What Was Neoliberalism?

Department

English

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Source

Novel: A Forum on Fiction

Publication Date

2019-05-01

Volume

52

Issue

1

First Page

161

Last Page

164

Abstract

The shocking victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election of November 8, 2016, has thrown the distinction between identity-based and materialist analyses of social change into sharp relief. Observers are working to untangle the complex ways in which the presidential candidate wove a populist critique of globalization and class stratification together with openly racist and misogynistic appeals to threatened white men. A similar ideological conjunction can be seen in the victory of little-Britain nationalism in the Brexit referendum of June 2016, the entrenchment of authoritarian regimes in Poland, Turkey, and elsewhere in Europe, and the relegitimization of xenophobic, potentially fascistic political discourse worldwide. We seem, now more than at any time since the global financial crisis of 2008, to be witnessing the emergence of a new political constellation, one to which humanist scholars, no less than mainstream politicians, have an...

DOI

10.1215/00295132-7330344

https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-7330344

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