WHY isn't the information contained within this book available to everyone? The answer, of course, is that the powers that be do not wish it so to be.

That may sound conspiratorial but, in this occasion, it has the ring of truth: a conspiracy theory is not a conspiracy theory when it IS a conspiracy! ( )

Everyone can accept that class struggle on behalf of the unwashed masses manifests as strikes and revolutions. But what about the other way? That's the void that Harvey's consistently addresses: the elites fight a class struggle too and their tool is neoliberalism. From Reagan and Thatcher to current globalization tactics, Harvey's point is that the rich fight the poor all the time. However, instead of doing it in the streets, they do it via public policy that regardless of political bent will ultimately favour continued advantage for the ruling class. ( )

Wow, what a helpful introduction to the history of neoliberalism. This book introduces the concept, traces a theory of its origin, and then details its emergence and eventual hegemony from the Seventies to Nineties.

I never knew the extent to which capitalists banded together as a unified class in the Seventies to secure their economic and political power in response to anti-establishment struggles. Harvey demonstrates how think tanks, business associations, and propaganda efforts went hard during that period, successfully exploiting the stagflation crisis and malaise of the Seventies to take the reins back from Keynesianism. Harvey is known for foregrounding economics in the birth of neoliberalism, in contrast to Foucault and his followers, who argue its an evolution of liberal governmentality.

That said, I have a problem with his theory about neoliberalism’s birth from the Sixties. Like a Marxist would, he sets up a dichotomy between two allegedly contradictory threads running through the period: social justice and individual freedom. Social justice requires working towards the interests of the group and other people, which allegedly requires submerging individual desires. Because the Sixties hosted both threads, and they emerged from dissatisfaction with the bureaucratic society built by the New Deal, the capitalists were able to use the desire for individual freedom to build consensus for neoliberalism. By framing it that the individual as consumer and producer should be free to pursue their own interests without permission from the group, they were able to make neoliberal ideas alluring.

Here’s what I think of that. There’s no way we’re going to build a better world without people being free to pursue their own desires and interests. Short of converting us all to zealots as SJWs try to do, most of us are not going to fight hard and take risks for the sake of other people, especially for a group we don’t belong to. Some of us will, sure, but most won’t. And I’d argue that those who did fight hard for others also had personal investment in whatever social change they were fighting for. The key here is to find ways of combining social and personal liberation, not heralding the former at the expense of the latter.

Additionally, it’s just not true that neoliberalism used individual desire and not social justice. Individual desire is not a cohesive enough glue to keep society together. That’s why Reagan rode in on the back of nationalism and religious conservatism and Thatcher benefited from it as well. Neoliberalism needs its own brand of “social justice”, however much we may disagree with its definition of the concept.

Now that I’ve vented my anarchist ire, I’ll say that this book is an important history for understanding the time we’re living in. I recommend it to everyone.
( )

Instructive and important even if you already have a good understanding of the material. Prescient for its time. ( )

A really thorough investigation and description of neoliberalism that helped me understand it as a body, rather than a cloak with a name. More later, probably. But still worth reading.

I’m not referring to my notes, so these are impressions. The book traces the history and impact of neoliberal policies from its theoretical beginnings in the 50s and 60s and the first inklings of its ideals in the fallout of the great depression in the 30s. It sets up the theoretical position of neoliberalism historically, which I liked. It’s very easy to read, the explanations are succinct and most of the required concepts are introduced pretty well (thought I had read *Debt* a few months ago so I may be more economically primed than I usually am). Then it starts discussing the impact of that theoretical position and how the people who implemented it sought and got their power, and what they did with it. You already know a lot of neoliberalism’s impact in the US and the UK if you’ve watched “Hypernormalisation” and all the other Adam Curtis films (which you should!), but probably not in this detail. What you probably don’t know about are the details of other countries’ histories with it, and the impact the end of the Bretton Woods policy had, though you’ve probably heard of some of the social consequences through authoritarianism and village slaughter.

The book is decidedly against neoliberalism both for its consequences and its theoretical faults. It feels like it’s written by that strain of liberal who champions FDR as the greatest president, who seeks a reconciliation between democratic socialism and liberal humanism. (I have no idea; I know the author publishes a lot but this is the only thing of his I’ve read.)

Anyway, it’s a really good book and if you’ve ever wondered what someone meant when they said the word “neoliberal,” my prescription is to watch some Adam Curtis films, then if you’re still interested, read this book. Or maybe the other way around if you can’t stand his tone. Either way, both make a meal. ( )

"US leaders have, with considerable domestic public support, projected upon the world the idea that American neoliberal values of freedom are universal and supreme, and that such values are to die for. The world is in a position to reject that imperialist gesture and refract back into the heartland of neoliberal and neoconservative capitalism a completely different set of values: those of an open democracy dedicated to the achievement of social equality coupled with economic, political, and cultural justice. Roosevelt's arguments are one place to start. Within the US an alliance has to be built to regain popular control of the state apparatus and to thereby advance the deepening rather than the evisceration of democratic practices and values under the juggernaut of market power."

This is as clear and concise an account of how neoliberalism has developed and taken hold of our political and economic landscape from the 1970s to the present as any could ask for. David Harvey is such a clear and compelling writer that the ideas in this book come across effortlessly without becoming overly simplistic.

This book actually prefigures our economic collapse (it was written in 2005) and yet it describes our current state with pinpoint accuracy:

"On the one hand [US nationalism] presumes that it is the God-given (and the religious invocation is deliberate) manifest destiny of the US to be the greatest power on earth (if not number one in everything from baseball to the Olympics) and that, as a beacon of freedom, liberty, and progress, it has been and continues to be universally admired and considered worthy of emulation. Everyone, it is said, wants to either live in or be like the US. The US therefore benevolently and generously gives freely of its resources and its values and culture to the rest of the world, in the cause of conferring the privilege of Americanization and American values on all and sundry. But US nationalism also has a darker side in which paranoia about fearful threats from enemies and evil forces from outside take over. The fear is of foreigners and of immigrants, of outside agitators, and now, of course, of 'terrorists'. This leads to the internal circling of wagons and the closing down of civil liberties and freedoms in episodes like the persecution of anarchists in the 1920s, the McCarthyism of the 1950s directed against communists and their sympathizers, the paranoid style of Richard Nixon towards opponents of the Vietnam War and, since 9/11, the tendency to characterize all critics of administration policies as aiding and abetting the enemy. This kind of nationalism easily fuses with racism (most particularly now towards Arabs), the restriction of civil liberties (the Patriot Act), the curbing of press freedoms (the gaoling of journalists for not revealing their sources), and the embrace of incarceration and the death penalty to deal with malfeasance."

Sorry for the long quotes. Needless to say I find this book to be quotable and, quite honestly, important for everyone to read.

Everyone should read this book and engage with Harvey's ideas. The fate of our society depends on it. ( )

"US leaders have, with considerable domestic public support, projected upon the world the idea that American neoliberal values of freedom are universal and supreme, and that such values are to die for. The world is in a position to reject that imperialist gesture and refract back into the heartland of neoliberal and neoconservative capitalism a completely different set of values: those of an open democracy dedicated to the achievement of social equality coupled with economic, political, and cultural justice. Roosevelt's arguments are one place to start. Within the US an alliance has to be built to regain popular control of the state apparatus and to thereby advance the deepening rather than the evisceration of democratic practices and values under the juggernaut of market power."

This is as clear and concise an account of how neoliberalism has developed and taken hold of our political and economic landscape from the 1970s to the present as any could ask for. David Harvey is such a clear and compelling writer that the ideas in this book come across effortlessly without becoming overly simplistic.

This book actually prefigures our economic collapse (it was written in 2005) and yet it describes our current state with pinpoint accuracy:

"On the one hand [US nationalism] presumes that it is the God-given (and the religious invocation is deliberate) manifest destiny of the US to be the greatest power on earth (if not number one in everything from baseball to the Olympics) and that, as a beacon of freedom, liberty, and progress, it has been and continues to be universally admired and considered worthy of emulation. Everyone, it is said, wants to either live in or be like the US. The US therefore benevolently and generously gives freely of its resources and its values and culture to the rest of the world, in the cause of conferring the privilege of Americanization and American values on all and sundry. But US nationalism also has a darker side in which paranoia about fearful threats from enemies and evil forces from outside take over. The fear is of foreigners and of immigrants, of outside agitators, and now, of course, of 'terrorists'. This leads to the internal circling of wagons and the closing down of civil liberties and freedoms in episodes like the persecution of anarchists in the 1920s, the McCarthyism of the 1950s directed against communists and their sympathizers, the paranoid style of Richard Nixon towards opponents of the Vietnam War and, since 9/11, the tendency to characterize all critics of administration policies as aiding and abetting the enemy. This kind of nationalism easily fuses with racism (most particularly now towards Arabs), the restriction of civil liberties (the Patriot Act), the curbing of press freedoms (the gaoling of journalists for not revealing their sources), and the embrace of incarceration and the death penalty to deal with malfeasance."

Sorry for the long quotes. Needless to say I find this book to be quotable and, quite honestly, important for everyone to read.

Everyone should read this book and engage with Harvey's ideas. The fate of our society depends on it. ( )

Excerpted from Inside Higher Ed with permission.

If you’re wondering how government got so caught up in the well-being of Wall Street, I have a book for you: A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey. I had a basic understanding of what neoliberalism is, and have sometimes winced at how liberally it’s sprinkled about as the root of most evil. But it’s a fundamentally powerful influence on our economic and political life as well as our everyday experience, and I’m grateful to the author for helping me understand how we got here – and how market behavior isn’t a fundamental law of the universe but an influential part of our recent intellectual history.

In the 1970s, businesses and financial institutions began to organize themselves to fight for their interests. They did so through making existing organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce more powerfully political in furthering their mission. Even the Nobel Committee got into the act, recognizing American economists who have put their stamp our world through their talismanic belief in the wisdom of markets. (Though we tend to see Sweden as a socialist worker’s paradise, Sweden has a traditionally powerful wealthy class that wields influence in high places and wanted to dethrone post-Keynesianism.) They built entire financial industries and financialized existing industries that capitalized on distrust of government and America’s traditional reverence toward individual rights. They were able to refashion the state’s purpose: rather than provide social welfare programs, it should create healthy conditions for businesses to thrive, which should in turn would trickle down to benefit society, though that’s proven less reliable than the trickles of springs that people in Puerto Rico rely on for drinking water right now. So many of our current debates – health care, infrastructure, environmental protection, creating jobs that pay enough to live on – were illuminated for me by this accessible and informative book.

I had been teaching about neo-liberal economic theory in my class and thought I should probably read this book to understand it better. I'm glad I did. In addition to explaining the nuts and bolts of neo-liberalism, Harvey also argues that neo-liberal rhetoric is, at heart, a disguise for its underlying project: the restoration [or creation] of class power. Harvey convincingly argues that neo-liberalism, despite its claims of the pursuit of freedom, is actually profoundly undemocratic. Harvey, a Marxist cultural geographer, makes no bones about his beliefs about the dangers and failures of neo-liberalism and argues for a return to the "embedded" liberalism of the post-1945 era.

I was a little bit afraid that this book would be filled with economic jargon, but I found it quite readable. I got a little bit lost in his discussions about China, as I'm just not familiar enough with macro-economic theories to understand exactly how neo-liberalism would play out there. I was also hoping for an epilogue or an updated prologue with information about the 2008 economic crisis in the US, which seemed to conform to Harvey's predictions. Harvey shines in his analysis of the UK and US situations and I was glad to see that he included a fair amount of information on Latin America as well, as it often seems to be a laboratory for economic theories.

This book asks some profoundly troubling but very necessary questions about our conceptions of freedom and democracy. ( )

Very clear examination of what neoliberalism is, where it came from, and what's problematic about it. ( )

David Harvey, whose professional background as a geographer has slowly led him astray into the fields of economics and cultural criticism, has written a interesting, if dense, intellectual history of neoliberalism, in both theory and practice. While not nearly as consequential as some of his other work (especially "The Condition of Postmodernity" and "The Limits to Capital"), it is nevertheless a highly compelling, critical account of the prevailing economic ideology of our time. As someone with a much greater interest in the theoretical side of matters than the pragmatics, I was somewhat disappointed that Harvey spent a lot of time discussing what neoliberal policies have perpetrated in various countries (Chile, China, the United States, and Sweden) as opposed to focusing on its formation and instantiation about a generation ago. The theory, for the most part, is discussed only in the first two chapters, while the rest of the book is dedicated its various effects.

According to Harvey, after the end of World War II, the social democracies of Western Europe were dominated by what he calls "embedded liberalism," an amalgam of "state, market, and democratic institutions to guarantee peace, inclusion, well-being, and stability," and which was marked by the regulation of free trade and the belief that full employment and the social welfare of the citizenry were at the heart of a healthy economy." The postwar economies that operated under embedded liberalism saw gradual growth and prosperity throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but eventually began to falter under a new set of emergent economic ideas.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s in China, England, and the United States, the shift away from policy finally began to catch up to the growing disenchantment among elites with embedded liberalism. The markers on the way to a final transition were obvious: in 1973, a U.S.-led coup in Chile in which we provided the economic minds to completely deregulate Allende's social-democratic system and install a fascist who respected no boundary between the state and the corporation; in 1979, a total restructuring of U.S. monetary policy under the direction of Paul Volcker (who still rears his head in policy-making decisions three decades later); and soon afterward the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The changes, too, were just as apparent: the increasing amounts of deregulation in private enterprise, the investment of capital in foreign economies, and the promotion of a regressive tax structure in which the super-rich pay the same percentage in taxes as the poor.

Harvey explicitly makes two arguments about the pervasive growth of neoliberalism: 1) some of the ways in which it is practiced making it a veritable contradiction in terms, and 2) neoliberalism has successfully rebuilt and sustained a lasting class differential and formation of capitalist class power which the working poor and middle classes have to continually fund. First, while one of the main tenets of the neoliberalism is to keep state interference in the economy to an absolute minimum, it turns out that the state conveniently intervenes when it is in the best interest of economic elites who run the system (see Paul Bremer's opening up of the Iraqi economy and banking system to foreign investment and business, as well as the aforementioned United States intervention in Chile). Secondly, the idea of continued and increased economic growth is a shibboleth. Aggregate growth rates after the inception of neoliberalism - which declined from 3.5% in the 1960s to a current approximate 1% after 2000 - show it to be less and less a set of economic policies which actually produce wealth in an egalitarian manner. While a formation of an ultra-rich capitalist class would have been unheard of in socialist China or Russia forty years ago, the vastly uneven distributions of wealth have allowed for exactly that.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is when Harvey discussed neoliberalism is when he talks about how the concept of "freedom" is deployed to rhetorically shore it up. Whenever you hear neoliberal policies discussed by politicians, you always hear about how open markets create more "freedom," which Harvey does not admit is true, at least in a sense. What he does emphasize is that it excludes other notions of freedom, such as access to a wide array of social services, the ability to collectively negotiate for wages, and appropriate working conditions.

This comes highly recommended for anyone interested in left-wing politics, criticism of the economic policies of international institutions (especially the International Monetary Fund and World Bank), and an answer to laissez-faire capitalism broadly speaking. ( )

Reviewed here.

david harvey critically examines post'70's neo-liberal (neo-conservative) policies. He argues that the richest within global societies had experienced a decline in their power to distribute wealth to favour their interests upto the '70's. That neo-liberalist policies have gone a long way to re-establish
their dominance by re-distributing wealth back to themselves at a level approaching that of the 1920's. Globalization,privatization of publicly owned assets he sees as vehicles which have brought about that re-distribution.
His argument here relates to his writing in his other works, where he sees
a rolling crisis within capitalism and so for everyone involved. With others he relates this to the 'over-accumulation' of productive capacity,including investment in china.