History of Neoliberalism
In her lecture on the topic, Elizabeth Adan outlines how neoliberalism gained prominence as a reactionary ideology in response to economic crises of the 20th century, and gives these two events as examples of such crises.
What are the Great Depression (20s-30s) and the Energy Crises (70s-80s)?
Neoliberalisms emphasis on individual responsibility and individualism fundamentally goes against which two important forms of care advocated for by WGQS as a field?
What are care work and mutual aid?
This U.S. president, who advocated for and spread neoliberal capitalism during his administration, once said "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." Who was he and what does this quote reflect about neoliberal capitalism?
Who was Ronald Reagan? What are neoliberal capitalism's hostile view towards public services and belief that the government providing services to the people is an impingement on personal liberty?
These are the goals neoliberalism claims to work towards, though whether or not it really does is, at best, debatable.
What are economic growth that benefits the populus, and the intensification and growth of freemarket capitalism?
Naomi Klein gives this name to the phenomenon of capitalist entities and states in the global north leveraging social unheaval (e.g. natural disasters, war, etc.) to push neoliberal policies onto a populus.
What is Disaster Capitalism/Shock Doctrine?
The globalization of neoliberal capitalism in the 20th century and consequential exportation of neoliberal policy and politics from the global north to the global south is described by this term.
What is Western neocolonialism?
Neoliberalism's atomized view of suffering and success also clashes with this method of change in WGQS.
What is systemic/structural change?
This author argues in her book Undoing the Demos that the marketization of democracy (one of the core ideas of neoliberalism) necessarily also destroys democracy, and writes that "Neoliberalism generates a condition of politics absent democratic institutions that would support a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best: informed passion, respectful deliberation, aspirational sovereignty, sharp containment of powers that would overrule or undermine it."
Who is Wendy Brown?
These are the traits that neoliberalism produces in a society, regardless of its stated aims.
What are competition, privatization, deregulation, and the valuing of profit over everything else?
This public institution that was originally established on humanist ideals of equality has been transformed by neoliberal policies and provides an example of the ways that neoliberalism shapes all of our lives despite its ideological invisibility.
What is public education?
Neoliberalism emerged as a reactionary response to this set of domestic economic programs, public work projects, and fiscal reforms under FDR in response to the Great Depression.
What were the New Deal policies?
Neoliberal capitalism's focus on individual responsibility for hardship created by systemic circumstances clashes with this foundational theory in WGQS?
What is Crenshaw's Theory of Intersectionality?
This UK Prime Minister once said "There is no such thing as society". Who does this quote come from? What core value of neoliberalism does it reflect?
Who is Margaret Thatcher? What is individualism and the abandonment of the collective in favor of the individual?
This term describes the understanding that neoliberalism has of society — that it is not a collective, but an amalgamation of individuals competing with one another with the strongest and most deserving always coming out on top.
What is social darwinism?
Neoliberalism goes unchallenges because it is [blank].
What is unnamed yet pervasive.
Neoliberalism's rapid growth was also a reaction to the growth of this ideology during the 20th century.
What is communism?
This 2019 text-based video game has a surprisingly insightful quote sumarizing the tendency of neoliberal capitalism to appropriate the language and aesthetics of progressive movmeents in order to neutralize the critiques of it generated by those movements.
What is Disco Elysium? ("Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.") [Authors note: I was convinced I read this in Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) until I googled it again while making this.]
This author of "Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change" said "Domestic work… [is] the work that makes all other work possible."
Who is Angela Garbes?
We can think of neoliberalism as a retooling of this ideology as a means to funnel wealth into the pockets of the already wealthy.
What is classical liberalism?
Markets left to themselves accumulate capital faster than generating growth, leading to [blank].
What is neofeudalism/stagnant economy, poverty, and oligarchy?
This book pubished in 1944 by Friedrich Hayek argued that the government providing for its people would inevitably lead to totalitarianism.
What is The Road to Serfdom?
Neoliberalism often incentivizes this behavior from marginalized groups into existing (patriarchal, cisheterosexist) institutions, something that WGQS advocates against.
What is assimilation?
This author wrote that "The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that [opposing] ideas were never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures."
Who is Naomi Klein?
According to George Monbiot, this is the defining characteristic of human relations in the eyes of neoliberalism.
What is competition?
Wendy Brown uses this phrase to refer to neoliberalism's invasion of the world beyond the market, including our personal lives and psyches?
What is "the stealth revolution"?