Suchergebnisse

Our last three guests on the show, Oren Cass, Francis Fukuyama, and Glenn Hubbard, have each brought forth their critiques and suggestions for how liberalism and neoliberalism work (or ought to work) in our society. In this episode, Bethany and Luigi reflect and take stock of how the political and economic components of these ideas might differ, where their promises have failed, and who has benefited from their messy implementation.

In the process, they try answering: What would a new version of (neo)liberalism look like?

In this paper, I provide a sketch of the republican view of freedom and government. And then, looking forward, I highlight the potential of this long, shared tradition of thinking for contemporary politics. As a philosophy of government, so I argue, neo-republicanism offers a very attractive alternative to the neo-liberalism that has been recently dominant in policy circles. In my discussion, I consider republicanism first, liberalism second, since that answers to the historical order in which the doctrines appeared. The paper is in three main sections. In the first, I provide a short history of classic republican thinking. In a second, briefer section, I describe the rise of classical liberalism, which displaced republican thought over the following century. And in the third, I look at the alternatives represented in contemporary thought by neo-republicanism and neo-liberalism, highlighting what I see as the advantages of the neo-republican approach.

Neo-liberalism rose to prominence during the stagflation crisis of the 1970s and consolidated its position as the dominant western ideology after the collapse of communism in Europe in the 1990s. Neo-liberalism is not a monolithic doctrine but has several different strands, including Ordoliberalism and Anglo-American economic liberalism. The latter became closely associated with globalisation, financialisation and deregulation, which helped produce the boom in the world economy during the 1990s but also created the conditions for the financial crash in 2008. Despite the scale of that crisis neo-liberalism has remained resilient as an ideology and as a policy regime. Different dimensions of this resilience are explored – the role of the state, geopolitics, class politics, electoral politics, and the hegemony of neo-liberal ideas – and whether this resilience is likely to continue.