Explaining (with) Neoliberalism

Abstract

The paper takes the form of a reflection on the explanatory status of neoliberalism, before and since the global crisis of 2008. Prior to the crisis, political-economic conceptions of neoliberalism as a hegemonic grid and as a relatively robust regime of state-facilitated market rule were being received with growing skepticism by some poststructural critics, while some ethnographers found the accompanying conceptual tools rather too blunt for their methodological purposes. The fact, however, that the global crisis—far from marking an inauspicious end to the regime of market rule—seems to have brought about something like a redoubling of its intensity and reach has prompted a reconsideration, in some quarters, of the explanatory and political status of neoliberalism. This, in turn, has opened up some new avenues of dialog between structural and poststructural treatments of neoliberalism, and between ethnographic and political-economic approaches, while at the same time highlighting a series of continuing tensions, both epistemological and ontological. The paper provides a critical commentary on this emerging terrain.

Extracto

Este artículo sirve de reflexión sobre el estado explicativo del neoliberalismo, antes y desde la crisis global de 2008. Antes de la crisis, los conceptos político-económicos del neoliberalismo, en forma de un entramado hegemónico y un régimen relativamente sólido de la ley del mercado facilitada por el Estado, eran recibidos con un creciente escepticismo por parte de algunos críticos postestructuralistas, mientras que algunos etnógrafos consideraban que las herramientas conceptuales complementarias no eran lo suficientemente precisas para sus objetivos metodológicos. Sin embargo, la crisis global—lejos de marcar un final desfavorable al régimen de la Ley del Mercado—parece haber causado un aumento en su intensidad y alcance, lo que ha llevado a reconsiderar en algunos círculos la explicación y el estado político del neoliberalismo. Esto, a su vez, ha abierto nuevas vías de diálogo entre los tratamientos estructurales y postestructurales del neoliberalismo, y entre los planteamientos etnográficos y político-económicos, resaltando al mismo tiempo una serie de tensiones continuas, tanto epistemológicas como ontológicas. Este artículo es una observación crítica sobre este terreno emergente.

本文反思新自由主义于2008年全球危机之前及之后的解释状态。在危机之前，政治经济学将新自由主义概念化为一种霸权网络，以及一个由国家促进的市场规则所构成的相对稳健之制度，但此一概念亦逐渐伴随着部分后结构批评的质疑，而民族志研究者亦发现，其所附带的概念化工具，对于达到他们的方法论目的而言显得过于拙钝。但与市场规则制度的终结相反的是，此一全球危机事实上似乎再次强化了市场规则的强度与广度，因而在一些地方促发了对于新自由主义的解释及政治状态的重新考量。此一趋势因而开创了结构主义与后结构主义新自由主义取径之间、以及民族志与政治经济学取径之间的崭新对话途径，却也同时突显了认识论与本体论层面一系列持续存在的紧张关係。本文便针对此一发展中的领域提出批判性的评论。

Résumé

Cet article constitue une réflexion du statut explicatif du néolibéralisme avant et après la crise mondiale de 2008. Avant la crise, certains critiques post-structuraux considéraient avec un scepticisme croissant des notions politico-économiques du néolibéralisme comme un réseau hégémonique et un régime relativement solide de l’économie de marché d’État, tandis que des ethnographes considéraient les outils qui les accompagnaient plutôt peu tranchants quant à leurs fins méthodologiques. Cependant, le fait que la crise mondiale—loin de mettre une fin de mauvaise augure à l’économie de marché—semble nécessiter que l'on redouble, plus ou moins, son intensité et sa portée a provoqué un réexamen dans certains milieux du statut explicatif et politique du néo-libéralisme. À son tour, cela a ouvert de nouvelles pistes de dialogue entre les traitements structuraux et post-structuraux du néolibéralisme, et entre les façons ethnographiques et politico-économiques, tout en soulignant également une série de tensions à la fois épistémologique et ontologique. L'article fournit une analyse critique de ce débat naissant.

Keywords:

• Neoliberalism
• political economy
• poststructuralism
• ethnography

INTRODUCTION: DEFLATING NEOLIBERALISM?

Neoliberalism has always been an unloved, rascal concept, mainly deployed with pejorative intent, yet at the same time apparently increasingly promiscuous in application. For some, it is the spider at the center of the hegemonic web that is worldwide market rule. For others, it is a bloated, jumbo concept of little utility, or worse, a cover for crudely deterministic claims tantamount to conspiracy theorizing or closet structuralism. Poststructuralist critics, even those that use the term, are wont to argue with some justification that the concept of neoliberalism is too often ‘inflated’ or ‘overblown’ (Collier, 2012; Dean, 2012), and that it is frequently deployed in a manner that less than convincingly ‘accelerates’, in explanatory terms, from specific circumstances to large claims (Latour, 2007). The advent, successively, of the Wall Street crash, the Great recession, and the age of austerity have amongst their many other consequences thrown the explanatory chips into the air once again. These events manifestly did not mark the end of neoliberalism, as a contradictory regime of market-centric rule, and neither have they resulted in the retirement of the associated, still-emergent concept, which has barely reached middle age on many counts. Premature announcements of the death of neoliberalism, in the thick of the financial crisis, proved to be variously wishful and deceitful, though the crypto-regulationist contention that neoliberalism was passing into its zombie phase—spasmodically lurching in roughly the same direction, anti-socially pursuing many of the same warm-blooded targets, but largely dead from the neck up, as a program of intellectual and moral leadership (Peck, 2009)—seems to have retained a certain morbid currency.

In the political-economic twilight world that has been taking shape ‘after’ the crisis, it appears that neoliberalism—both as a political-economic-cultural phenomenon, and as an explanatory concept—has not gone away, but neither does it remain what it was. The sobering failure, to date anyway, of postneoliberal ‘alternatives’ to gain much meaningful traction, either extra-locally or in mainstream discourse, has meant that neoliberalism appears to have scored a most audacious (yet at the same time hollow) victory. It now sits as a lonely occupant of an ideological vacuum largely of its own making. In this afterlife, the arch-advocates of market reform in the global power centers may sound somewhat more circumspect, their rhetorical hubris, intellectual cant, and technocratic self-assurance having been tempered, but for the most part they remain in post. As Centeno and Cohen (2012, p. 312) conclude, in their recent survey of the perplexing arc of market rule, ‘[t]he crisis and ensuing Great Recession may have shaken neoliberalism's supremacy, but it remains unchallenged by serious alternatives and continues to shape post-2008 policy.’

Many of these policies—hewing toward the familiar line of regulatory restraint, privatization, rolling tax cuts, and public-sector austerity—are in fact being pursued in an even more sternly necessitarian fashion than before. After doubling up, neoliberalism has doubled down. This unmistakable doggedness itself commands a certain kind of attention, even for those who might have preferred just to be rid of the concept. But in truth, explanations of neoliberalism have been evolving along with their mutating explanandum. Evidence of what looks like an ideological resurgence of a brusquely renovated version of neoliberalism, coupled with the roughly simultaneous arrival of probing intellectual histories that have leavened the old conspiracy theories with some new conspiracy facts (see Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Jones, 2012), has led some to contemplate a grudging recuperation of the concept. More skeptical than most, perhaps, of ‘leftist Don Quixotes tilting at ideological windmills’, Dean's perceptive tour of the post-crisis horizon reaches the conclusion that neoliberalism must now be correctly seen as ‘a militant thought collective, many of whose innovations and ideas have become embedded in the techniques of various regimes of national and international government over the last thirty years’ (2012, p. 69, 86).

Yet there remains a certain unease about the explanatory status of the concept of neoliberalism, perhaps amplified by what for most critics is an essentially unwanted, continued relevance. As Hall has reflected,

The term ‘neo-liberalism’ is not a satisfactory one … Intellectual critics say the term lumps together too many things to merit a single identity; it is reductive, sacrificing attention to internal complexities and geo-historical specificity. I sympathize with this critique. However, I think there are enough common features to warrant giving it a provisional conceptual identity, provided this is understood as a first approximation. Even Marx argued that analysis yields understanding at different levels of abstraction and critical thought often begins with a ‘chaotic’ abstraction; though we then need to add ‘further determinations’ in order to ‘reproduce the concrete in thought’. I would also argue that naming neo-liberalism is politically necessary to give the resistance to its onward march content, focus and a cutting edge. (2011, p. 706)

The fact that the meaning, and in some quarters the very existence, of neoliberalism continues to be debated, several decades after its ascendancy as a (euphemistically styled) governmental project, and almost as long after the term's lagged emergence as a social-scientific signifier, must be telling us something.

Is neoliberalism, as more ‘inflationist’ accounts tend to have it, an expansive and adaptable ideological project, jointly constituted with prevailing forms of financialized capitalism, a project that variously frames, legitimates, and necessitates a paradigmatic package of policies? (Here, neoliberalism represents a codification of the prevailing rules of the globalizing-capitalist game.) Or does it designate but one strand of a diffuse complex of individualized post-social governmentalities, a never more than small-n, flexible assemblage of technologies, routines, and modes of conduct, as more ‘deflationist’ and particularized analyses are more inclined to argue? (Here, neoliberalism is but one transformative pulse among many, and not necessarily the dominant one.) Does it really define the principal ideological power grid of the contemporary world, or is its invocation a manifestation of post-Keynesian yearning, a consolatory figment of the left-structuralist imagination? These are not trivial, or merely semantic, questions. If neoliberalism really has risen again, following its near-death experience the Wall Street crash of 2008, and if its lingering aftermath has yet to give rise to a recognizable ‘postneoliberal’ successor, what is to be made of the austere netherworld that the increasingly normalized crisis has apparently wrought? What (renovated) conceptions of neoliberalism might be put to work in such circumstances? And how might they be put to work?

In pursuit of these questions, the paper proceeds in four steps. First, some of the conditions of ‘actually still existing’ neoliberalism, in this post-crisis afterlife, are briefly examined. Next, by way of a retro-methodological reflection on the politics of Thatcherism, and contending accounts of those politics then and now, some critical questions are raised about ‘catch-all’ explanatory maneuvers, even under conditions of neoliberal hegemony. Third, moving toward the definition of more positive methodological (pro)positions, an argument is sketched for situating processes of neoliberalization within ‘discrepant’ formations—which, it is suggested, more closely resemble their normal, rather than exceptional, conditions of existence. A fourth section takes this a step further, proposing that neoliberalism, whether or not it is understood to be hegemonic, must be theorized amongst its others—that is, amongst others of neoliberalism that are not only elsewhere and ‘out there’, but also right here, side by side in mongrel forms of market rule, and amongst others to neoliberalism, its various competitors, would-be successors, and alternatives. This entails some rethinking of neoliberalism ‘inside/out’, with particular implications for the conduct of (critical) urban and regional studies, both methodologically and politically (cf. Peck et al., forthcoming). Finally, the paper is concluded with a comment on the longing to get over neoliberalism, which might be considered to be a scholarly as well as social condition in these twilight times.

NEOLIBERALISM: UNDEAD

One some counts, it lasted barely six months. That was the length of the ideological service interruption experienced in the global power centers, when the Wall Street crash of 2008 shorted out some of the primary circuits of financialized capitalism. For a while, this temporary power failure was deeply disorienting, not least for those corporate, financial, and media elites whose actions were amongst the proximate causes of the overload. There followed a brief fling, in mainstream circles, with alternative rationalities, ruses, and remedies, as even Keynes was exhumed, if not entirely rehabilitated, as a justification for once again saving capitalism from the capitalists (see Peck et al., 2010; Blyth, 2013). The ‘system’ duly saved, almost entirely at public expense and with hardly any strings attached, it was not long before business was being conducted almost as usual in the epicenters of the crisis in Washington, New York, and London. The moment of ideological free-fall, which had begun in the Fall of 2008, quickly passed into a normalized crisis, managed in the barely reformed terms of a neoliberal resettlement. By the time of the London G20 summit in April 2009, as the Guardian's Larry Elliot (2011, p. 22) later observed, the ‘flirtation with alternative thinking was over’, global elites having ‘returned to the pre-crisis mindset with remarkable speed’. Never mind that (even) internal assessments would not only reveal, but effectively confess to, debilitating levels of ‘groupthink’ and ‘intellectual capture’ in multilateral agencies like the International Monetary Fund (see IEO-IMF, 2011), very little had changed.

What might be incautiously labeled ‘the system’ was brazenly rebooted with more or less the same ideological and managerial software, complete with most of the bugs that had caused the breakdown in the first place. And even in the midst of neoliberalism's unlikely reincarnation, there were ominous signs that its post-crisis mutations might be yet more anti-social than their predecessors, imposing the rule of markets in more intensely disciplinarian ways, and substituting still more coercive and necessitarian strategies for the politics of consent and compromise. A new normal was taking shape, as the costs of restructuring and insecurity were visited (once again) on the poor and the vulnerable, as austerity programming, entitlement cutbacks, and radical reforms of the public sector were once again raised to the status of non-negotiable imperatives. The watchwords in the western economies at the center of the crisis have since been growth restoration, deficit reduction, and budgetary restraint, but macroeconomic conditions have remained dangerously sluggish on both sides of the Atlantic.

The period of panic-induced ‘stimulus’ having apparently passed, both Europe and the USA have been resorting to internally administered forms of structural adjustment amid growing evidence that this is merely perpetuating the anemic and faltering conditions of ‘recovery’. In the USA, budget debates in Washington are more and more resonant of the End Times, stalemated between anti-tax nihilism on one side and concession bargaining on the other, while fiscal discipline is ‘devolved’ downward onto cities and states (Peck, 2012). Hovering on the brink of a currency crisis, Europe has been imposing long-term austerity measures on the lagging economies of the Mediterranean, while tightening public-spending spigots just about everywhere else. In the process, the financial crisis seems to be ‘transforming the European Union overnight’, as Kalb (2012, p. 318) has caustically put it, ‘from a self-declared civic alternative for US-style capitalism into a transnational debt collection agency’.

Widespread public opposition to post-crisis austerity measures and cuts to social programs has brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets of European cities, perhaps most conspicuously in the indignados protests in Spain. Initially, the grassroots response in the USA could hardly have been more different, as the tea-party movement's fiscal fundamentalists rallied to the noble cause of tax cuts and deregulation, demanding even less government, not more. But the subsequent electoral resurgence of the Republican Party,¹ coupled with the timidity-cum-paralysis that gripped the first-term Obama Administration, would promptly generate gyrations and counter-movements of its own. The US Republicans seem to have overplayed their hand, suffering a humbling defeat in the 2012 Presidential elections, while retaining belligerent control of Congress, and caught between the unruly spirits of the tea-party caucus and the unforgiving arithmetic of a practically stalled legislative process. The Democrats, on the other hand, have the hollow victory of (narrow) electoral advantage in the absence of a governing program. Meanwhile, the proudly leaderless Occupy movement funneled dissent toward systemic forms of socioeconomic inequality and the predatory behavior of financial, corporate, and governing elites, helping to stimulate a belated but still-inconclusive public dialog around a wide array of alternatives. (The next steps, however, remain unclear.) Tens of thousands marched against public-sector cuts and union busting in Wisconsin. The incomplete revolutions across the Arab world might be considered more-or-less distant precursors to these social mobilizations, although their political consequences are clearly far from straightforwardly additive—or for that matter predictable. Something similar might be said about the now-daily uprisings against dispossession and exploitation across China. Perhaps these really do amount to a ‘global mass upheaval in fragments’ (Kalb, 2012, p. 318), but viewed as a potentially anti-systemic movement, the whole has yet to exceed the sum of the parts. As Davis has reflected on the turbulent protest politics of 2011:

As the fates of previous journées révolutionnaires warn us, spring is the shortest of seasons, especially when the communards fight in the name of a ‘different world’ for which they have no real blueprint or even idealized image […] But perhaps that will come later. For the moment, the survival of the new social movements—the occupiers, the indignados, the small European anti-capitalist parties and the Arab new left—demands that they sink deeper roots in mass resistance to the global economic catastrophe, which in turn presupposes—let's be honest—that the current temper for ‘horizontality’ can eventually accommodate enough disciplined ‘verticality’ to debate and enact organizing strategies. It's a frighteningly long road just to reach the starting points of earlier attempts to build a new world. But a new generation has at least bravely initiated the journey. (2011, p. 5)

Meanwhile, many of the same hands remain on the levers of power; indeed, the grip may in some ways be even tighter. In distributional terms, neoliberal reformers have largely prevailed in the initial stages of their freshly hatched plans for social-state retrenchment and enforced austerity. And what is austerity, Blyth (2013) asks, if not a program of large-scale regressive redistribution? Much of the opposition is understandably defensive—more a politics of protest than a counter-paradigm in the making—which may be sharply focused in its critical opposition to neoliberalism but remains diffuse and inchoate when it comes to alternatives. There is cold comfort, moreover, in the massive imbalances in the global economy, where desperate efforts to maintain export-led growth across the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies remain precariously reliant on indebtedness and productive hollowing out across the world's final markets, and where endemic problems of social and ecological unsustainability remain largely unaddressed. Meanwhile, the late-neoliberal ‘freedoms’ conferred on corporations and financial speculators continue to be actively defended as the only legitimate (or practical) means of growth restoration by national governments in Washington, London, and elsewhere. In the name of markets, corporate monopolization continues to deepen …

These highly asymmetrical conditions, of hegemonic rearmament on the one hand and inchoate resistance on the other, seem to broadly affirm those first readings of the initial fallout of the Wall Street crash and the Great Recession, that this conjuncture was not immediately propitious for ideological regime change—for all the evident culpability of the bankers and (de)regulators. Rather than an imminent, postneoliberal turn to the left and to renewed social-statism, the crisis seemed set to play into the hands of established corporate, financial, and political interests, setting the stage for a host of reactionary responses and presentational makeovers (see Bond, 2009; Peck et al., 2010). Second readings may have been somewhat more circumspect, though the optimism of the progressive intellect remains distinctly tempered. When Colin Crouch (2011, p. 179) rhetorically asks, ‘what remains of neoliberalism after the financial crisis’, his soberly delivered answer is ‘virtually everything’. While the neoliberal model has been undeniably tarnished, the social structure on which the program was predicated, Crouch maintains, is still largely intact (in marked contrast, it should be noted, to the broadly simultaneous crises of Keynesianism, a generation ago, as a governing ideological project, as a dominant mode of economic science, and as an institutionalized social contract). Crouch's worldly conclusion, from what is a broadly transatlantic vantage point, is that the realistic scope for (moderately) progressive politics hardly exceeds the goal of moderating the most egregious excesses of the entrenched neoliberal nexus of corporate, financial, and market power. Some reboot of the third way is, realistically, what is on offer here.

Alternatively (quite literally, one might say), Emir Sader's view from Latin America, while no less worldly in its own way, sees the potential for incrementally opening up a series of pragmatically postneoliberal pathways, where these can be constructed on the foundations of ‘transitional’ social settlements, such as those that have been developing in Brazil. For Sader (2011, p. 104), ‘grasp[ing] the reality of the existing political landscape’ means focusing strategically on ‘where the right is located and the dangers it poses’, rather than ‘confus[ing] a moderate, contradictory ally [such as the Brazilian Workers’ Party] with the real enemy’. Correspondingly, he maintains that the challenge for a renewed, broad left is to pursue struggles that are ‘anti-neoliberal in the sense of combatting all forms of submission to the market [but also] post-neoliberal in [promoting] alternatives centered on the public sphere’; and that are strategically targeted on a ‘refounding of the state’ (Sader, 2011, pp. 105, 132). Reclaiming the state, however, remains a controversial strategy in many left circles, where more energy seems to be focused on grassroots and ‘horizontalist’ efforts, usually outside (and antagonistic to) formal structures (see Wainwright, 2003; Harvey, 2012).

If there is a familiar ring to post-crisis restatements of the nefarious logic of neoliberalism, it must be acknowledged that the dialog around alternatives also seems to be stuck in the same grooves. More than postneoliberal pipedreams, these must confront the fact that alternative designs (whether reformist or radical, pragmatic or utopian) must in some way or other gain traction on the inhospitable terrain of the now. Yet more prosaically, they must also confront—from what at this remove looks more and more like a Wall Street correction, rather than a serious ideological rupture—the possibility that neoliberalism may not, in fact, meet its ultimate end by disappearing into an apocalyptic black hole of its own construction. Neoliberalism's rude return from what was widely interpreted, for a time anyway, as a terminal event—a very public financial crisis, striking at its central nervous system—represents a sobering lesson about both the dogged persistence of market rule and the challenges of effecting various kinds of progressive turn. Perhaps neoliberal policy preferences are now just too deeply embedded in the dominant circuits of corporate, financial, and political power? Perhaps the array of progressive alternatives is destined to remain, in the short- to medium-term at least, too disparate and isolated, advocated by social forces generally short on political leverage, strategic capacity, and institutional resources? Recurring questions such as these, it must be said, are finding few compelling answers.

Meanwhile, many are interpreting these dispiriting conditions as a lurch backwards to a different kind of neoliberal future. In countries like the USA and the UK, where some may have thought they had seen the worst of neoliberalism's excesses, attacks on the social state are being pursued with new-found fervor. A US Republican Party that moved sharply to the neoliberal right during the Reagan years has continued to hurtle in this direction, first through the Gingrich realignment of the 1990s and then further still under the influence of the tea party/Fox News/Grover Norquist axis. President Obama may have raised a laugh, at the Democratic Convention, by parodying the Republicans' anti-tax fundamentalism, though the Democrats' own forms of triangulated timidity on these questions—as measured in action, rather than merely in words—might also have prompted some self-satisfied smirks on the other side:

Our friends at the Republican convention were more than happy to talk about everything they think is wrong with America, but they didn't have much to say about how they'd make it right. [A]ll they have to offer is the same prescription they've had for the last thirty years:

Have a surplus? Try a tax cut.

Deficit too high? Try another. (LAUGHTER)

Feel a cold coming on? Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning.² (APPLAUSE)

In Britain, where even third-way accretions of Blairite neoliberalism are being rolled back, the reserves of gallows humor may be running low. As John Harris (2011, p. 29), a commentator for the Guardian, has forlornly asked, ‘If you're old enough to remember the Thatcher years, you may have an answer to this question, but it's still worth asking: in living memory, have thousands of us on the left ever felt so bleak?’

WHAT THATCHER DID

‘I blame Thatcher’ was an almost reflexive retort on the British left in the 1980s, since passing into cliché status. Beyond its function as a mobilizing slogan, the phrase also performed explanatory work, of a kind. It pointed unambiguously, of course, to a root cause, personalizing and politicizing at the same time. By implication, it suggested a remedy for various ills that (at least in principle) was simple: remove Thatcher and then … Whatever the depressing explanandum (the deindustrialization of northern Britain, management failure across the public services, the social breakdown of inner-city communities, or ‘loadsamoney’ loutishness in the South East of England), ‘I blame Thatcher’ could serve as a universally applicable and pithy explanans. However, setting aside for the moment the question of the proper positioning of Thatcherism in the long and geographically checkered history of transnational neoliberalization, its meaning and salience as a political-economic and cultural phenomenon divided even the most astute analysts of the time (Jessop et al., 1988; Hall and Jacques, 1989; Skidelsky, 1989). Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop have since agreed that Thatcherite neoliberalism has been the dominant, if not defining, force in British politics since the 1970s, though they differ on the extent of its cultural hegemony (Hall characterizes Thatcherism as ‘epochal’, in that it established a new political stage; Jessop insists that British neoliberalism has been more unstable, less consensual), and they continue to disagree over the role of historical and external constraints on the effective availability of governing strategies, which Jessop emphasizes and Hall downplays (Hall, 2003; Jessop, 2004). They also diverge on the question of whether the New Labour project of Blair and Brown represented an asymmetrical hybrid of neoliberalism and social democracy, in effect an attenuated form of Thatcher's ‘full-blown’ neoliberalism (Hall, 2003), or the contradictory consolidation of neoliberal accumulation strategies and ameliorative socioinstitutional ‘flanking’, secured in conjunction with a deformed resurrection of Christian socialism (Jessop, 2004). Even now, the question of what Thatcher did remains contested.

What does seem to be clear, however, is that neither she, nor her successors, were acting alone. Neoliberalization, even when it is dominant, never secures a monopoly. As a frontal project, it always exists amongst its others, usually antagonistically. So Thatcher forged a governing strategy across the fault lines of neoliberalism and traditional British Toryism and little-Englander anti-Europeanism; Blair reworked the interface between an inherited neoliberal settlement and social democracy or Christian socialism (take your pick), while separating from the labor movement; and Cameron's coalition since 2010 can be seen as a volatile cocktail of Blairism and Thatcherism, remixed in the context of weak leadership and even more deeply financialized times. Meanwhile, the institutions of the British welfare state (and its allies) did not disappear altogether, even if they have been relentlessly eroded and restructured for more than three decades now. Neoliberalism has evidently been much more than a sinewy presence here, but its shapes have kept shifting and it has never been the only occupant of the political stage.

As a result, although this may be analytically inconvenient, neoliberalism can only be found amongst its others, in a state of messy coexistence. Likewise, the contemporary cry, ‘Neoliberalism did it’, should never be taken at face value as an omnibus ‘first cause’ (Tickell and Peck, 2003, p. 179; Ferguson, 2010, p. 171), since it will always be found amongst other causes, not to say other culprits, while both its form and consequences can only be revealed in conjuncturally specific ways. ‘Globalization’ often performs this questionable role as first or primary cause in more orthodox analyses (cf. Piven, 1995, on ‘globaloney’); there is no excuse for propagating parallel forms of ‘neoliberaloney’, as a kind of all-determining mega-cause, bluntly attributed. Establishing causality necessitates the specific consideration of cases, conjunctures, and contexts, no less in situations where neoliberalism is understood to be incipient or subordinate, as in some analyses of contemporary China (cf. Nononi, 2008; Chu and So, 2010), than in those where it is considered to be dominant, normalized, or to occupy the leading position (cf. Gamble, 1988; Hall, 2011). The evocation of ‘hybridity’ in this context is more than a poststructuralist tic, but an indicator of the inescapably impure forms in which neoliberalizing tendencies are found.

Since neoliberalization is always an incomplete process (and frustrated yet frontal project), these circumstances of contradictory cohabitation represent the rule, rather than the exception. Chronically uneven spatial development, institutional polymorphism, and a landscape littered with policy failures, oppositional pushbacks, and stuttering forms of malregulation are all consequently par for neoliberalism's zigzagging course; incomplete or partial neoliberalization is not some way-station on the path to complete neoliberalism, so it represents a category error to evaluate neoliberalism against the yardstick of absolute market rule (Brenner et al., 2010). As a result, cities, regions, or countries must not be classified in the wrongheaded terms of ‘degrees’ of neoliberalization, as if lined up on an historic (down?) escalator ‘full’ neoliberalism. Neoliberalism may be present in this or that regional formation. It may even be almost omnipresent. But it can only be present in conjuncturally hybrid forms. Statistically, there may be a good chance that ‘neoliberalism did it’, where this historically specific mode of market rule is hegemonic or dominant, but the contextual circumstances of such acts are more than background scenery, since neoliberalism is never found alone and it never acts alone. Even hegemonies, Stuart Hall reminds us, are incomplete and contradictory.

[I]s neo-liberalism hegemonic? Hegemony is a tricky concept and provokes muddled thinking. No project achieves a position of permanent ‘hegemony’. It is a process, not a state of being. No victories are final. Hegemony has constantly to be ‘worked on’, maintained, renewed and revised. Excluded social forces, whose consent has not been won, whose interests have not been taken into account, form the basis of counter-movements, resistance, alternative strategies and visions … and the struggle over a hegemonic system starts anew. They constitute what Raymond Williams called ‘the emergent’—and the reason why history is never closed but maintains an open horizon towards the future … Neo-liberalism is in crisis. But it keeps driving on. However, in ambition, depth, degree of break with the past, variety of sites being colonized, impact on common sense and everyday behaviour, restructuring of the social architecture, neo-liberalism does constitute a hegemonic project. (Hall, 2011, pp. 727–728)

The manner in which neoliberalism has kept ‘driving on’, at least so far, is in this respect never preordained. And in real-time analyses of urban and regional restructuring, an (analytical) context in which ‘neoliberalism’ is now regularly invoked—clearly too regularly for some—if and how particular events, actions or movements are connected to the contradictory reproduction of neoliberal hegemony must always be an empirical and political question. The establishment of straight-line connections to a singular global Neoliberalism represent more than analytical shortcuts, in this context; they also misrepresent the constructed and contradictory nature of neoliberalization as a transformative process.

Even those skeptical of the claim that neoliberalism represents a globally hegemonic ‘common sense’ (cf. Harvey, 2005), can perhaps accept the proposition that a ‘common thread’ (Hall, 2003, p. 22) has been identifiable for some time, across a whole raft of political-economic, social, and cultural (trans)formations. This would include the somewhat cumulative ideological/institutional realignments of the Thatcher–Blair–Cameron, Reagan–Clinton–Bush–Obama, or the Deng–Jiang–Hu kind, in which the strategies of each successor borrow selectively from and react selectively against those before them; but it would also extend to the relational interpenetration of governing logics and routines, across sites and territories, through such means as structural adjustment, normative isomorphism, and competitive discipline, across transnational space. Whether one leans toward heavily qualified readings of neoliberalism-as-contextualized exception, or bolder notions of neoliberalization-as-common-process, some of these lines of connection and ‘cross-formation’ are widely recognized. Analytically, however, the next steps can be quite divisive.

In fact, it is almost as if there is a fork in the road, between those who would take a political-economic or macroinstitutionalist path and those pursuing more particularized approaches, often in a poststructuralist and/or ethnographic vein (with the latter being different paths to the usually more-provisional recognition of neoliberal influences or inflections in particular or localized settings). The former are inclined to emphasize extra-local disciplines and (always) ‘out there’ forces, expressed through structurally unequal power relations; the latter will tend to find neoliberalism, if at all, as just one of many pulses, in more frail and provisional forms, in closely observed ‘in here’ situations. For the former, neoliberalism possesses a structural and more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts quality, even as attention is duly paid to ‘the diversity of “actually existing” neoliberalisms, and why and how the diffuse system of power that lends them a certain unity has managed to implant itself with such apparent success in such a wide range of circumstances [across] both neoliberalism and its counter-movements’ (Gledhill, 2004, p. 336; see also Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Saad-Filho and Johnston, 2005). For the latter, pertinent questions are more reflexively defined, oftentimes self-consciously against those ‘paradigms that envision neoliberalism as a coherent, unitary force or treat it as a monolith acting upon the world [and] the project of identifying neoliberalism's unifying strands across disparate contexts’, and in favor of difference-finding approaches that foreground the ‘contingent, contradictory, and unstable character of neoliberal processes, examining historically and geographically contextualized situations through grounded studies of concrete places, people, and institutions’ (Tretjak and Abrell, 2011, p. 29; see also Ong, 2006; Kingfisher and Maskovsky, 2008a).

There are sound reasons to take such poststructuralist injunctions seriously, just as (for different but in some cases overlapping reasons) there is an indispensible role for investigations in various ethnographic registers. Despite more than a decade of efforts to develop constructive dialogs between these more context-rich, agent-centered, and difference-finding approaches on the one hand, and political-economic or macroinstitutional approaches on the other (see Larner, 2003; Peck, 2004), and notwithstanding some recent attempts to rethink the terms and terminology of such engagements (see Brenner et al., 2010; Dean, 2012; Fairbanks, 2012), for various reasons this division has been a recurring motif. Some prefer to tune out of what has been characterized as ‘[the] “normal science” for economic geography—studies of neoliberal this and that’ (Gibson-Graham, 2008, p. 620); others have observed that a neoliberal-centric position can inadvertently reproduce a narrowed analytical and political gaze (Leitner et al., 2007a). For a range reasons, though, there is a now a rather large catalog of studies of neoliberal this and that, loosely programmatic in character, which in turn are connected to various theoretical understandings of neoliberalism and neoliberalization, themselves also (and still) evolving.

If there is an analytical fault line here, this is exposed when more nuanced and contingent accounts come at the expense of an appreciation of the commonalities and connections across (‘local’) neoliberalisms; if they are positioned at an ironic distance from the more-than-local ideational and ideological constitution of neoliberalism qua hegemonic formation; or if they are detached from the normative networks, policy frames, and power relations that recursively secure the parameters for (or limits on) local or national action. There is, after all, surely little dispute, amongst critical analysts, that neoliberalism remains a ‘thwarted totalization’ (Kingfisher and Maskovsky, 2008b, p. 118), and that the vagaries of neoliberal policy depart routinely and raggedly from the pristine vision of neoliberal ideology (Ferguson, 2010, p. 171).³ Indeed, Kingfisher and Maskovsky (2008a, p. 119) characterize their approach, constructively, not as the antithesis but the ‘flipside’ of Gledhill’s (2004) stated project of tracing connections and commonalities across different cultural formations, seeking to place these analytical traditions in conversation rather than merely in tension (see also Fairbanks, 2012). In other situations, however, this can flip over into more practiced ambivalence, invoking neoliberalism effectively as a foil, at arm's length and in scare quotes, where exceptionalist-particularist readings of small-n neoliberalism are set up as weakly contingent formulations of an under-specified other, in a field of unpatterned difference, against the (mis)conception of a ‘uniform global condition of “Neoliberalism” writ large’ (Ong, 2006, p. 14, 2007), sometimes concretized as American capitalism.

The comparative advantage of close-focus, experience-near, low-flying methods is their facility for finding and placing neoliberalism in muddy hybrids, in fraught and often frustrated forms of partial or distorted realization. They bring neoliberalism to earth, in all kinds of ways, both literally and metaphorically (see Collier, 2011; Fairbanks, 2012). Here, pulses and traces of neoliberalizing tendencies are deeply contextualized, often in quite idiosyncratic ‘local’ formations. On the other hand, such accounts typically have less to say about the (more macro and trans-local) context of this (more immediate and usually local) context. They are unable readily to address (and sometimes actually demur from) issues related to the spatial patterning and historical evolution of neoliberal strategies and fronts across cases and contexts; though they differ on the question of whether such macroanalytical work is a different-but-complementary exercise, or a worrisome structuralist hangover. Partly conceding this point, Collier quite reasonably counters that ‘[t]o say that [poststructuralist] approaches fail to grasp the “context of context” … or the “macro-spatial rules” that structure neoliberalisation processes’ is only an argument against doing so in a rather tautological sense, since it restates ‘the fact that a non-structural approach is a non-structural approach’ (2012, p. 189; cf. Brenner et al., 2010). But if supposed islands of hybrid neoliberal practice exist, at least in part, in mutual relation to one another, and if the reproduction of neoliberalism as a more-than-local regime of rules, disciplines, and incentives occurs, at least in part, through ‘out there’ circuits, domains, and logics (such as competitive pressure, prescriptive policy modeling, and fiscal constraints), then a non-structural approach, for all its other virtues, will be missing something if it is anti-structural, either by commission or omission.

In this respect, while there is a great deal to be gained from deeply contextualized and methodologically skeptical investigations that purposefully set out to put neoliberalism in its place (amongst other forces, formations, dynamics, and tendencies), there is much to be lost if such analyses reflexively spurn more abstract and/or macro formulations. It is not sufficient to stereotype analyses of the recurring, structural forms of neoliberalization processes—their more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts and more-than-local qualities—as no more than another invocation of the Big Picture (à la Latour, 2007, p. 187), and to follow this with the deliberately flattening questions, ‘in which movie theatre, in which art gallery is [this picture] shown? Through which optics is it projected?’ Problematizing the issues of how local neoliberalizations articulate with one another, of how family resemblances connect hybrid formations, of how mid-level and higher abstractions can be generated and interrogated, and of how macro patternings emerge across multiple cases and conjunctures is not merely a matter of ‘staging the totality’, as Latour puts it, of preemptively positioning every ‘local neoliberalism’ in a preconceived box, enslaved to an unchanging Master Narrative. Rather, it is a matter of confronting the question of how, in practice, market hegemonies are being continuously remade through uneven spatial development (not instead of it), and of recognizing the ways in which all such local formations are jointly constituted, not only with distant others but also with formative networks (for example, of technocratic expertise and policy norms) and differently scaled relations (for example, of a fiscal or geopolitical nature). Methodologically, it is unhelpful to be ‘voluntarily blind’ (Latour, 2007, p. 190) to such cumulative, multi-locale rationalities and to the constitutive outsides of neoliberalization processes, or to pass them off as merely Big Picture fantasies.

Just as it is never adequate to characterize neoliberalism only in reference to its fanciful self-representation, it is also misleading to position supposed deviations and exceptions only in relation to some imagined, overbearing norm (of Neoliberalism as rigid and mechanically imposed Global Hegemon), the very existence of which is effectively denied. The fear seems to be that the incautious capitalization of the phenomenon might bring on a bout of stealth-structuralism, sweeping all and sundry in its omnipotent sway, so protection is sought in the methodological swaddling of hyper-contingency. In the process, self-consciously small-n treatments of neoliberalism tend to render their local objects of analysis into conceptual and political orphans, separated from all of their ‘relatives’). Against such maneuvers, which are more likely to obfuscate the meaning and consequences of neoliberalism than they are effectively to position it, relative to actually existing variants and alternatives, process-based interpretations of neoliberalization seek to specify the patterning of contingencies across cases, with no expectation of imminent regulatory monopoly or incipient socioinstitutional convergence, just as they problematize uneven development itself as a (defining) characteristic of this process, not as a mere side-effect of ‘blocked’ liberalization. These approaches do not, however, presume that neoliberalism exists exclusively in ‘out there’, quasi-global settings, as if to play some sneaky neo-structuralist trump card. Rather, they propose, as a central methodological challenge, the problem of empirically connecting and dialectically relating ‘in here’ conditions, projects, struggles, and alternatives with ‘out there’ rule regimes, disciplinary pressures, competitive constraints, and so forth. Rather than floating offshore as a detached but all-determining superstructure, out-there neoliberalism is seen to be jointly constituted through all of the various in-heres, even as this more-than-local phenomenon can be shown to be disproportionately animated by certain centers of calculation and sites of conjunctural power. An additional aspect of this dialectical commitment, to always positioning the local, is an abiding skepticism concerning attempts detach or bracket off—for whatever reason—the in here from the out there.

As a restructuring paradigm and frontal ideological project with a global reach, neoliberalism cannot be separated from those extra-local domains that contribute to its reproduction, nor is it advisable to imply that neoliberalization is natural and normal in some places but an alien or aberrant presence in others. Neoliberalism is found, almost overwhelming empirical evidence now shows, in all manner of forms and formations, but it can never be found in a pristine state, implemented on a tabula rasa or social blank slate, in a fashion that is entirely unobstructed or unmediated. And there is no ideal type or institutional template against which hybrids can be singularly evaluated. The problematic of variegated neoliberalization (Brenner et al., 2010; Peck et al., forthcoming)—while hardly a receipt, admittedly, for an easy methodological life—entails the relational analysis of hybrids amongst other hybrids. More like an ideological parasite, neoliberalism both occupies and draws energy from its various host organisms—bodies politic ranging from post-Soviet states to East Asian developmental regimes and European welfare states—but it cannot, ultimately, live entirely without or outside them. (So again, the out-there and the in-here are jointly constituted—pretty much inescapably.) Understanding the effects of such ‘parasitical’ infections and mutations must involve the diagnostic study of many patients, not just a few of the more (or less) susceptible to the deregulatory bug. This also necessitates an understanding of the ‘ecological’ conditions and preconditions (cf. Jessop, 2000) that have enabled the emergence and spread of such viral forms, their favored sites of incubation, their swarming behavior, their modes of reproduction, and their various mutations.

NEOLIBERALISM IN DISCREPANT FORMATIONS

As a discrepant, contradictory, and shape-shifting presence, found in a wide range of political-economic settings, governance regimes, and social formations, neoliberalism will not be fixed. In some respects, it is more appropriate to define neoliberalism—or the process of neoliberalization—through its recurring contradictions and uneven realization than in reference to some presumed, transcendental essence (see Peck and Zhang, forthcoming). At its contradictory heart, as an ongoing process of regulatory transformation, lies the discrepancy between the galvanizing utopian vision of freedom through the market, discursively channeling competitive forces that are far from imaginary, and the prosaic realities both of earthly governance and endemic governance failure. Hence the now well-understood gulf between neoliberalism as ideology, as a strong discourse of market progress, and the much less prepossessing array of actually existing neoliberalisms (Bourdieu, 1998; Brenner and Theodore, 2002). In abstract terms, this gulf exists because the neoliberal worldview rests on the fundamentally mistaken understanding that it is possible somehow to ‘liberate’ markets from their various institutional moorings and social entanglements, to disembed and purify social life as (if) a projection of utilitarian rationality (Polanyi, 1944). In concrete terms, the gulf exists because neoliberal restructuring schemes, while often damagingly consequential, will always be incomplete. They are inescapably associated with negative externalities and with downstream consequences that prompt their own counter-flows, resistances, recalibrations, adjustments, alternative mobilizations, and occasional u-turns. And in their tendency to overreach and overflow (in the absence of a theoretical ‘brake’ on what are rolling programs of marketization, privatization, dispossession, deregulation, commodification …) will inadvertently prompt double-movement counteractions of various sorts. These counteractions, however, may be either regressive or progressive; and they may impede neoliberalization or enable its (nonlinear, adaptive) reproduction. In practice, the course of neoliberalization almost never describes a tidy arc from regulated to deregulated markets, or big government to smaller states, but is more likely to result in a plethora of gyrations across the terrains of social regulation.

The messiness of these revealed outcomes should not be naively taken as grounds for dispensing with theories of neoliberalization; on the contrary, it means that they are all the more necessary, and that they are necessarily contextual. But of course, critical theories of neoliberalization must not be confounded by what the neoliberal medicine doctors choose to write on their own bottles (‘Miracle cure: shrinks the state, grows the economy, frees the people!’). Neoliberalization cannot be reduced to a unidirectional process of enacting a master plan cooked up by Hayek and friends at their mountain resort in Mont Pelerin, deviations from which stand as variants or refutations of ‘neoliberal theory’. Neither should it be expected that processes of neoliberalization are working inexorably toward the ‘destination’ of a particular institutional formation, or that they express an incipiently coherent institutional logic (cf. Wacquant, 2012). Rather, the dynamic mapping of inescapably mongrel formations and mutative flows—that is, tracing the uneven spatial development of neoliberalization amongst its others—holds the key to understanding how neoliberalism has been reproduced, systematically, through discrepant formations (Peck, 2010; Peck and Theodore, 2012b). This is difficult, if not impossible, absent some appreciation of the distinctive hegemonic form of neoliberalism, as Hall (2011) has argued. Cahill likewise observes:

neoliberal doctrine is best understood as an ideology—a doctrine which provides only a partial representation of the world and whose misrepresentations mask material processes which benefit dominant class interests. When read as an ideology, a clearer picture can be formed of the relationships between neoliberal doctrine and the practices which have generally been labelled ‘neoliberal’. (2012, p. 177)

Cahill goes on to note three significant (and recurring) anomalies in subsequent neoliberal statecraft, where revealed practice diverges, time and time again, from the official script—that the aggregate ‘size’ state has not significantly been reduced since the 1970s; that the scope or reach of the state has been extended in some realms; and that there has been extensive recourse to coercive and authoritarian powers. His means of addressing this apparent paradox is a Polanyian one: ‘the discrepancy between neoliberal theory and practice [lies in] the failure of neoliberal theory to recognize the inherently socially embedded nature of the capitalist economy’ (Cahill, 2012, p. 115). The contradictions, in other words, are part of the package.

The fact that all neoliberal experiments are antagonistically embedded means that they can only exist as unstable, mongrel formations; in practice, there can be no ‘purebred’ neoliberalisms. Critical theories of neoliberalization must therefore be purposefully addressed to the contradictory dynamics between neoliberal theory and practice; neither purely abstract-ideational nor purely concrete-institutional analyses will alone suffice. Neoliberal theory will always be frustrated, yet at the same time it has the (demonstrated) capacity to inspire, direct, and prioritize programs of socioeconomic transformation and state restructuring; the effect is to invoke a utopian destination, even if this is unattainable, as a means to sustain a transformative direction in reform and restructuring efforts. (In so far as neoliberalism ‘works’, as a frontal ideological program, this appears to be its modus operandi.) Neoliberal practice necessarily diverges from this same (flawed) theory, yet it does not merely exist ‘downstream’ from the ideological commanding heights; neoliberal nostrums have been perpetually adjusted, strategically, in dialog with the vagaries of practice and comingled with others, even as they continue to resound to a certain matrix of idealized commitments. The contradictions, again, are part of the package.

On these grounds, one can support Hilgers’ (2012, p. 81) assertion that neoliberalism ‘can never be understood in radical separation from historical configurations’, even while questioning his earlier claim that it is only when neoliberalism touches down, in particular grounded formations, that it becomes properly the subject of anthropological investigation (Hilgers, 2011). As Collier (2012, p. 194) has countered, not only is it a self-limiting error to sequester ethnographic practice in such a way, there is ‘no reason that an anthropological investigation of neoliberalism as an original movement of thought … could not be linked to policy programmes, to trans-local channels of circulation carved by powerful institutions or peripatetic experts, [and] to patterns of adoption and adaptation in various countries and sectors’, even if these extra-local concerns have not been of paramount concern in the field to date. It is not that neoliberalism only becomes sociologically complex in grounded, local, and lived settings, while its founding principles and global logics can be somehow cordoned off as an automated realm of iron-clad economic laws and fixed philosophical principles. There is a need for no less situated and sociological analyses of the origins, tenets, and imperatives of neoliberalism—before, ‘above’, outside, and beyond this or that ‘local’ configuration, actually existing neoliberalism, hybrid assemblage, etc.—and although Collier (2012, p. 194), for his part, is skeptical that these are ‘reconcilable’ with more structural accounts of neoliberalism, to rule out what could be a fruitful conversation seems like another form of sequestering (cf. Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Peck, 2010). If exceptionalist local studies of hybrid neoliberalism really are incompatible with understandings of the phenomenon-cum-process in cross-situation, more-than-local terms, or if such studies can only be positioned at ironic distance from (or in nondialectical tension with) processual understandings, then perhaps they are using the wrong terminology?

‘Template’ models of neoliberalism have been rightly questioned by structural and non-structural analysts alike (see Brenner et al., 2010; Peck et al., forthcoming). It follows that the problematic of neoliberalization is never ‘quite as simple as lining up a list of attributes of neoliberalism, such as privatization, deregulation and the limited state, and showing whether or not they correspond to the current “institutional reality” of state’ (Dean, 2012, p. 75). As a rolling and somewhat revolutionary program of macrosocial and macroinstitutional transformation, neoliberalization acts on and through these institutional landscapes; this is not a static neoliberalism, a classificatory category that can be cleanly determined to be more or less commensurate with different state or social forms. It follows that theorizing more or less exclusively within the domain of concrete state or social forms, or in the realm of hybrid assemblages, can only generate partial explanations. It may indeed be wise to heed the Foucauldian injunction that neoliberalism should not be presumed to display unity or coherence as a governing doctrine-cum-political program; yet a reflexive presumption of disarticulated incoherence hardly stands as a meaningful methodological axiom. As Dean has recently reflected,

the most significant limitation of the early governmentality approach to neoliberalism is the very concept of ‘advanced liberalism’ itself. [I]ntellectual historians have established that neoliberalism can be regarded as a thought collective with a frontal character and indeed a social and political movement. The enduring significance of that movement and the degree of its coherence qua movement is something which is systematically underestimated by approaching ‘advanced liberalism’ as simply a diverse and contingent ‘assemblage’ of techniques and rationalities bearing at best a ‘family resemblance’. (2012, p. 79)

There is a parallel risk in those low-flying approaches that effectively prioritize deviations from a supposed (big-N Neoliberal) global norm, focusing on ostensibly more distant hybrid forms, while remaining deeply ambivalent (or even antagonistic) to political-economic conceptions of neoliberalism. Such approaches risk methodological myopia if they are dismissive of, or blind to, cross-local patternings, to recurrent strategies, to extra-local constraints, incentives and disciplines—simply lumping these into the indefensible bogey-category of ‘monolithic’ conceptions of Neoliberalism (cf. Peck and Tickell, 2012). The risk that they run is one of systematically underestimating the frontal and programmatic character of the neoliberal offensive, by reducing it to even less than the sum of its parts. This, as George W Bush might have said, would be to ‘misunderestimate’ neoliberalism.

After all, for all its mixed achievements on the ground, the hegemonic grip of neoliberal ideology continues to be manifest in the form of unrelenting political pressure for market-oriented and voluntarist modes of governance, based on the principles of devolved and outsourced responsibility, along with a correspondingly circumscribed regulatory solution space. (This is how neoliberalism frames, brackets, and preemptively narrows the field of the politically visible and tractable.) It follows that invocations of (dynamic) neoliberalization rather than (static) neoliberalism represent more than analytical sophistry; rather, they seek to capture the underlying character of this transformative process, as a ‘directional’ and not a ‘destinational’ form of liberal-capitalist political economy. (This is one reason why the Gramscian metaphor of the hegemonic front seems appropriate in this context.) This may also help to explain the mood, or temper, of the neoliberal reformer—endlessly frustrated, impatient, seeing (potential) setbacks at every turn and socialist-interventionists under every bed, and as a result always (re)targeting obstacles to, and opponents of, the rolling program of market-oriented transformation. History may ultimately judge neoliberalism, as a result, as rather more efficacious in dismantling and disabling alien and contesting social formations (like collective provisions, systems of social redistribution, planning regimes) than in effectively sustaining its self-identified Jerusalem of market freedoms. Denied their utopian destination, pathways of neoliberalization invariably describe a vagarious and crisis-strewn course, markedly away from preceding social formations, such as the developmental state or Keynesian-welfare state, but hardly describing some beeline to the neoliberal nirvana. Hence the significance of Hayek's portrayal of neoliberalism as a ‘flexible credo’, and Milton Friedman's recurrent complaint that the aggregate size of government has been extremely difficult, historically speaking, to shrink. By virtue of the radical non-availability of the destinational dream of the zero-state society, one of absolute deregulation and unsullied market freedom, neoliberal reformers are condemned to dwell in the purgatories of governance. Their guiding philosophy provides a framework for action in these circumstances (which is why they repeat many of the same mistakes), but it delivers few (if any) sustainable solutions.

This is a principal reason for the messiness, and incompleteness, of trajectories of neoliberal restructuring. And it also accounts for the fact that neoliberalism has never been associated with a fixed policy repertoire or tendential institutional core, but instead improvises within ideological and fiscal parameters, resorting routinely to experimentation, opportunism, and trial through costly error—albeit in the broad context of a pattern of socio-regulatory selectivity favoring market-based and market-like strategies, coupled with an allowance for corporate states of exception. So, over time, the strategy of outright privatization has blurred into a myriad of murky arrangements like public–private partnerships; strict monetarism was succeeded by inflation targeting and fiscal vigilance; bootstrapping exhortations to the poor, the unemployed and other blamed victims gave way to a feel-good emphasis on human and social capital building, even community empowerment; Thatcher's infamously blunt ‘there's no such thing as society’ mutated into the smoke-and-mirrors rhetoric of David Cameron's Big Society. Some might see this as a softening of the hard-edged version of 1980s neoliberalism, or the mainstreaming of the accompanying political project. There may be some truth in these arguments, but they also call attention to the ways in which the project of neoliberalism continues to evolve, both as a governing strategy and as a policy package. This has happened both as a result of its own limitations and blindspots (such as a tendency to speculative excess and indifference toward social externalities) and as a response to crises, frequently of its own making. It also reflects a proclivity for working around, selectively undermining, and tactically targeted sources of opposition and resistance.

For some considerable time now, it has been an article of faith on the left that neoliberalism would eventually succumb to its own contradictions (Peck and Tickell, 1994; Albo, 2007). The Wall Street crash and its aftermath may have finally put paid to this myth, to the expectation that the entrenched and polymorphic phenomenon of neoliberalism might somehow still be vulnerable to a form of total ‘system failure’ (Peck et al., 2010). While there would have been poetic justice in the final crisis of neoliberalism being incubated in New York City, an appropriately inauspicious end to the free-market doctrine of neoliberalism and its culture of deregulation, this kind of singular, terminal event may be increasingly unlikely. Local failures—even ‘big’ ones—will continue to animate the moving landscape of neoliberalization, as for the time being at least will be localized adaptations in these and other places. Analytically, single-site case studies, either of an affirmative or a dissenting character, cannot properly capture what is a multi-sited, relational process of reproduction.

The Wall Street crash and its sobering aftermath can also be seen as an explanatory corrective to a certain kind of structural overreading of neoliberalism, which underestimates the plural adaptability of the project, especially the capacity to improvise provisional regulatory fixes, workarounds, mediations, displacements, deferrals—to variously maintain a directional momentum even in the face of significant obstacles, serial failures, and sporadic forms of resistance. By the same token, the doggedness of neoliberalism, its demonstrated capacity to surf through successive waves of crisis, and the unmistakable patterning of regulatory responses to the Great Recession, all stand as an explanatory challenge to those who would have preferred to do away with the concept of neoliberalism altogether. Refusing to use the word, even sans capital-N, will not make these conditions go away. What to do, then, if neoliberalism is indeed ‘once more the dominant, nay self-evident, policy paradigm’ (Kalb, 2012, p. 320)?

NEOLIBERALISM INSIDE/OUT

The awkward reality, perhaps, is that it is difficult to live either with, or without, macrological concepts such as neoliberalization (see Clarke, 2008). On the one hand, the concept's apparent promiscuity, and its ready availability as a plausible source of ultimate causality, means that it is readily prone to inflation into a blunt, omnibus category. On the other hand, dismissing neoliberalism (or Neoliberalism) as a structuralist fantasy or regulationist folly, while instead to taking recourse to the ‘exceptionalist’ analyses deliberately detached from the consideration of macro-scale constraints and incentives, extra-local forces, hegemonic formations, trans-local rules of the game, cross-case connections, family resemblances, and so forth, is to privilege localist-particularist forms of explanation over relational-conjunctural ones. What Collier (2012, p. 186) poses as a choice between a more hierarchical, political economy-style reading of neoliberalism as ‘macro-structure or explanatory background’ and flatter, more poststructural and horizontalist approaches to ‘neoliberalism as though it were the same size as other things’, is not one that is amenable to reconciliation in some happy, friction-free synthesis. There are real tensions between what are different ontological and epistemological understandings of neoliberalism, but this does not mean that there is no scope for dialog (see Kingfisher and Maskovsky, 2008a; Fairbanks, 2012).

The potential contribution of variegated neoliberalization approaches, in this context, lies in their overlapping concern with ‘how neoliberalism is specified in a variegated landscape of institutional, economic and political forms’ (Brenner et al., 2010; Collier, 2012, p. 191; Peck and Theodore, 2012b). In the terms summarized in Figure 1, this means embracing a conception of neoliberalism based on the twin principles of relationality and connectivity. Relational approaches can be distinguished from gradational ones in that they call attention to the mutual constitution and qualitative interpenetration of ‘local’ neoliberalisms, rather than drawing more/less distinctions of a quantitative kind between supposed ‘degrees’ of neoliberalization, or measuring near/far distances relative to some imagined ‘heartland’. And approaches that emphasize (global) connectivity over (local) exceptionality likewise problematize the linkages, interconnections, and more-than-local patterns revealed by neoliberalization processes; they work between internalist treatments of neoliberalism (as a characteristic of, say, particular institutions or territorialized political regimes) and externalist conceptions of global hegemony, instead to problematize what might be called inside/outside relations.

Figure 1 Between neoliberalism as exception and neoliberalism inside/out.

From a Foucauldian perspective, Collier (2012, p. 191) recognizes that neoliberalism ‘is a concept we cannot do without’, and therefore that operationalization of this concept must imply definitional parameters; while the position ‘neoliberalism can be just anything’ is manifestly indefensible, wary of inflationary tendencies, Collier is equally concerned that expansionist conceptions can become indiscriminate theories of ‘everything’. These are sensible (if not commonsensical) admonitions. Even though they only represent a first step toward methodological operationalization, the fact that such propositions (still) need to be stated is itself revealing. If a minimalist point of departure is that neoliberalism is never everything—either ‘within’ a particular social formation, governance regime, or territorial space, or in the realm of extra-local relations—then it is clearly imperative that neoliberalism must, inescapably and in every situation, be located amongst its others. Even where neoliberalism is demonstrably hegemonic, it is never the entire story, never the only causal presence; it never acts alone. Furthermore, friction, double movements, resistance, alternatives are ever-present. While a case can be made that neoliberalism possesses an inherent expansionary logic (since it actively targets new spaces and fronts for marketization, while unleashing loosely bounded deregulatory imperatives), 100% monopoly status is impossible, even in theory. And this is not just a matter of ‘local differences’. Even globally, neoliberalism exists among other forces and conditions. With reference to what Kalb (2012, p. 319) unapologetically calls ‘the jumbo questions [of] global capitalism’, for example,

the interconnected key issues of global transformation, such as the financialisation of Western capitalism, the insertion of China, in particular, into the global capitalist assembly line, the tripling of the world proletariat since 1989, including the associated urbanisations, migrations and related competitive pressures, and the rolling eclipse of Western hegemony, cannot be explained by, or reduced to, a reigning policy paradigm or even a state calculus called ‘neoliberalism’, even though it is multiply entangled with such calculus and paradigm.

That these global conditions were in part enabled by earlier rounds of neoliberalization (such as the selective deconstruction of ‘barriers’ to the flows of trade, capital, and labor), and that they also establish conditions for the further entrenchment of neoliberal regulation (for instance, in terms of exacerbation of interjurisdictional competition, inducing more ‘entrepreneurial’ postures on the part of local actors, coupled with downward pressure on taxes, wages, and costs, which in turn redouble pressures for entrepreneurial responses and competitive adjustment), clearly does not mean that all these phenomena should be rolled into an all-inclusive catch-all notion of Global Neoliberalism, at which point the quest for explanation ceases. The indiscriminate cry that ‘Neoliberalism did it’ belongs in the same family as the ‘I blame Thatcher’ denunciations of old; who did what, to whom, where, and how must be specified in social, economic, and institutional terms. In the global or extra-local realm, this means teasing out neoliberalizing tendencies (again, among their others) in particular settings, circuits, and fields—such as decision-making cultures within multilateral agencies; channels of policy learning and mobility; the rules of regulatory regimes in investment, trade, and finance; the operations of epistemic communities and technocratic networks; governance at a distance through financial instruments, indexing and benchmarking systems, model-building and best-practice emulation; and so forth. Neoliberalism has different valences, registers, capacities, and contradictions across these (and other) fields, circuits, and settings; they are not all neatly fitting components of a singular, global template. Theoretically informed, and informing, empirical work on these issues is consequently essential for the refinement even of relatively abstract understandings of neoliberalization, which cannot be divined unilaterally from founding theories or germinal texts.

Correspondingly, neoliberalism will also be found amongst its others within local or national territorial formations. It may occupy a dominant or subordinate position in these formations, but even under conditions of dominance the qualitative form of the process is likely to change, evolve, mutate—as for example in Stuart Hall's (1988, 2003, 2011) successive analyses of cumulative neoliberalization through the Thatcher, Blair, and Cameron regimes. And because there are still others (and counter-tendencies) to neoliberalization even where it is dominant, properly conjunctural analyses must take account not only of internal relations and characteristics but external connections and contradictions. This cannot reduced to a binary choice between situations in which neoliberalism is allegedly ‘exceptional’ and those where it is supposedly normal and unexceptional, for this implicitly naturalizes neoliberalism in some settings, while preempting questions of its contextualization and trajectory in others (see Brenner et al., 2010). Likewise, all ‘local’ neoliberalizations exist in a relational global field, not as islands. None are entirely isolated, just as none should be reduced to mere reverberations of a global logic:

[N]eoliberalisms are not merely locally variegated instantiations of global ideas but fully lived realities in which people and states have their own theories, and elaborate their own discourses and critiques, about the worlds they inhabit and the ways in which these should be organised. ‘Actually existing neoliberalism(s)’ are more than curious local manifestations of global norms. (Goldstein, 2012, p. 305)

As Goldstein's work in Bolivia after Morales clearly shows, however, (anti)neoliberal strategies are never freely chosen either. While Morales' platform and key elements of his governing program have been (pronounced as) contra el neoliberalismo, elsewhere this has been compromised by the way that his administration has been ‘caught up in the sticky business of global capitalism’, not to mention the vagaries of domestic politics (Webber, 2011; Goldstein, 2012, p. 307). The point here is to judge such configurations both in their own terms and in relation to their others, near and far, not to hold them up against an imagined singular yardstick of absolute neoliberalism (which does not, and could not, exist anywhere), against some supposedly crystalline evocation of its logic (whether read from the list of Washington consensus policy commandments, ur-texts like the Road to serfdom, or the secret transcript of the Mont Pelerin meetings), or against allegedly paradigmatic or first transitions (such as those of Chile, New Zealand or the UK). It is methodologically axiomatic that variegated neoliberalism can only be fully understood across sites, texts, institutions, and so forth, rather than being theorized (as deviations from) a privileged center, ultimate form or pure theory, however that might be defined (Peck and Theodore, 2012b; Peck and Tickell, 2012). As an especially crisis-prone pattern of social regulation, neoliberalism might be considered somewhat deviant wherever it is found.

To do so, of course, is not simply to (re)embrace an unthinking style of neoliberal-centrism. It calls for methodological strategies that are pitched somewhere between, on the one hand, those finely granulated studies of local neoliberalizations, that are characteristically light on extra-local referents or invoke the concept only ambivalently, and on the other hand, those sweeping accounts of neoliberal hegemony that are largely abstracted from any kind of social or textural specificity and which gloss over uneven development and contradictory hybridity. Operating in between (and in and between) these methodological poles involves turning neoliberalism, as a real-world process, inside/out. There is no readily available methodological abracadabra here, indeed a plurality is strategies is called for rather than a singular fix. But some of the well-established rationales for (extended) case selection (cf. Burawoy, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2012a) seem appropriate in this context: selecting and theorizing cases in an orthogonal or awkward relation to emergent explanatory conceptions, in order both to interrogate and reconstruct those conceptions. This means positioning local cases in relational and conjunctural terms, rather than terrain of typicality or exception. It means striving to make part–whole connections, while recognizing that this more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts phenomenon only exists by dint of its parts. It means uncovering local constitutions of global forces, rather than resorting to top-down ‘impact’ models. And it means rendering the moving landscapes of neoliberalization as theoretical problematics in their own right (rather than placing these in the shadow of presumed convergence), probing power centers and vulnerable flanks, mapping the spatialities of consent and conflict, and tracing interdependencies through hierarchies and networks. In this context, the functioning of neoliberalism as an operational matrix, as a form of regulatory hegemony always in the (re)working, would not reside, unquestioned, as an article of critical faith, but would rendered anew as an object of sustained, reflexive and dialectical interrogation.

In this respect, there may be scope for different kinds of conversation between approaches to variegated neoliberalization rooted in geographical political economy and more situated treatments of neoliberalism found in some stripes of Foucauldian and poststructural scholarship. In rather different terms, a parallel conversation might also emerge between analysts of neoliberalism as an ideological and/or macroinstitutional phenomenon, on the one hand, and those on the other hand who have been more concerned with its more granulated, grounded, and provisional forms, often unearthed ethnographically or through intensive case studies. Anxious to dismantle jumbo-scaled, template-like models of neoliberalism, Collier nevertheless recognizes that:

As an analytical term, neoliberalism draws meaningful conceptual interconnections among a range of historical experiences and contemporary problems in a way that is essential; methodologically speaking, we need it. (2011, p. 247)

For Collier, the empirical reality of evidently diverse social and geographical manifestations of neoliberalism/its others is not a reason to abandon the concept altogether, but an invitation rigorously to refine it. The ‘significance of neoliberalism’, he writes, ‘must be sought, at least in part, in the disparate experiences in which neoliberal styles of reasoning, mechanisms of intervention, and techniques have played a significant role in shaping the forms of government’; where he has a problem, understandably, is with those analyses that, to recall the Foucauldian objection, do not ‘pay the full price’ of establishing the interconnections and commonalities to which their definitions implicitly adhere (Collier, 2011, p. 12). Quite right. But there is a price, too, to be paid for invocations of neoliberalism that are only local, which are distanced and detached from extra-local domains, referents, and spaces of reproductive circulation. ‘Inside’ manifestations of neoliberal logics—a privatization program in Macedonia, say, or a conditional welfare initiative in Indonesia—are locally embedded and constitutively contextual, to be sure, but they must not be shorn of their constitutive outsides, such as the actually existing and imagined ‘reform families’ to which they belong, as near or distant relatives to other and earlier projects, experiments, and models. This underlines the need for a continuing concern with neoliberalism's family misfortunes.

CONCLUSION: GETTING OVER NEOLIBERALISM

To say that neoliberalism is still with us is not the same as saying that this is a permanent condition or that neoliberalism is always, transcendentally, the same. This is one reason why simple invocations of neoliberalism as an all-purpose, omnibus explanation for the contemporary condition can never be enough. Citing the process of neoliberalization must not be a substitute for explanation; it should be an occasion for explanation, involving the specification of particular causal mechanisms, modes of intervention, hybrid formations, social forms and foibles, counter-mobilizations, and so forth. It might be said that the concept does define a problem space and a zone of (possible) pertinence, and as such represents the beginning of a process of analysis. But it is here that the task of excavating contextual forms and connective flows really begins; it is here that analysts really have to ‘pay the full price’ of invoking this more-than-local concept.

If ‘neoliberalism did it’ should never be a fig leaf for preemptive explanation, neither should invocations of neoliberalism be a prelude to unbounded analytical (or indeed political) fatalism, of the ‘we're all doomed to endless market rule’ variety. As an always-thwarted totalization, the neoliberal circle is never squared. Even hegemonies have their outsides and others; their construction is a continuing and contradictory process, not a fixed condition. Those skeptical of the utility of the concept of neoliberalism sometimes complain that its deployment, even the dropping of the name, somehow throws gasoline on the flames while effectively denigrating alternatives, both actual and potential. Some of this skepticism, clearly, stems from a deeper concern with all forms of explanation that invoke structural rationalities, big processes, and hegemonic forces, but quite often these are stereotyped as mechanistic forms of template theorizing rather than for what they actually are. Process-based approaches to neoliberalization, in fact, work explicitly with and across difference, problematizing the (re)production of that difference, and they are no less attentive to the contradictions and limits of neoliberalism in both theory and practice. These approaches do not necessitate the automatic or preemptive dismissal of non-neoliberal alternatives or postneoliberal trajectories, but they do require that such (emergent) developments are understood, in the current context at any rate, in relation to hegemonically neoliberalized fields of power and their associated domains of transformative practice. Searching questions are therefore likely to be raised about one-sided projections of enclavist alt-models, if the advocacy of these is detached from an assessment of the challenges of scaling up or networking out. ‘Alternatives’ must be analyzed relationally too, not in utopian isolation (see Peck, forthcoming).

Squaring up to neoliberalism, in such a context, need not mean genuflecting before the altar of limitless market rule (see Leitner et al., 2007b). Applying the principles of relationality ‘all the way down’ (or all the way out), however, calls for an understanding of the ways in which hegemonic forms of neoliberalization both inhabit, and tendentially remake, the field of difference. There are few bright lines, these days, between neoliberalism and its others, irrespective of whether these others are progressive or conservative, liberal or authoritarian. So it is ill-advised to code the world ‘beyond’ neoliberalism in blanket terms, as a space of somehow untouched alternatives or as a generalized zone of resistance. Two conditions of neoliberalism's contradictory existence—its apparent facility for shape-shifting survival and the fact that perhaps its signal, enduring achievement has been the incapacitation of bases for ideological opposition—suggest that it may be less likely to meet its ultimate end in some epic, dialectical contest between a muscular Neoliberalism in the blue corner and plucky Resistance in the red. Perhaps it is still likely that the contradictions of neoliberalism will get it in the end, but the end may well be a protracted one—maybe one in which the complex of neoliberal projects and programs is eventually exhausted, and incrementally outflanked or exceeded. Meanwhile, if no big-bang failure of neoliberal rule is imminently expected, then what are currently styled as alternatives will have to do more (even) than stand their ground in local enclaves; they will have to stake claims on enemy territory while rewriting the rules of extra-local redistribution, reciprocity, and competition.

Optimism of the will can and must be replenished by the diverse alternatives, real utopias, and counter-projects to neoliberalism, many of which are to be found at the local scale, but pessimism of the intellect should also caution that neoliberalism's ‘permanent economic tribunal’ (Foucault, 2008) continues to exhibit a capacity to crimp, contain, and co-opt these more progressive others, especially where they issue a challenge to the governing imperatives of financialized and corporatized market rule (see Crouch, 2011). Meanwhile, neoliberalism itself is never static, but as a flexible credo constantly reanimated by crisis and contradiction is persistently generating market-friendly alternatives of its own. As long as neoliberal rules continue to hold sway at the scale of inter-local relations, ‘local’ alternatives are likely to remain just that, local. (Indeed, it might provide a clue as to why they are local in the first place.) The intensifying capillary, infrastructural, and normative reach of market rule at the transnational scale (cf. Mann, 1984; Simmons et al., 2008), threatens to further entrench, as one of the many perverse outcomes of the crisis, the ‘dull compulsion’ of competitive relations and the pernicious logic of regulatory undercutting.

Doing away with the concept of neoliberalism will not do away with the conditions of its still-hegemonic existence; neither, on its own, would it render alternatives any more realizable. Rather, it is imperative that the array of alternatives—from the reformist though to the radical—are positioned relationally in ideational, ideological, and institutional terms. This is not, then, a plea for a relentlessly ‘neoliberalocentric’ perspective, for it is arguably more important than ever to ensure that the reach and ambition of critical endeavors—methodological, theoretical, and political—extend across the entire field of socioeconomic difference, a task in which Polanyian forms of comparative socioeconomics, for instance, might have constructive roles to play (see Peck, forthcoming). Consistent with such an approach is the observation that the necessary incompleteness of the neoliberal program of free-market reform means that it must always dwell among its others, along with the rather cold comfort that its ultimate destination is unattainable. Actually existing alternatives (progressive and otherwise) will never be completely expunged. The residues of preexisting social formations will never be entirely erased or rendered inert. Double movements against the overextension of market rule will not only continue, but can be expected to intensify, presenting new challenges but also opening up new moments for social action. Crises, in forms old and new, will recur. Realistically speaking, it is on this uncertain and uneven terrain that all forms of postneoliberal politics will have to be forged. And there is analytical work to be done too, not least across the interdisciplinary field of critical urban and regional studies. There is much to be gained from this work being conducted across, as well as within, methodological traditions and theoretical registers, although a particularly important contribution remains to be made by the ‘ethnographic archeologist’, as Burawoy (2003, p. 251) dubbed them some time ago, ‘who seeks out local experiments, new institutional forms, real utopias if you wish, who places them in their context, translates them into a common language, and links them one to another across the globe’.

Acknowledgements

I thank Catherine Kingfisher, Michael Flower, and two anonymous referees for their constructive and probing comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The arguments here have benefited from ongoing conversations with Neil Brenner, Rob Fairbanks, and Nik Theodore, and in the Geography 560 seminars at UBC. I am solely responsible for what is here, however.

Notes

1. In the 2010 mid-term elections, the Democrats lost 63 seats in the US Congress and 6 in the US Senate; the Republicans also gained 6 governorships and some 680 seats in state legislatures, securing the party's strongest position at the state level since 1928.

2. Barack Obama; Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention. Washington Post, 6 September, accessed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/dnc-2012-obamas-speech-to-the-democratic-national-convention-full-transcript/2012/09/06/ed78167c-f87b-11e1-a073-78d05495927c_story.html.

3. These have also long been staple observations in political-economy accounts of neoliberalism, although this is often lost in critical translation.