Actually existing neoliberalism

The notion of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ would hardly be necessary were it not for the marked utopian idealism of free-market narratives and the checkered, uneven, and variegated realities of those governing schemes and restructuring programs variously enacted in the name of competition, choice, freedom, and efficiency. Understood as a ‘strong discourse’ deeply enmeshed with the primary circuits of financial, cultural, and corporate power (Bourdieu, 1998), neoliberalism tells a self-serving story of free markets and small states, selective deregulation and targeted reregulation, low taxes and lean administration, in which privatized and market-like arrangements are presented in positive terms, in contrast to the corrupt and bloated objects of reform – most notably ‘big government’ and ‘big labor’. This said, ‘neoliberalism’ itself has practically no officially sanctioned status, rarely crossing the lips of even the most ardent of free-market reformers. Some time around the middle of the twentieth century, when the ideational project of neoliberalism was confined to a fringe network of conservative intellectual and renegade economists, the term fell out of use among proponents, to be replaced by an altogether more euphemistic vocabulary. This has made analyzing the dimensions and characteristics of market rule all the more complicated. In the age of actually existing neoliberalism(s), since the 1970s, when the project has rarely spoken its name, academic critics and political foes resuscitated this terminology and began to define, place, and position neoliberalism. It is to this task to which we devote this chapter