Edward VII, the rotund
monarch who didn’t live quite long enough to see the Great War start in 1914,
is supposed to have remarked of social reform in his day, “We are all
socialists now-a-days”. If he had
lasted another hundred years, he might have changed it to “We are all
capitalists now-a-days”.
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| A well-known socialist Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Where does this ideology come
from? There’s a familiar origin
story: neoliberalism was dreamed up by Professors Hayek and Friedman, spelt out
in the Chicago School of Economics, rammed through by Reagan and Thatcher,
clamped down on the rest of the world by the IMF and World Bank.
Yes, but... there are
reasons to doubt this. Neoliberalism
got a grip on some parts of the global South before Reagan and Thatcher came to power. Important features of neoliberalism in the developing world
don’t correspond to the model circulating in the global North.
Doubt about the origin story
is the starting-point for our investigation of neoliberalism as a global
issue. Two papers from this
project have just been published.
Pre-publication versions of the papers available HERE
Pre-publication versions of the papers available HERE
The first is about origins
and the shape of neoliberalism on a world scale. Raewyn Connell and Nour Dados,
“Where in the World does Neoliberalism Come From?”, Theory and Society, vol. 43 no. 2, 117-138. Here is the abstract:
Neoliberalism
is generally understood as a system of ideas circulated by a network of
right-wing intellectuals, or an economic system mutation resulting from crises
of profitability in capitalism.
Both interpretations prioritise the global North. We propose an approach to neoliberalism
that prioritises the experience of the global South, and sees neoliberalism
gaining its main political strength as a development strategy displacing those
hegemonic before the 1970s. From
Southern perspectives, a distinct set of issues about neoliberalism becomes
central: the formative role of the state, including the military; the expansion
of world commodity trade, including minerals; agriculture, informality and the
transformation of rural society.
Thinkers from the global South who have foregrounded these issues need
close attention from the North, and exemplify a new architecture of knowledge
in critical social science.
The second is an essay for
the first issue of a new sociology journal, Social
Currents, that has just been launched by the Southern Sociological Society
in the United States.
Congratulations to the Society, and the editors, on the launch!
This paper looks at the old
question of the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, in the new
conditions of neoliberalism – and thinks about the role of sociology. Raewyn
Connell, “Global Tides: Market and Gender Dynamics on a World Scale”, Social Currents, 2014, vol. 1 no. 1,
5-12. Here is the abstract:
Sociology may be heading for a marginal place in a
market-dominated world. If it is to do more, it must address major questions
about the social world now coming into existence. One of these is the
relationship of gender dynamics to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has to be understood
on a world scale, not just as an export of global-North preoccupations. Older
models of the relationship between capitalism and gender, built on systems
models of both, need to be replaced in the light of the coloniality of gender.
Researchers across the global South are opening up new perspectives on gender
and power; new dynamics of change are visible in transnational arenas created
by empire and neoliberal globalization.