Hi Daromir,

Nice to hear from you. I would love to hear more of your thoughts on this. I was just reading some stuff by Aihwa Ong you may be familiar with — she said, predictably enough, that neoliberalism is a portable technology of governance that translates itself differently in different contexts, but she still seemed attached to using the name “neoliberalism” to name a global phenomenon, which I think is what really should be in question. If neoliberalism is everywhere different, why categorize it with this global catch-all term?

On the other hand, I wasn’t aware that Hayek and Friedman were self-labeled “neoliberals” — I’ll try to check out the Foucault at some point. It’s interesting if ‘neoliberal’ has been a self-categorization and not only a pejorative categorization of the political Other (for lack of a better and less jargony way of putting it). I do know Strathern and Shore’s stuff — Shore in particular has a huge, decade-long research project that I am keeping up on. I saw from your website you do indonesia and went to berkeley/uchicago — what are you working on these days?

stay in touch, eli

This is an important and interesting contemporary problem and I am glad you are starting a discussion on it. I have quite a bit to say, but for the moment only had two quick reactions.

First, although I agree with you that it is massively misused and often misunderstood, I still find neoliberalism useful as an analytic simply because there were (and are) a significant and influential group of people who self-identified under that rubric, including Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. In his lectures on the the “Birth of Biopolitics” which recently came out in English, Michel Foucault does a nice genealogy of neoliberalism in which he not only shows how it is similar to (but different from liberalism), but also distinguishes German, French, and American variants. (The final one he somewhat clumsily, but probably accurately calls “anarcho-capitalism”!)

Second, in addition to the authors that you cited, you might want to check out work by Marilyn Strathern, Cris Shore, and Susan Wright on “Audit Cultures.” They do an extremely skillful job in illustrating how neoliberal techniques were implemented in academic settings and elsewhere in parts of western Europe.

Cheers,
Daromir

Thanks for posting these reflections. I provided a link to this piece in my comments to another post at USIH (here: http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2009/09/bleg-help-me-learn-about-late-twentieth.html).

– TL

I was so happy to come across your blog and website. Well done!

As you know, I think this question of neoliberalism in academic production is extremely important… I actually began to compose some thoughts as a response to your post here when I realized I was going on longer than the decorum of “a reply”.

So instead I’ve crafted a post over at my own blog (http://kevinkarpiak.wordpress.com) and linked to this post (hopefully the trackback will work).

In any case, exciting stuff!