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    A Brief History of Neoliberalism
    A Brief History of Neoliberalism
    A Brief History of Neoliberalism
    Audiobook8 hours

    A Brief History of Neoliberalism

    Written by David Harvey

    Narrated by Clive Chafer

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 30, 2017
    ISBN9781515977773
    A Brief History of Neoliberalism
    Author

    David Harvey

    David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written extensively on the political economy of globalisation, urbanisation, and cultural change. His recent books include Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Profile Books, 2014) and The Ways of the World (Profile Books, 2016). He contributed the foreword to the Pluto Press edition of The Communist Manifesto (Pluto, 2008; 2017).

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    Reviews for A Brief History of Neoliberalism

    4/5

    156 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Dry, but concise and succinct. Understanding the differences, definitions, and goals of lliberalism, neoliberalism, neoconservatism, how they interact and overlap, and their effects and contradictions is an essential part of developing a political consciousness in the 21st century, and this book is an excellent place to start. Harvey presupposes a familiarity with certain economic concepts such as seignorage, deflation, value-added production, and capital, but should pose no barrier to understanding the thesis.
    • 5/5
      Great book. Narrator was easy to follow. Lots of useful information.
      Not sure why, there seemed to be several areas were things got completely edited out. For example, a list of reasons for xyz is going on. Get to 3/8 and suddenly you hear a splice and never find out what the rest of the reasons were. No jump in the time elapsed. Two part example of neoliberalism referring to Enron.. suddenly cut halfway through the first part. Skip back to try it again, hear the cut and pickup elsewhere with no jump in time. Happened several times all throughout this audiobook. That I give a 1 Star.
    • 5/5
      As someone who already knew a fair amount of neoliberal history, this book was perfectly concise in that it kept the subject to the point (a real feat when discussing neoliberalism) while not leaving anything out. Personally, I learned more about how the Chinese economy functions from a few sections of this book than I have anywhere else. The narration is top-notch also. A British accent at 1.5x is the perfect blend for me; fast enough to keep it interesting, articulated enough to remain understandable while sped up.
    • 5/5
      Instructive and important even if you already have a good understanding of the material. Prescient for its time.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.