Finding
This is sensible, but it also leaves one wondering what else is going on.
Paper
Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary
Citations: 13
Full textAbstract
view. Academic literatures on neoliberalism written in a critical Marxian vein do tend to stick to the narrow narrative of right-led neoliberalism that Humphrys outlines. But this is not true of academic accounts in general. One might also note that the term ‘‘neoliberalism’’ is not generalized across the human sciences (unsurprisingly, it is especially unpopular in economics) and, when it does appear, it is often between quotation marks and hedged with now-ritualized acknowledgments of the concept’s dubious analytical value. I would need to be persuaded that, beyond the academy, there is a popular narrative of neoliberalism that extends beyond socialist, democratic socialist, and other left-leaning circuits. None of this undermines the book’s contribution to our understanding of the historical political economy of Australia, however. A second concern, referenced above, is an approach to historical analysis that does not take up the question of how, from the perspective of the actor, old policies take on new meanings, especially as actors themselves and economic arrangements undergo rapid change. Policies like wage restraint, once initiated, are not frozen in place; what they mean, and the logic by which they are implemented, depends on how those with the power of interpretation and implementation understand what is possible and what is not. Humphrys’s analysis touches on financialization but does not say much about how financializing policies emerge alongside other neoliberal policy fare (privatization, deregulation. . . ) and does not adequately center the relationship between the wholesale transformation of the economic order and people’s understanding of it. On this kind of question an emphasis on state-led class rule, no matter how sophisticated theoretically, may obscure more than it clarifies. A final issue is that Humphrys’s analysis stays on familiar institutional terrain— parties, states, labor organizations—but doesn’t venture beyond it. This is sensible, but it also leaves one wondering what else is going on. How, more broadly, did Australian civil and democratic institutions change in the 1980s and 1990s—say, in terms of the kinds of people and organizations involved in policy deliberation and implementation, or in the world of nonprofits and media, or in how parties and campaigns operate? Given the importance of these sorts of institutions in other accounts of neoliberalism, one hopes that further scholarship will build on Humphrys’s work in order to address these questions.
Authors
C. Miller-Idriss
Journal
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews