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Neoliberalism has been a popular concept within anthropological scholarship over the past decade; this very popularity has also elicited a fair share of criticism. This review examines current anthropological engagements with neoliberalism and explains why the concept has been so attractive for anthropologists since the millennium. It briefly outlines the history of neoliberal thought and explains how neoliberalism is different from late capitalism. Although neoliberalism is a polysemic concept with multiple referents, anthropologists have most commonly understood neoliberalism in two main ways: as a structural force that affects people's life-chances and as an ideology of governance that shapes subjectivities. Neoliberalism frequently functions as an index of the global political-economic order and allows for a vast array of ethnographic sites and topics to be contained within the same frame. However, as an analytical framework, neoliberalism can also obscure ethnographic particularities and foreclose certain avenues of inquiry.

Johanna Bockman unpacks a hefty term, neoliberalism. She cites its roots and its uses, decoding it as a description of a "bootstraps" ideology that trumpets individualism and opportunity but enforces conformity and ignores structural constraints.

AbstractIn this essay I argue that the ideology of neoliberalism may have failed, but that neoliberal practice is alive and kicking. Most of the 'solutions' to the crisis are in the spirit of neoliberalism, rather than enraptured by neoliberal spirit. Yet, this neoliberal solution is not a solution; it is part of the problem in the sense that it is leading to more problems — not just today but also in decades to come. This so‐called solution is often presented as Keynesian, but it is only partly so. A better way to classify this solution is as an attempt to save the existing, neoliberal, system. The big crisis of our time did not become a crisis of the hegemony of neoliberalism, because actually existing neoliberalism is flexible enough to influence policy in other ways than through the mantra of free markets: it thrives on presenting existing socioeconomic conditions as failing and neoliberalism as the best solution. Considering the many blows neoliberal ideology has received during this crisis, it should already be dead, but like a creeping cancer neoliberal practice is able to resurface and show up in both new and unexpected, and old and predictable, ways.

This article draws from Slavoj Žižek's approach to ideology to theorize neoliberalism as an ideological formation. I focus on neoliberalism's fantasy of free trade and on its displacement of symbolic identities by imaginary ones. The fantasy of free trade organizes enjoyment through the promise that everyone will win, uses losses to reconfirm the necessity of strengthening the system so that everyone will win, and perpetually displaces the thieves of enjoyment throughout the system as warnings, exceptions, and contingencies. In addition to relying on the fantasy of free trade, neoliberal ideology also functions through the production of imaginary rather than symbolic identities. These identities serve not as means of internalized discipline but of external control. Thus I argue that a key difference between Keynesianism (the economic theory and practice of the welfare state) and neoliberalism is the production of subject positions available for redeployment. The disciplined worker and consumer-citizen of the social welfare state are reformatted under neoliberal ideology as the shopaholic and incorrigible criminal.

This article examines the curious non-death of neoliberalism in Japan. After initial predictions about the end of neoliberalism in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, more recent analysis, focusing primarily on the United States and Western European cases, have turned their attention to explaining the "resilience" or "non-death" of neoliberalism. I seek to contribute to this analysis by examining the case of Japan, a country that has faced three major financial crises since it began to embrace neoliberal policies and practices in the 1980s. I demonstrate that the Japanese state has scaled back its role in many of the functionally equivalent forms of welfare that were associated with the developmental state model that Japan adopted in the early decades of the post-war era. Moreover, despite these cutbacks, and in contrast to the predictions made by many observers of Japanese politics, I further show that there has not been a corresponding rise in more formal and universalistic forms of welfare for the working age population that would help mitigate the rise in the level of social stratification and risk in Japan caused by these cutbacks. Instead, I show that many formal welfare benefits have been cut back even as spending has risen, and the various tax and labour reform policies that have been adopted since the 1980s have further eroded the level of social equality and income security in Japan.

The economic "Great Recession" of 2008/09 has seen skyrocketing unemployment, a lowering of the standard of living, & a near-collapse of the financial industry. This recession was brought about by unrestrained capitalism, and, according to the author, could spell the end of the neoliberal economic model, which has been dominant in global economics since the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In order to cripple the market-fundamentalist right wing in American politics, the left will have to come up with an economic model that is dynamic & sensitive to the market, all the while balancing the needs between labor & business. As the Great Depression of the 1930s showed, & the current recession is showing, market fundamentalism is unstable, & is incompatible with equality or social peace. Adapted from the source document.

Lebanon, a multi-confessional state, is undergoing a deep socioeconomic change that could trigger a review of its constitutional arrangement. The tiny republic on the Mediterranean was born in 1920 as a liberal democracy with a market economy, where the Christians had the upper hand in politics and the economy. In 1975, Lebanon witnessed a major war that lasted for fifteen years, and a new political system emerged in 1989, dubbed the Ta'ef Accord. The new constitutional arrangement, also known as the "second republic," transferred major powers to the Muslims. Under the new republic, illiberal policies were adopted in reconstruction, public finance, and monetary policy, coupled with unprecedented corruption at the highest levels. On 17 October 2019, the country exploded in a social revolution which could precipitate the death of the second republic or the demise of the country as another victim of predator neoliberalism.

English
The last decade has seen a number of attempts to periodise neoliberalism and the wider liberal project into different phases. While acknowledging the difficulties any periodisation approach entails, this article proposes a number of core factors against which periodisation might be considered. In its main body, it describes recent and current developments in factors including strategy; labour market policy; institutional reform; disciplinary inclusion and exclusion; and other geopolitical and social aspects of reaction, regendering and re-embedding. In concluding, the article evaluates both the prospects for periodisation as method, and the extent to which a significant, recent period shift in the neoliberal project has emerged.