Join our upcoming online workshop on Thursday, 26 March at 6pm CET about Ian Bruff’s recent article!
On zoom, register here: https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/jLSVzvWIQzaK8xHJ8suw-g
Speaker: Ian Bruff is a Senior Lecturer in European Politics at the University of Manchester. His research is founded upon a core interest in the materialities and experiences of living in capitalism. From this he focuses on a number of theoretical and empirical issues, such as neoliberal thought, the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, critical methodologies, critical social theory, and European political economy.
Discussants
Aleksandra Piletić, Lecturer in International Political Economy Education, King’s College London
Matthew Watson, Professor of Political Economy, University of Warwick
Find the article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346764.2024.2361156
Abstract
The article contributes to the emerging literature on neoliberalism that explicitly rejects the long-held assumption that it is fundamentally about the valorisation of free markets. This scholarship has taken a more ‘applied’ approach hitherto, leaving open the question of whether neoliberalism might be about free markets in principle. Via a wide-ranging survey of texts authored by intellectuals from the Austrian, Chicago and Ordoliberal schools, the article explores the neoliberal endorsement of monopolistic corporations. While beginning with distinctive conceptions of markets, neoliberal intellectuals occupy remarkably similar ground once they elaborate on their vision for markets. Monopolistic corporations are most enthusiastically discussed by Austrian authors and in the most qualified manner by Ordoliberals, but the effect is analogous: they represent the ideal form taken by markets. Only when neoliberalism is detached from free markets can a fully appropriate critique be mounted, enhancing the possibilities for it to be overcome.
See you there!
Critical Political Economy Research Network (RN06) 