HIS 475 - Neoliberalism: A Global History

This course will take the global history of neoliberalism as its remit, and students will learn to historicize how “Neo” or “new” liberalism re-imagines what liberalisms’ original object - “good society” must look like. Historically, prescriptive interventions of neoliberal policy have produced a politics of difference across a wide array of political contexts whether that be the receding of the welfare state in Western democracies, post-socialist transformation in Eurasia or global South countries that experience “structural adjustment” through the intervention of the United States, the IMF and the World Bank. We will follow the ideas an actions of historical actors - thinkers, policy-makers, leaders and social movement organizers - in order to build an understanding of neoliberalism beyond the spatial and temporal markers of the Reagan and Thatcher eras in the U.S. and U.K.

Even as scholars question its uses, neoliberalism as a concept has been amassing a history, and more recently, that history has acquired a diverse and varying geography. Once understood more through its apparent ubiquity in the Anglo-North Atlantic world from the 1980s onwards, situated histories of neoliberalism now point towards its “unruly historical geographies.” In this way, the analytic diffusionism of a Eurocentric story of a North Atlantic phenomenon moving outwards has stopped being the rule to the exceptional case of Chile as an original laboratory of neoliberalism in the late 1950s. When it comes to chronology too, excellent work by Isabella Weber, Amy Offner and Antina von Schnitzler, to name a few, offer up histories of institutions, ideas and practitioners that push the emergence of neoliberal back into the farther reaches of the twentieth century, to the 1970s and even to the Great Depression. As a consequence of these new directions in the historical scholarship on neoliberalism the question of its origins has been displaced from its spatial and chronological touchstones. In fact, one might say that the transnational perspective on the independent emergence of neoliberal ideology as professed by a variety of different kinds of historical actors who articulate it from within the historically specific configuration of politics that shape their South Asian, Chinese, Latin European or West African contexts displaces the origins question into irrelevance.

Satisfies History major and minor requirement.
Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.