Since the turn of the century, anthropologists have increasingly invoked the concept of ‘neoliberalism’. It can refer to economic policy, an overarching economic or cultural structure, or to particular attitudes or inclinations towards entrepreneurship, competition, responsibility and self-improvement. The varied use of the term reflects desires to link large-scale economic and political formations to social actions, patterns of thought, and cultural phenomena that are observed in the course of ethnographic research. While the term can be suggestive of widespread social patterns, its use can also be so vague that the term becomes meaningless (Kipnis 2007).
Three ways of viewing neoliberalism
The most straightforward way of conceptualizing neoliberalism is as a particular set of ideas about economic policy. These ideas include the notions that markets are the best way of distributing goods and services across the economy, that markets work best when governments do not intervene in them, that the primary of function of governments is to protect private property rights, and that individuals interacting in markets constitute the only grounds for human freedom (Nonini 2008). A corollary to these ideas is that society, social forces, and social structures either do not exist, or are at best unimportant considerations in the design of political and economic policy.
These ideas were articulated most forcefully in the public arena by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Within the United States and Great Britain, they were used to justify reforms to welfare systems, public administration and other policy areas. Through the influence of the United States, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), these policy ideals affected many other countries as well. The World Bank and IMF widely recommended policies like the privatization of public resources, economic austerity and welfare reform and often imposed these policies as conditions for receiving loans or other forms of economic assistance. Often such policies had disastrous effects. The ‘shock therapy’ of rapid privatization in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after 1989 and the austerity policies imposed after the East Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, for example, are now both regarded as large-scale policy failures (Stiglitz 2002). Despite neoliberalism’s importance as a set of policy ideals, other ideals have always existed. Its many failures have arguably led to a decline of its influence.
In theorizing neoliberalism, anthropologists often go beyond thinking of it as a set of policy ideals. Some of the language discussing neoli-beralism implies it is a ‘stage’ of world history. Phrases like ‘the neoliberal world order’, the global ‘culture of neoliberalism’ are especially evocative (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 2000), but even more limited terms, like ‘neoliberal city’ or ‘neoliberal China’, imply that a place as a whole might somehow have become neo-liberal, that all of what goes on there is defined by the term neoliberalism. Such language is especially apparent among Marxist anthropologists, who speak of neoliberalism in much the same way that they speak of ‘capitalism’ — as an abstract social whole. Such thinkers often see neoliberalism as an ideology that has spread across the globe, completely reshaping the world’s society and culture in the process of mystifying actual class relations and redistributing the world’s wealth upward (e.g. Harvey 2005).
Another way of conceiving neoliberalism follows fFoucault’s lectures on the topic of fgov-ernmentality and their interpretations by Barry Hindess (1996a; 1996b), Colin Gordon (1987; 1991), Nikolas Rose (1996) and others. Several significant differences to Marxist approaches are worth noting. First, rather than a focus on a retreat of the state, governmentality theorists begin with the post-World War II German ordo-liberals, who saw state intervention as central to the project of producing a liberal, responsible, governable and entrepreneurial citizenry, as well as properly functioning markets. For the ordo-liberals, public investments in education, for example, could be a central aspect of neo-liberalism. While for Marxists, the heights of neoliberalism appear in the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan’s America, I have heard govern-mentality theorists describe the Scandinavian welfare states of the late 1970s as the foremost example of neoliberal governance. Those are the places where governments put the greatest amount of effort into producing a population with the health, housing, education and employment necessary to act as the autonomous individuals that ordo-liberals believe a liberal society needs. Second, governmentality theorists exude a sense that neoliberal governance functions, that it has successfully produced responsible and governable but alienated neoliberal subjects. Where the Marxists see neoliberalism as an ‘ideology’ that masks actual human (class) relations, the governmentality theorists see it as a ‘discourse’ that structures human relationships as it defines them. This focus on the production of governable citizen/subjects blends political and economic (neo)liberalism more thoroughly than Marxian approaches. For governmentality theorists, the ideal citizen/subject is both entrepreneurial in the economic sense and reasonable, law-abiding, tolerant and autonomous in the political sense.
Clearly neoliberalism is a theoretical construct in anthropology as much as a conceptual force in the world. It may be better to conceive of neoliberalism primarily in the first sense described above (Kipnis 2008), but for those who would do otherwise, a tight definition of ‘neoliberal’ is recommended.
