Neoliberalism and Its Others

Abstract

Abstract Where ongoing debates suggest that neoliberalism is ill, dying, or indeed dead—once again—this chapter sets out how the neoliberal order has increasingly morphed into its “other.” I first unpack key epochs of modern liberalism, having been built on top of each other since the nineteenth century. Although the divide between liberalism and illiberalism is anything but clear in practice, incompatibility with core liberal premises is understood as illiberal. Next, I highlight where and how neoliberalism relates to preceding liberal epochs; how neoliberalism harbors illiberal tendencies within; why it is compatible with politically illiberal regimes, and how it fuels illiberalization domestically and globally. As neoliberalism’s compatibility with its “other” becomes increasingly legible, we not only ought to revisit neoliberalism’s liberal credentials, but understand that modern liberalism has principally functioned as the core ideological ordering rationality undergirding global capitalism, with most liberal premises anything but sacrosanct across time and space.