting point would be to look to the 'Colloque Walter Lippmann' of 1938, when a group of twenty-six prominent liberal thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Michael Polanyi, Louis Rougier, Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow met in Paris to discuss Lippmann's (1937/2005) book, The Good Society, with the aim of reinvigorating classical liberalism and its emphasis on individual economic freedoms. Participants discussed names for the new philosophy of liberalism they developed, including 'positive liberalism', but eventually agreed on 'neoliberalism', giving the term both a birthday and an address (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). The publication of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in 1944 was one of the first products of this meeting, establishing Hayek as the principal intellectual architect of the 'neoliberal counterrevolution', as the backlash against Keynesianism has subsequently become known. Hayek had a profound influence over neoliberalism's various apostles, including the Chicago School of Economics' most (in)famous intellectual, Milton Friedman, and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher.

An initial explanation for the contemporary 'triumph' of neoliberalism is that the original group of neoliberals bought and paid for their own regressive 'Great Transformation'. They intuitively understood that their ideas could, with time and relentless cultivation, have very material consequences (George 1999). Starting with the seeds planted in 1938, the guiding principles of neoliberal organising, networking and institutionalisation began to take shape. The 'Colloque Walter Lippmann' recognised that the political right lacked capable experts to proselytise their ideas, so they took it upon themselves to (re)build antisocialist science in order to develop an antisocialist filter in the knowledge-disseminating institutions of society. This objective was given life when many of the original Paris participants reconvened in Switzerland for the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947, the first of many neoliberal think tanks. From here, the group established a programme through which they would endeavour to construct an international network of institutes, foundations, research centres and journals to promote neoliberal knowledge (Plehwe and Walpen 2006). The success of this campaign was not simply its growing virility among intellectuals, but rather its achievements hinged on the geographic dispersion of neoliberal discourse across multiple spaces of institutional engagement, including academia, business, politics and media. Accordingly, neoliberal ideas became well positioned to penetrate the everyday spaces of people's lives.

All this neoliberal networking remained in a state of virtual hibernation vis-à-vis public policymaking until the 1970s, when a financial crisis hit and the door to neoliberal reform was blown open. Between 1973 and 1979 world oil prices rose dramatically, where the impact on the 'First World' was severe economic recession, the 'Second World' went into an economic tailspin that eventually led to its disappearance, and the 'Third World' fell into a 'debt crisis', giving rise to a condition of aid dependency that continues to this day. These disruptions marked the beginning of an economic paradigm shift away from Keynesianism and towards neoliberalism. Global North politicians, governments and citizens alike became increasingly disillusioned with the record of state involvement in social and economic life, leading to a growing acceptance of neoliberalism's primary proclamation: the most efficient economic regulator is to 'leave things to the market'. Among neoliberalism's defining, vanguard projects were Thatcherism in the United Kingdom and Reaganomics in the United States. Following this, more moderate forms of neoliberalism were 'rolled out' in traditionally social-democratic states such as Canada, New Zealand and Germany (Peck and Tickell 2002). But it was Chile's trauma that provided the model for what Klein (2007) refers to as the 'shock doctrine', where collective crises or disasters, whether naturally occurring or manufactured, are used to push through neoliberal policies at precisely the moment when societies are too disoriented to mount meaningful contestation. Pinochet's Chile is widely understood as the first state-level neoliberal experiment, when in 1973 on the 'other 9/11', the American government became embroiled in a coup that saw a despotic hand replace the country's elected socialist government (Challies and Murray 2008).

Following the Chilean experiment, 'shock' tactics became the principle means of delivery in neoliberalism's selective exportation from the Global North to the Global South. The growing debt crisis opened a window of opportunity for neoliberalism as neocolonial relationships of aid dependency were fostered though the auspices of US-influenced multilateral agencies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Loan dispersals and subsequent reschedulings hinged on conditionalities that subjected recipient countries to structural adjustment programmes, which reorganised their economies along neoliberal lines. Neoliberal economics were packaged, marketed and sold to the Global South as a series of nostrums that once implemented through the freeing of market forces, would supposedly lead to a prosperous future, where all of the world's peoples would come to live in a unified, harmonious 'global village'. Although neoliberalism's utopian promise was an empty one from its outset, powerful elites in various countries and from all political stripes were only too happy to oblige, as neoliberalism often opened up opportunities for well-connected government officials to informally control market and material rewards, thus allowing them to easily line their own pockets (Springer 2009).

A remarkable array of regulatory reforms came with each successive wave of neoliberalism's dispersal. Beyond seeking to deregulate markets, advance 'free' trade and promote unobstructed capital mobility, neoliberalism typically includes the following finer points: it seeks to impede all forms of public expenditure and collective initiative through the imposition of user fees and the privatisation of commonly held assets; to position individualism, competitiveness and economic self-sufficiency as incontestable virtues; to decrease or rescind all forms of social protections, welfare and transfer programmes while promoting minimalist taxation and negligible business regulation; to control inflation even at the expense of full employment; and to actively push marginalised peoples into a flexible labour market regime of low-wage employment, where labour relations are unencumbered by unionisation and collective bargaining (Peck 2001; Peck and Tickell 2002).

Yet, for all the ideological purity of free market rhetoric, and for all the seemingly pragmatic logic of neoclassical economics, 'the practice of neoliberal statecraft is inescapably, and profoundly, marked by compromise, calculation, and contradiction. There is no blueprint. There is not even a map' (Peck 2010). Although the underlying assumptions of neoliberalism and its naturalisation of market relations remain largely constant, neoliberalism in its 'actually existing' circumstances (Brenner and Theodore 2002) has nonetheless varied greatly in terms of its dosages among regions, states and cities, where and when it has been adopted. Far from a fait accompli, neoliberalism's ongoing implementation in various sites has been marked by a considerable amount of struggle, contradiction and compromise, which suggests that the meaning of neoliberalism as a paradigmatic construct must necessarily be called into question. It is to the variegations of neoliberalism then that I want to now turn our attention, precisely because the widespread use of neoliberalism as both an analytical construct and as an oppositional slogan has been accompanied by so much imprecision, confusion and controversy that, in effect, neoliberalism has become 'rascal concept' (Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2010a; Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2009).

VARIEGATIONS: FROM NEOLIBERALISM TO NEOLIBERALISATION

As neoliberalism expanded as a multifaceted theoretical abstraction among scholars, definitional consensus about what might actually be meant by the term has unsurprisingly waned. Neoliberalism has been criticised as suffering from promiscuity (involved with too many theoretical perspectives), omnipresence (treated as a universal or global phenomenon) and omnipotence (identified as the cause of a wide variety of social, political and economic changes) (Clarke 2008). Some commentators have been so deeply troubled by the 'larger conversation' that neoliberalism invokes, or so disillusioned by the potential explanatory power of the concept, that there now exists a willingness to proclaim neoliberalism a 'necessary illusion' (Castree 2006) or simply that 'there is no such thing' (Barnett 2005). These misgivings are centred on the contemporary pervasiveness of neoliberalism in academia and a concern that by constituting neoliberalism as a powerful, expansive and self-reproducing logic, we lend it the appearance of monolithic and beyond reproach. There is much to be gained from such critiques, as it is imperative to contest the neoliberalism-as-monolithism argument for failing to recognise space and time as open and always becoming (Springer 2015). Likewise, in focusing exclusively on an extraneously convened neoliberalism, we overlook the local geographies of existing political economic circumstances and institutional frameworks, where variability, internal constitution, societal influences and individual agency all play a role in (re)producing, circulating and facilitating neoliberalism.