Overview

Eminent scholar-activist Neil Davidson’s brilliance is on full display in this posthumous work, a timely and prescient introduction to the neoliberal era. While it is widely agreed that neoliberalism arose in the wake of the global economic crisis of the 1970s, there remains much debate about how to understand its significance and even how to define it. Is it best seen as an ideology of free market fundamentalism, a series of policy decisions gutting the public sector and breaking unions, or as an era of capitalist development with its own logic Bringing his considerable intellectual breadth and characteristic generosity to bear on this question, Neil Davidson shows that to truly appreciate what is unique about neoliberalism, and what marks it out as a continuation of capitalism more generally, it is necessary to examine its social dimensions. What Was Neoliberalism? holds fast to Davidson’s conviction that thoroughly understanding the past means being better prepared for the struggles of the future.

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9781642599565

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Reviews

Praise for How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions I was frankly pole-axed by this magnificent book. Davidson resets the entire debate on the character of revolutions: bourgeois, democratic and socialist. He's sending me, at least, back to the library. -Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums This is, quite simply, the finest book of its kind. -Tony McKenna, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books What should our conception of a bourgeois revolution be, if it is to enlighten rather than to mislead ? Neil Davidson's instructive and provocative answer is given through a history both of a set of concepts and of those social settings in which they found application.His book is an impressive contribution both to the history of ideas and to political philosophy. -Alasdair MacIntyre, author, After Virtue Praise for Holding Fast to an Image of the Past This is Neil Davidson at his very best. In a sparkling set of essays, Davidson offers a conceptually sophisticated and historically wide-ranging analysis of the work of classical and contemporary political thinkers. From a critical assessment of Tom Nairn on nationalism to his sympathetic reading of the messianic Marxism of Walter Benjamin, Davidson demonstrates the profound intellectual insights to be derived from a careful, open and non-dogmatic deployment of the theoretical resources of historical materialism. -Satnam Virdee at University of Glasgow Working from the best grounds of a now-classical materialism, with great interpretive breadth and rich historical learning, Neil Davidson offers astute and measured guidance through some main territories of contemporary Marxist and associated intellectual history. -Geoff Eley, Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History University of Michigan

Author Information

Neil Davidson (1957-2020) lectured in Sociology at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Glasgow. He authored The Origins of Scottish Nationhood, Discovering the Scottish Revolution, for which he was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (2012), Holding Fast to an Image of the Past (2014) and We Cannot Escape History (2015). Davidson was on the editorial boards of rs21 and the Scottish Left Project website, and was a member of the Radical Independence Campaign.

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