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Racial Neoliberal Britain?
Abstract
The rush to label all recent social, economic and political phenomena as neoliberal is reminiscent of discussions of postmodernism — sometimes particular terms seep between sub-disciplines and are exchanged as a kind of cipher for a broader sensibility, in this case, the suspicion that economics might matter after all. However, as with previous catch-all terms, the explanatory value of the term may be limited or so expansive that it is hard for us to speak meaningfully to each other (see Ferguson 2009). If we are to take neoliberalism as a frame through which to understand the remaking of global racism but with local configurations, then there may be some value in considering again what we mean when we name our neoliberal times. After all, the point of sharing these catch-all terms is to enhance our shared understanding, even if we may continue to disagree on the details of what is happening and why it matters. As a result, what follows is largely an exercise in clarification, to try to think again about the term ‘neoliberalism’ and what it might signify in the concept ‘racial neoliberalism’. I use this discussion to consider the suggestion that neoliberalism is in crisis and perhaps has been for some time, and how plausible such a suggestion is in relation to racial neoliberalism in Britain. This leads to a reconsideration of the definition of racial neoliberalism and its applicability to Britain, and of the impact of austerity measures on these patterns of racism.
... needs to provide its citizens with welfare "from the cradle to the grave" is seen as producing dependency and laziness, and the role of the state is to encourage people to adopt entrepreneurial and opportunity-maximising behaviour (e.g. Bhattacharyya, 2013;Lister, 2006;. This discursive turn 'explains' poverty as the result of reckless behaviour on the part of the poor, and aims to alleviate it by re-educating the poor out of state dependency and into 'economic mobility'. ...
... Many feminists have critiqued this individualisation of poverty and explored its deeply gendered aspects (e.g. Lister 2006), while others also attend to its racialised aspects (Bhattacharyya, 2013) and unequal impacts on disabled people (e.g. Duffy, 2013;Power et al., 2014). ...
This article explores how the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy policy, commonly known as the Bedroom Tax, works materially and discursively to create certain types of individuals and families as valued and deserving, while portraying others as excessive, wasteful or discretionary. The paper draws on a qualitative study project (Bragg et al., 2015) which generated accounts from 14 families impacted by the policy, as well as 39 interviews with key workers in local schools, charities and community organisations. Through analysis of official texts (such as the policy text and related debates in Parliament) and interview data, the paper explores how particular gendered understandings of care and kinship are constructed, regulated, penalised, and performed via the Bedroom Tax, and how these impact on the everyday lives of families subject to the subsidy removal, and beyond this also to their neighbours and neighbourhoods.
... Of course, nominally 'racially blind' policies have played a significant role in preserving racial and colonial systems of inequality; seeGoldberg (2009);Bhattacharyya (2013). The point here is that the concept of race in neoliberalism is generally understood to function very differently from the essentialised and explicitly hierarchical conception of race characteristic of fascism.Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...
This article theorises the contemporary convergence of neoliberal and fascist principles by examining the thought of political actors in the 1930s and 1940s who were active in both neoliberal and fascist organisations. I suggest that a sympathy for fascism formed a minor but significant strand of early neoliberal thought, and that unpacking the logics that led particular thinkers and political actors to believe that fascism was compatible with neoliberalism can shed light on the contemporary political moment. Based on my reading of early ‘neoliberal fascists’, I theorise three points of convergence. The first was a belief that socialism had to be opposed by all possible means, including violence and the repression of popular democracy. The second was a racialized understanding of the underpinnings of the market economy, leading to an acceptance of the necessity of racial exclusion. Thirdly, both fascist and neoliberal thinkers believed that patriarchy was a necessary feature for the reproduction of capitalism, and hence that traditional gender roles had to be preserved against pressures for social change. In theorising this convergence, I also gesture to how the overlap of neoliberalism and fascism can be witnessed in the contemporary milieu, with a focus on the libertarian Mises Institute.
... The concepts of racial capitalism (Melamed, 2015;Robinson, 1983) and racialised capitalism (Virdee, 2019) have emphasised racism's centrality, its intrinsic link to capitalism, which organises exploitation and over-exploitation through ethnicised and racialised processes globally. In the last decades the concept of racial neoliberalism (Bhattacharyya, 2013) has been used by a number of scholars to explore the relationship between racial capitalism and the present neoliberal agenda. It has further emphasised the specificity in the racial constitution of neoliberalism (Kundnani, 2021), with a culture of individualism and 'free choice' marginalises the systematic impact of racism on people´s lives, and decreases the role of public policies in challenging structural inequalities (Lentin & Titley, 2011: 168). ...
A weakness in research on welfare regimes is that solidarity and deservingness has often been analysed unidimensional in relation to a capitalist class-structured society. Feminist and postcolonial scholars have argued that welfare regimes need to be situated and analysed in an intersectional setting. In this chapter, focussing on Sweden, a central contention is that in analysing welfare provisions, migration and racial regimes are constitutive in structuring citizenship and nation.Sweden is undergoing a transformation of the welfare regime from a social-democratic, towards a neoliberal regime. At the same time, the Swedish welfare regime is increasingly infused with neo-racism, making it important to locate welfare in relation to the concepts of welfare and racial regimes, but also gender regime. After an introduction, followed by sections outlining the theoretical perspective and a contextualisation of the racial character of the Swedish society, the main part of the chapter explores three competing welfare regimes, with different class, gender, and racial configurations. The chapter ends with a short section exploring the embryonic struggles in the making of a fourth welfare project.KeywordsWelfare regimeClassGenderNeo-racismRacialisationSweden
... The European Typology of Homelessness and Housing Exclusion (FEANTSA, 2006) classifies people who are homeless according to their living or 'home' situationsan approach that references three domains: physical ('an adequate dwelling/space over which a person and their family can exercise 2 We understand neoliberalism and processes of neoliberalisation to be racialised and gendered (see e.g. Bhattacharyya, 2013). 3 CEE countries are Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia. ...
This paper examines how deportation became a solution to rough sleeping in pre-Brexit England. It identifies relationships between the social regulation of vulnerable and marginalised adults, contemporary governance arrangements and bordering practices characteristic of Britain's ‘hostile environment’. Drawing on media reports and grey organisational literature, the focus of discussion is events across 2015–2018 in which three London-based charities were criticised for working with the Home Office to deport homeless migrants under its European Economic Area Administrative Removal policy. The overall tenor of criticism was that collaboration with the government compromised the organisations’ independence and charitable missions and aims. This diminished their capacity to both advocate for vulnerable adults and effectively challenge oppressive state practices. The paper observes how state and nonprofit relations structure institutional and socio-legal responses to marginalised and ‘othered’ adults through commissioning and contracting mechanisms. It demonstrates that the social and legal control of homeless migrants may be differently constituted by institutions delivering services in relation to citizenship, vulnerability and marginalisation. This analysis incorporates a broader appraisal of institutional motivations, values and beliefs in social welfare delivery, including the historic role of charitable agencies in the criminalisation of social welfare users. Taken together, the paper offers an interdisciplinary critique of the relationships between border control, neoliberal governance and the sociocultural and historic construction of homeless migrants.
... The sociology of race and schooling in the UK has long been associated with a number of diverse themes, including racism (MacDonald 1989;Gillborn 1995Gillborn , 2008, racial inequality (Tronya 1987;Swann 1985), identity (Mirza 1992;Shain 2003, masculinities (Sewall 1996; Mac an Ghaill 1994), citizenship and integration (Mullard 1982;Miah 2015b). In recent years there has been a marked shift in educational policy to an over securitised model of schooling in matters of race; these have largely been shaped by local and international events Bhattacharyya 2013;Kalra and Mehmood 2014). ...
This edited collection brings together international leading scholars to explore why the education of Muslim students is globally associated with radicalisation, extremism and securitisation. The chapters address a wide range of topics, including neoliberal education policy and globalization; faith-based communities and Islamophobia; social mobility and inequality; securitisation and counter terrorism; and shifting youth representations. Educational sectors from a wide range of national settings are discussed, including the US, China, Turkey, Canada, Germany and the UK; this international focus enables comparative insights into emerging identities and subjectivities among young Muslim men and women across different educational institutions, and introduces the reader to the global diversity of a new generation of Muslim students who are creatively engaging with a rapidly changing twenty-first century education system. The book will appeal to those with an interest in race/ethnicity, Islamophobia, faith and multiculturalism, identity, and broader questions of education and social and global change.
... The sociology of race and schooling in the UK has long been associated with a number of diverse themes, including racism (MacDonald 1989;Gillborn 1995Gillborn , 2008, racial inequality (Tronya 1987;Swann 1985), identity (Mirza 1992;Shain 2003, masculinities (Sewall 1996; Mac an Ghaill 1994), citizenship and integration (Mullard 1982;Miah 2015b). In recent years there has been a marked shift in educational policy to an over securitised model of schooling in matters of race; these have largely been shaped by local and international events Bhattacharyya 2013;Kalra and Mehmood 2014). ...
... Hence our analysis extends feminist critiques of the individualisation of poverty in highlighting its deeply gendered aspects (e.g. Morini, 2007;Lister 2006), whose covertly racialised aspects (Bhattacharyya, 2013) and unequal impacts on disabled people (e.g. Duffy, 2013;Power et al., 2014) should also be noted. ...
This paper draws on material generated from a qualitative study of educational impacts of a British welfare reform affecting housing rent subsidy, size and location commonly known as ?the bedroom tax? (Bragg et al., 2015), which was partly taken as a topic for study specifically because of its iconic status as a controversial and unpopular welfare ?reform? (or cut). The analysis draws on Foucauldian understandings of subjectification or subject-formation - as elaborated both from within and in relation to the social (Foucault, 1970; 1983; Ball, 1990; Olssen, 2006; Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998), read through new and newly available perspectives (Allen, 2015; P?cheux, 2014). This approach is applied to discuss how those addressed by educational policy, and also as research participants, are both subject to prevailing political and practice-oriented discourses (of educational ?problems?, and of the neoliberal frameworks by which poverty and welfare cuts are discussed), but also ? at times ? how they can become the subject of ? in the sense of reformulating ? these discourses in their accounts of everyday activities. After outlining our approach and the context for the study, we focus on four examples drawn from the narratives of the various stakeholders in the study ? parents/carers, school staff and other community-based organisations as illustrations of how this discursive approach can provide rich readings of relevance to educational policy debates. From these we not only take further discussions of the production and regulation of subjectivities via social and educational policy practices, but also offer indicative glimpses of resistance to this as expressed by those who are its primary subjects, and where in one case such resistance brings our own research commitments under critical scrutiny. As such, the contribution of this article is both topic-related (concerning the educational impacts of policy) but, crucially, also conceptual and methodological, in motivating for a Foucauldian-influenced discursive approach that is sensitive to struggle and resistance.
... The second theoretical framing acknowledges the institutional reconfiguration of ethnicity and racialized identities. Importantly, as Bhattacharyya (2013, 38) argues: '… the concept of racial neoliberalism suggests that racial politics is remade in particular ways in the time of neoliberal economics and state practices – yet key aspects of this racial neoliberalism predate the ascent of neoliberal economics'. The internal fracturing of racial politics, as part of a broader questioning of new social movement theory, has emerged in response to what Stuart Hall (1992) refers to as a contemporary key political question of how we live with difference. ...
This article explores Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men’s experiences of schooling to examine what inclusion/exclusion means to them. Qualitative research was undertaken with 48 Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men living in areas of the West Midlands, England. The young men highlighted three key areas: the emergence of a schooling regime operating through neo-liberal principles, the recognition of class difference between themselves and teachers, and their awareness of how racialization operated through codes of masculinity. In conclusion, it is argued that research on issues of inclusion/exclusion should be cautious when interpreting new forms of class identity through conventional categories of ethnicity.
The survival of neoliberal forms of governance after their apparent repudiation during the Global Financial Crisis is a problem that continues to generate significant scholarly controversy. One of the most influential accounts of the survival of neoliberalism in the crisis draws on Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics to claim that states intervening to support financial markets during the crisis was simply the neoliberal system working as expected. Returning to Foucault’s original text, I argue this account constitutes a systematic misreading because it treats Foucault as having developed an instrumentalist theory of the neoliberal state, a possibility Foucault explicitly rejected. I suggest that the reasons that led Foucault to reject an instrumentalist theory of the state remain just as relevant today, and accordingly argue for a return to Foucault’s methodological decision to treat neoliberalism not as a theory of state but as a discourse which constructs a novel bio-political governmentality.
This chapter asks whether we are witnessing the disintegration of one phase of neoliberalism. The chapter reviews the concept of racial neoliberalism and argues that we are witnessing a shift in neoliberal formations. Whereas previously, formations of racial neoliberalism have been characterized by the continuation of racialized divisions by other means, accompanied by a muting of racialized referents in political and institutional worlds, a variety of factors has led to a breaking apart of this recent set of tacit agreements. Instead, we see the impact of political crises met by a resurgent movement towards anti-politics, economic crises reshaping alliances around issues of nation and of class and new configurations of elite and popular racisms. In this context of fragmenting neoliberal orders, practices of racial neoliberalism also fragment, with a battle between competing versions of official racism. The chapter outlines some key characteristics of this moment of contest between competing racisms.
As debates on the rise of violent crime in London unfold, UK drill music is routinely accused of encouraging criminal behaviour among young Black Britons from deprived areas of the capital. Following a series of bans against drill music videos and the imposition of Criminal Behaviour Orders and gang injunctions against drill artists, discussions on the defensibility of such measures call for urgent, yet hitherto absent, sociological reflections on a topical issue. This article attempts to fill this gap, by demonstrating how UK drill and earlier Black music genres, like grime, have been criminalised and policed in ways that question the legitimacy of and reveal the discriminatory nature of policing young Black people by the London Metropolitan Police as the coercive arm of the British state. Drawing on the concept of racial neoliberalism, the policing of drill will be approached theoretically as an expression of the discriminatory politics that neoliberal economics facilitates in order to exclude those who the state deems undesirable or undeserving of its protection.
This chapter evaluates what a Foucauldian discursive approach brings to analysis of educational policy-related material. It focuses on a specific textual example from a local, UK-based study of educational impacts of welfare reforms. The statement, ‘Tell your professor we are good mothers’, is discussed in relation to four features: (1) the range of subject positions elaborated; (2) the incitement to ‘confession’ and investments in being seen as ‘good mothers’; (3) the articulation of a collective subjectivity that repudiates the surveillance and regulation of working-class communities; and (4) an ethical-political demand addressed to the researchers to challenge the dominant discourses to which this mother and others like her are subject.
The London bombings, 10 years ago this year, radically transformed the education policy framing of Muslim communities in Britain. The events signified a radical shift away from the politics of racial inequality/multi-culturalism to racialised politics of securitisation. By focusing on recent legislation and policy announcements, this chapter highlights how minority communities in general and Muslim communities in particular are racialised and also criminalised, as can be seen through the politics associated with the Counter-Terrorism and Securities Act 2015 and its impact on education policy. This chapter further explores the relationship between Muslims, securitisation and racial governmentality.
This article reviews two decades of work carried out at the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies, University of Leeds in the area of racism and higher education. It introduces key issues and themes in this field and also identifies a seven-point agenda for action. This article provides an overview and agenda-setting account of the theoretical and policy innovations developed by this research team, which provide a contextual background for this volume as a whole. Historical recognition of the role of universities as key sites for the production of racialised knowledge across a range of intellectual fields is an essential starting point. We urge promotion of fundamental de-racialisation and de-colonisation of the academy. This cannot be achieved by self-regulation by the sector or by the setting of minimum legal requirements, it requires strong political, institutional and intellectual leadership, alliance-building and mobilisation.
This article explores two significant incidents of racism – involving Luis Suárez and John Terry – from the 2011–2012 English Premier League football season. In particular, it analyses and contextualises the reactions and responses articulated by key stakeholders within the football industry. Discursive themes were employed by these individuals as a means of trying to mitigate and/or exonerate the actions of Suárez and Terry, to question the veracity of the allegations made against them, and to downplay the extent and effects of racism in English football more generally. The article situates these standpoints within the wider cultural politics of race in the game and extricates the connections between discourse and structure in manifestations of racism. It demonstrates that these dominant responses are indicative of colour-blind ideology, white racial framing and the rules of racial standing. It also argues that these sporting trends are part of a wider societal shift towards racial neoliberalism.
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This paper assesses the degree to which conceptualizations of neo-liberal governance and advanced liberal governmentality can throw light on contemporary transformations in the practices and politics of consumption. It detours through theories of governmentality, stories about consumption and shopping, and different variations on what we can learn from Foucault. We explore the degree to which aspects of Foucault's discussions of government and ethics can be put to work methodologically without necessarily buying into fully systematized theories of governmentality that have been built around them. The idea that organizations and networks might share rationalities through which they problematize and seek to intervene in specified areas of social life seems worth pursuing. So too does the notion of various modes of ethical problematization through which people come to take their own activities as requiring moral reflection. In neither case, however, can the analytics of governmentality provide a coherent theoretical account of how political processes of rule and administration work, or indeed of how they connect up with cultural processes of self-formation and subjectivity.
This paper sets out to develop two related ideas. First, it seeks to identify how both violence and neoliberalism can be considered as moments. From this shared conceptualisation of process and fluidity, I argue that it becomes easier to recognise how these two phenomena actually converge. Building upon this conceived coalescence of neoliberalism and violence, the second aim is to recognise how the hegemony of neoliberalism positions it as an abuser, which facilitates the abandonment of those 'Others' who fall outside of neoliberal normativity. I argue that the widespread banishment of 'Others' under neoliberalism produces a 'state of exception' , wherein because of its inherently dialectic nature, excep-tional violence is transformed into exemplary violence. This metamorphosis occurs as aversion for alterity intensifies under neoliberalism and its associated violence against 'Others' comes to form the rule. Key words: banality of evil, moment, neoliberalism, othering, state of exception, violence Our alienation is becoming more acute. Our appetites are becoming voracious and indiscriminate cravings. Our fan-tasies more violent, and our episodes of violence more fantastic.
This paper focuses on the fifth dimension of social innovation—i.e. political governance. Although largely neglected in the mainstream 'innovation' literature, innovative governance arrangements are increasingly recognised as potentially significant terrains for fostering inclusive development processes. International organisations like the EU and the World Bank, as well as leading grass-roots movements, have pioneered new and more participatory governance arrangements as a pathway towards greater inclusiveness. Indeed, over the past two decades or so, a range of new and often innovative institutional arrangements has emerged, at a variety of geographical scales. These new institutional 'fixes' have begun to challenge traditional state-centred forms of policy-making and have generated new forms of governance-beyond-the-state. Drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality, the paper argues that the emerging innovative horizontal and networked arrangements of governance-beyond-the-state are decidedly Janus-faced. While enabling new forms of participation and articulating the state – civil society relationships in potentially democratising ways, there is also a flip side to the process. To the extent that new governance arrangements rearticulate the state-civil society relationship, they also redefine and reposition the meaning of (political) citizenship and, consequently, the nature of democracy itself. The first part of the paper outlines the contours of governance-beyond-the-state. The second part addresses the thorny issues of the state –civil society relationship in the context of the emergence of the new governmentality associated with governance-beyond-the-state. The third part teases out the contradictory way in which new arrangements of governance have created new institutions and empowered new actors, while disempowering others. It is argued that this shift from 'government' to 'governance' is associated with the consolidation of new technologies of government, on the one hand, and with profound restructuring of the parameters of political democracy on the other, leading to a substantial democratic deficit. The paper concludes by suggesting that socially innovative arrangements of governance-beyond-the-state are fundamentally Janus-faced, particularly under conditions in which the democratic character of the political sphere is increasingly eroded by the encroaching imposition of market forces that set the 'rules of the game'.
Recent work on neoliberalism has sought to reconcile a Marxist understanding of hegemony with poststructuralist ideas of discourse and governmentality derived from Foucault. This paper argues that this convergence cannot resolve the limitations of Marxist theories of contemporary socio-economic change, and nor do they do justice to the degree to which Foucault’s work might be thought of as a supplement to liberal political thought. The turn to Foucault highlights the difficulty that theories of hegemony have in accounting for the suturing together of top-down programmes with the activities of everyday life. However, the prevalent interpretation of governmentality only compounds this problem, by supposing that the implied subject-effects of programmes of rule are either automatically realised, or more or less successfully ‘contested’ and ‘resisted’. Theories of hegemony and of governmentality both assume that subject-formation works through a circular process of recognition and subjection. Both approaches therefore treat ‘the social’ as a residual effect of hegemonic projects and/or governmental rationalities. This means that neither approach can acknowledge the proactive role that long-term rhythms of socio-cultural change can play in reshaping formal practices of politics, policy, and administration. The instrumental use of notions of governmentality to sustain theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization supports a two-dimensional understanding of political power—which is understood in terms of relations of imposition and resistance—and of geographical space—which is understood in terms of the diffusion and contingent combination of hegemonic projects. Theories of neoliberalism provide a consoling image of how the world works, and in their simplistic reiteration of the idea that liberalism privileges the market and individual self-interest, they provide little assistance in thinking about how best to balance equally compelling imperatives to respect pluralistic difference and enable effective collective action.
Competition among countries—or regions within them—to attract mobile capital is often thought to discipline their governments, motivating them to invest more in infrastructure, reduce waste and corruption, and spend less on non-productive public goods. The result should be convergence on business-friendly policies. We argue that this requires an assumption—units start out very similar—that is often unrealistic. If units are heterogeneous (in natural resources, geographical location, inherited human capital or infrastructure), capital mobility often weakens discipline on the poorly- endowed units. This may help explain disappointing results of liberalizing capital flows within Russia and sub-Saharan Africa. (JEL F36, H73, H87)
Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
This paper assesses the degree to which conceptualizations of neo-liberal governance and advanced liberal governmentality can throw light on contemporary transformations in the practices and politics of consumption. It detours through theories of governmentality, stories about consumption and shopping, and different variations on what we can learn from Foucault. We explore the degree to which aspects of Foucault's discussions of government and ethics can be put to work methodologically without necessarily buying into fully systematized theories of governmentality that have been built around them. The idea that organizations and networks might share rationalities through which they problematize and seek to intervene in specified areas of social life seems worth pursuing. So too does the notion of various modes of ethical problematization through which people come to take their own activities as requiring moral reflection. In neither case, however, can the analytics of governmentality provide a coherent theoretical account of how political processes of rule and administration work, or indeed of how they connect up with cultural processes of self-formation and subjectivity.
Achieving mass democracy was the great triumph of the twentieth century. Learning to live with it will be the greatest achievement of the twenty-first century. A rising tide of discontent is posing a major crisis for systems of mass democracy: the evidence is clear to see in reduced turnout and party membership and in opinion surveys. The failures of politicians have played their part but, Gerry Stoker argues, equally important are the dysfunctional political stances and styles adopted by many citizens. Democratic politics, he argues, is doomed to disappoint because it involves collective decision-making, demands complicated communication and generally produces a messy compromise. One size fits no-one. So what is the solution? Stoker suggests that democracy - and the political class - must create a new politics, making it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to express and debate their political preferences.
The onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 has been widely interpreted as a fundamental challenge to, if not crisis of, neoliberal governance. Here, we explore some of the near-term and longer-run consequences of the economic crisis for processes of neoliberalization, asking whether we have been witnessing the terminal unraveling of neoliberalism as a form of social, political, and economic regulation. In many ways a creature of crisis, could neoliberalism now be falling to a crisis of its own making? Answering this question is impossible, we argue, without an adequate understanding of the nature of neoliberalization and its evolving sociospatial manifestations. These are more than definitional niceties. The prospects and potential of efforts to move genuinely beyond neoliberalism must also be considered in this light.
The reality of long term mass youth unemployment has produced a ‘new social condition’ for many young people—especially when the concentrations of class, race, geography and qualification are taken into account.This ‘condition’ shifts the grounds upon which our theoretical debates have stood and must renew the questioning of certain fundamentals. It also places or replaces on the agenda just what is supposed to be the working class interest in state education.
The term “neoliberalism” has come to be used in a wide variety of partly overlapping and partly contradictory ways. This essay seeks to clarify some of the analytical and political work that the term does in its different usages. It then goes on to suggest that making an analytical distinction between neoliberal “arts of government” and the class-based ideological “project” of neoliberalism can allow us to identify some surprising (and perhaps hopeful) new forms of politics that illustrate how fundamentally polyvalent neoliberal mechanisms of government can be. A range of empirical examples are discussed, mostly coming from my recent work on social policy and anti-poverty politics in southern Africa.
In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter-century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.
Powers of Freedom, first published in 1999, offers a compelling approach to the analysis of political power which extends Foucault's hypotheses on governmentality in challenging ways. Nikolas Rose sets out the key characteristics of this approach to political power and analyses the government of conduct. He analyses the role of expertise, the politics of numbers, technologies of economic management and the political uses of space. He illuminates the relation of this approach to contemporary theories of 'risk society' and 'the sociology of governance'. He argues that freedom is not the opposite of government but one of its key inventions and most significant resources. He also seeks some rapprochement between analyses of government and the concerns of critical sociology, cultural studies and Marxism, to establish a basis for the critique of power and its exercise. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in political theory, sociology, social policy and cultural studies.
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