Explains the surprising endurance of neoliberal policymaking over two decades in post-Communist countries, from 1989-2008, and its decline after the financial crash.

This work examines ideas about the role of law and legal reform in the creation of market capitalist economies, focusing on post communist transition in Russia. Looking at the example of Russia, an enquiry is made into the wider relationship between democracy, regulation and the market in modern capitalism.

George Louis Beer Prize Winner Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year “A groundbreaking contribution...Intellectual history at its best.” —Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again by the relentless change and social injustice that accompanied it. “Slobodian’s lucidly written intellectual history traces the ideas of a group of Western thinkers who sought to create, against a backdrop of anarchy, globally applicable economic rules. Their attempt, it turns out, succeeded all too well.” —Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg Opinion “Fascinating, innovative...Slobodian has underlined the profound conservatism of the first generation of neoliberals and their fundamental hostility to democracy.” —Adam Tooze, Dissent “The definitive history of neoliberalism as a political project.” —Boston Review

The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state. Drawing on Michel Foucault's lectures from the late 1970s, Post-Soviet Social uses the Russian case to examine neoliberalism as a central form of political rationality in contemporary societies. The book's basic finding--that neoliberal reforms provide a justification for redistribution and social welfare, and may work to preserve the norms and forms of social modernity--lays the groundwork for a critical revision of conventional understandings of these topics.

Authoritarian Neoliberalism explores how neoliberal forms of managing capitalism are challenging democratic governance at local, national and international levels. Identifying a spectrum of policies and practices that seek to reproduce neoliberalism and shield it from popular and democratic contestation, contributors provide original case studies that investigate the legal-administrative, social, coercive and corporate dimensions of authoritarian neoliberalism across the global North and South. They detail the crisis-ridden intertwinement of authoritarian statecraft and neoliberal reforms, and trace the transformation of key societal sites in capitalism (e.g. states, households, workplaces, urban spaces) through uneven yet cumulative processes of neoliberalization. Informed by innovative conceptual and methodological approaches, Authoritarian Neoliberalism uncovers how inequalities of power are produced and reproduced in capitalist societies, and highlights how alternatives to neoliberalism can be formulated and pursued. The book was originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Anchored in the principles of the free-market economics, 'neoliberalism' has been associated with such different political leaders as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Augusto Pinochet, and Junichiro Koizumi. In its heyday during the late 1990s, neoliberalism emerged as the world's dominant economic paradigm stretching from the Anglo-American heartlands of capitalism to the former communist bloc all the way to the developing regions of the global South. At the dawn of the new century, however, neoliberalism has been discredited as the global economy, built on its principles, has been shaken to its core by a financial calamity not seen since the dark years of the 1930s. So is neoliberalism doomed or will it regain its former glory? Will reform-minded G-20 leaders embark on a genuine new course or try to claw their way back to the neoliberal glory days of the Roaring Nineties? Is there a viable alternative to neoliberalism? Exploring the origins, core claims, and considerable variations of neoliberalism, this Very Short Introduction offers a concise and accessible introduction to one of the most debated 'isms' of our time. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Neoliberal economic theories are powerful because their domestic translators make them go local, hybridizing global scripts with local ideas. This does not mean that all local translations shape policy, however. External constraints and translators' access to cohesive policy institutions filter what kind of neoliberal hybrids become policy reality. By comparing the moderate neoliberalism that prevails in Spain with the more radical one that shapes policy thinking in Romania, Ruling Ideas explains why neoliberal hybrids take the forms that they do and how they survive crises. Cornel Ban contributes to the literature by showing that these different varieties of neoliberalism depend on what competing ideas are available locally, on the networks of actors who serve as the local advocates of neoliberalism, and on their vulnerability to external coercion. Ruling Ideas covers an extended historical period, starting with the Franco period in Spain and the Ceausescu period in Romania, discusses the economic integration of these countries into the EU, and continues through Europe's Great Recession and the European debt crisis. The broad historical coverage enables a careful analysis of how neoliberalism rules in times of stability and crisis and under different political systems.

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem of scale, with essays ranging in subject matter from literature to film, architecture, the plastic arts, philosophy, and scientific and political writing. Its contributors consider a variety of issues provoked by the sudden and pressing shifts in scale brought on by globalization and the era of the Anthropocene, including: the difficulties of defining the concept of scale; the challenges that shifts in scale pose to knowledge formation; the role of scale in mediating individual subjectivity and agency; the barriers to understanding objects existing in scalar realms different from our own; the role of scale in mediating the relationship between humans and the environment; and the nature of power, authority, and democracy at different social scales.

Introduction: Transition from communism - qualified success or utter catastrophe? -- The plan for a J-curve transition -- Plan meets reality -- Modifying the framework -- Counter-narratives of catastrophe -- Where have all the people gone? -- The mortality crisis -- Collapse in fertility -- Outmigration crisis -- Disappointment with transition -- Public opinion of winners and losers -- Evaluations shift over time -- Towards a new social contract? -- Portraits of desperation -- Resistance is futile -- Return to the past -- The patriotism of despair -- Conclusion: Towards an inclusive prosperity.