Overview

In recent years, the concept of neoliberalism has been discarded as shrill and overspent. In Political Neoliberalism, Christian Joppke argues that it is a useful lens to make sense of a wide range of political phenomena--those pertaining to the order and governing of advanced Western societies, but also rupture and conflict at the extreme right and left ends of the political spectrum.With respect to order, Joppke outlines an inventory of the political forms of neoliberalism that undermined the post-World War II liberal-democratic synthesis. This is complemented by a genealogy of neoliberalism, which matured from a movement associated with the right into a full-blown political order once the left, in terms of the Third Way, embraced its principles. In response to the center right-left consensus on market-conforming principles and policies, radical movements have emerged that signal rupture: right-wing populism, on the one hand, and left-wing identity politics, on the other. Despite their oppositionist posture and claims to be authentically democratic, Joppke argues that both are movements within rather than against neoliberalism. Their illiberal leanings make them unsuited to credibly recover democracy, the indispensable tool to rein in the imposition of market principles on most--if not all--aspects of society.In contrast to the optimism for a return of a public-good oriented state that was galvanized by the Covid-19 pandemic, Joppke's telling closes with an indictment of the ways pandemic public health management rejuvenated political neoliberalism through the expansion of technocratic authoritarianism and the increased power of big corporations, with no forces on the horizon capable of shifting political neoliberalism off-track. A shrewd and original analysis of what must be considered the predominant ideological project in our time, this is essential reading for anyone interested in neoliberalism and the persistent crisis of liberal democracy.

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9780197801925

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Reviews

One of the world's leading sociologists, Christian Joppke, has written a compelling intellectual account of the slippery and evasive ideology of neoliberalism. In a superbly researched and richly comparative volume focusing on ideas and ideologies, Joppke distils a core set of principles to define and analyse how neoliberalism spreads into politics and with what effects. Consistently engaged with political debates and intellectual arguments, Political Neoliberalism is an urgent book for a world in which geopolitics and domestic electoral politics are shifting profoundly and swiftly. * Desmond King, Andrew W. Mellon Statutory Professor of American Government, University of Oxford *

Author Information

Christian Joppke, Professor Emeritus, University of Bern Christian Joppke is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Bern and a Senior Research Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS). After earning a PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1989), he taught at the University of Southern California, European University Institute, University of British Columbia, International University Bremen, the American University of Paris, and the University of Bern. Specializing in comparative political sociology, he has written widely and influentially on social movements in West and East, immigration, citizenship, multiculturalism, religion, nationalism, populism, and more recently on liberalism and neoliberalism.

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