History 280U Fall 2013
Neoliberalism and its histories
This class will grapple with what neoliberalism is and how we might conceive of its histories. Broadly speaking there are three competing (if sometimes overlapping) ways of conceiving and historicizing neoliberalism. Firstly, there are those that seek to capture neoliberalism as a set of ideas that they trace from the political economy of German Ordo-Liberals of the 1930s through Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society in 1940s to the Chicago school of economists and Milton Friedman from the 1950s. This is a story of how marginal ideas moved center stage in the context of a diverse form of political, economic and cultural contingencies. Secondly, those working in a broadly Marxist tradition see neoliberalism as a product of the structural contradictions of global capitalism that has enabled the consolidation of finance capital as the governor of the globe. Finally, after Foucault, others focus on how new rationalities and practices of government produce a new kind of neoliberal subject, homo economicus, by instilling market logics in to all areas of social and political life.
Our readings will try to map the terrain of some of this scholarship and the histories it evokes focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on the Euro-American world. As a set of ideas, economic structures and techniques of government neoliberalism is always on the move and is by definition a transnational phenomenon that takes shape in locally specific ways. It is the specificity of these local iterations and their changing forms over time that will chiefly preoccupy us. Readings will range widely across disciplines but it is the historicity of neoliberalism - the contrasting accounts of when, where and why it emerged and how it has changed over time - that we will try to stay focused on.
Each week students will be expected to write short weekly responses to the readings that will be shared with the group as a whole. In addition, there will be a final analytical paper that will either interrogate the scholarship on a particular topic or seek to map out a research agenda around a specific historical question.
4 September: Introductions
11 September:
Michel Foucault, The Birth of BioPolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979 trans Graham Burchell (Houndmills, 2008), chs.4-12.
T.Lemke, “The birth of bio-politics: Michel Foucault’s lecture at the College de France on neo-liberal governmentality” Economy and Society, 30, 2 (2001): 190-207.
18 September:
Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, 2012).
Ben Jackson, “The Think Tank Archipelago: Thatcherism and Neoliberalism” in B.Jackson and R.Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012)
25 September:
Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Harvard: Cambridge, Mass., 2011).
2 October:
Monica Prasad, The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (Chicago, 2006).
Marion Fourcade and Sarah L.Babb, “The Rebirth of the Liberal Creed: Paths to Neoliberalism in Four Countries” American Journal of Sociology, 108, 3 (2002): 533-79.
9 October:
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (Verso: London, 1994).
16 October:
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: New York, 2007).
Stuart Hall, “The Neo-Liberal Revolution” Cultural Studies, 25, 6 (2011): 705-728
23 October:
Jean and John Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism" Public Culture, 12, 2 (2000):292-343.
Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare”, Political Theory, 34, 6 (2006): 690-714.
John Clarke, “New Labour’s Citizens: Activated, Empowered, Responsibilized,
Abandoned?” Critical Social Policy, 25, 4 (2005): 447-63.
Aihwa Ong, “Neoliberalism as a mobile technology” Trans of Institute of British Geographers, 32, 1 (2007):3-8
30 October:
Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (Verso; London, 2014).
or
Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford, 2010).
6 November:
Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard, 2009)
13 November:
Tim Mitchell, Carbon Democracy. Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011).
20 November:
Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadeplphia, 2002).
Paul Langley, The Everyday Life of Global Finance: Saving and Borrowing in Anglo-America (Oxford, 2010)
27 November:
Jamie Peck, “Explaining (with) Neoliberalism” Territory, Politics, Governance (2013).
Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin, After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto (2013).
4 December:
Paper workshop