Sorry to trigger you with a cartoon if they're your nemesis in section 1, but welcome to the first week of our new saga: The Enlightenment!
I know that neoliberalism is thrown around a lot in the GAMSAT community already and that a lot of you might have been told to incorporate it in your essays. Yes, it might be a little overdone, but I still wanted to address it as our research recommendation for this week, because if done well, incorporating a knowledge of how neoliberalism and liberalism impacts your topic (Task A or B), may come across very well in your essays. So, if you're going to do it, do it well.
What I'm about to describe is basically a summary of the first article that I have recommended, "The Uses and Abuses of Neoliberalism" from Dissent Magazine. If you are going to read anything, read it. The other day, my American Studies lecturer, Brendan O'Connor, described it as "the best essay written on neoliberalism of all time", so if you don't take my word for it, take his.
First of all, as always, some definitions:
Liberalism: Emerging in the nineteenth century, "throughout Europe and Latin America, liberal political parties stood for the maximization of economic and personal liberty: free trade, laissez-faire economies, weak states, and extended freedom of thought and conscience."
Liberalism was born during the Age of Enlightenment (our new saga topic) out of a backlash in Europe to replace old values of monarchical power, hereditary privilege, and religious conservatism with democracy and the rule of law.
Neoliberalism: Now this one is harder, because the term "neoliberalism" has actually been used to describe four different things at four different times. It first appeared in Britain in the 1980s, but came to be used throughout Latin America and Europe on and off throughout the last two centuries and has now firmly planted itself in the language of politics as a bit of a 'trend'. The four uses of the term are as follows:
(1) Finance capitalism: the needs of global capitalism that sustains itself on the free flow of capital, goods, disembedded labor, and market-friendly state policies.
(2) Market Fundamentalism: A strand of ideas to restructure late twentieth century economic thought around the paradigm of the efficient market.
(3) Disaster capitalism: A bundle of business-friendly policy measures implemented by the state during economic crises, such as Margaret Thatcher's austerity program and Ronald Reagan's tax cuts.
(4) A culture regime: The "governing rationality" (as Wendy Brown describes in Undoing the Demos, the second suggested resource below) of our times, which "spreads the model of the market to all domains and activities" and “configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus."
The last definition (4) is probably the one that most of us are familiar with and is what we can blame for the state becoming a firm, the university a business, and our lives as individuals seeming to be market commodities.
This is a summary of what Liberalism and Neoliberalism are, but I'd recommend you use this as a starting point to investigate how these forces impact on various economic, political, and social matters of modern day. We'll get further into the Enlightenment and what this all meant for the 19th century in the next coming weeks. Happy researching!
