Neoliberalism: An LPE Reading List and Introduction Samuel Aber1 What is “neoliberalism”? What sorts of institutions and ways of thinking characterize the “neoliberal era”? How might law reflect commitments of neoliberalism in different domains—in, for example, employment discrimination, criminal law, international trade, or welfare reform? This introduction offers a broad overview of the concept and the scholarly approaches to studying and theorizing it. It is followed by a bibliography, which provides resources to help answer some of these questions. I. Fundamentals: Neoliberalism as “Deregulation” and “Reregulation” “Neoliberalism” is frequently criticized for being difficult to define, but it is a crucial concept for understanding fundamental changes in political economy and in law that began in the 1970s. As several scholars have pointed out, many of our most important concepts, like capitalism, democracy, efficiency, conservatism, liberty, and socialism, remain in wide use despite perpetual debates about their definitions. Clearly this does not mean that the words are analytically useless, and even less that they are empty signifiers. It only means that challenging and developing previous interpretations of these concepts is a necessary part of understanding them. In order to make sense of the vast literature on neoliberalism, which covers complex phenomena across wide swaths of history and geography, we’ll begin with three points of orientation: First, we should distinguish between earlier studies of neoliberalism and more recent literature because of a shift in how scholars characterize the basic character of neoliberal policy. As will be discussed in greater detail in this section, earlier literature tended to define neoliberalism as a project of deregulation, or to use Jamie Peck’s formulation, of “roll-back.” More recent scholarship, by contrast, emphasizes the central role of the state in neoliberal governance, which can be thought of as “reregulation” or “roll-out.” Second, despite the diversity in its theorizations, there is consensus that neoliberalism refers to a form of governance that was born in the 1970s, and which then came to dominate many domestic economies, as well as global economic institutions, over the course of the 1980s. The term can become confusing in part because writers use it to refer both to a form of governance and to its underlying ideological commitments. (Thus, there are often gaps between neoliberal thought and actually existing neoliberalism, as with any theory in action.) Third, as an ideology, neoliberalism reconceives the appropriate relation between the market economy and forms of collective, public authority. It tends to take the former as a realm of individualistic, self-interested, rational calculation, while it casts the latter as prone to mismanagement, distortion, tyranny, and ignorance. This point is worth underscoring because it 1
This primer was prepared for the Anti-Monopoly and Regulated Industries Summer Academy. It was drafted in consultation with the Faculty Planning Committee, which included Amy Kapczynski, Sabeel Rahman, William Novak, Frank Pasquale, Lina Khan, and Project Lead Jay Varellas. Many thanks are also due to Kate Redburn and Corinne Blalock for their deeply knowledgeable edits, and to David Grewal and Jedediah Purdy for their essential feedback on an earlier draft. All errors are mine.
1