Terror Of Neoliberalism

With its dream worlds of power, commercialization, and profit making, neoliberalism has ushered in new Gilded Age in which the logic of the market now governs every aspect of media, culture, and social life-from schooling to health care to old age. As the social contract becomes a distant memory, the new "corporate state" distances itself from workers and minority groups, who become more disposable in a new age of uncertainty and manufactured fear. This is the only book to connect the history, ideology, and consequences of neoliberal policies to education and cultural issues that pervade almost every aspect of daily life. A significantly revised and updated new version of Giroux's 2003 book, The Terror of Neoliberalism, this book points to ways in which neoliberal ideology can be resisted, and how new forms of citizenship and collective struggles can be forged, to reclaim the meaning both of a substantive politics and of a democratic society. Against the Terror of Neoliberalism was featured in the New York Times in the Stanley Fish blog: Stanley Fish Blog

This book argues that neoliberalism is not simply an economic theory but also a set of values, ideologies, and practices that works more like a cultural field that is not only refiguring political and economic power, but eliminating the very categories of the social and political as essential elements of democratic life. Neoliberalism has become the most dangerous ideology of our time. Collapsing the link between corporate power and the state, neoliberalism is putting into place the conditions for a new kind of authoritarianism in which large sections of the population are increasingly denied the symbolic and economic capital necessary for engaged citizenship. Moreover, as corporate power gains a stranglehold on the media, the educational conditions necessary for a democracy are undermined as politics is reduced to a spectacle, essentially both depoliticizing politics and privatizing culture. This series addresses the relationship among culture, power, politics, and democratic struggles. Focusing on how culture offers opportunities that may expand and deepen the prospects for an inclusive democracy, it draws from struggles over the media, youth, political economy, workers, race, feminism, and more, highlighting how each offers a site of both resistance and transformation.

This book explores the complicity of democratic states from the global North in state terrorism in the global South. It evaluates the relationship between the use of state terrorism by Northern liberal democracies and efforts by those states to further incorporate the South into the global political economy and to entrench neoliberalism. Most scholarship on terrorism tends to ignore state terrorism by Northern democracies, focusing instead on terrorist threats to Northern interests from illiberal actors. The book accounts for the absence of Northern state terrorism from terrorism studies, and provides a detailed conceptualisation of state terrorism in relation to other forms of state violence. The book explores state terrorism as used by European and early American imperialists to secure territory, to coerce slave and forced wage labour, and to defeat national liberation movements during the process of decolonisation. It examines the use of state terrorism by the US throughout the Cold War to defeat political movements that would threaten US elite interests. Finally, it assesses the practices of Northern liberal democratic states in the 'War on Terror' and shows that many Northern liberal democracies have been active in state terrorism, including through extraordinary rendition. This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, security studies, South American politics, US foreign policy and IR in general. Ruth Blakeley is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Bristol.

Terrorism and neoliberalism are connected in multiple, complex, and often camouflaged ways. This book offers a critical exploration of some of the intersections between the two, drawing on a wide range of case studies from the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, and the European Union. Contributors to the book investigate the impact of neoliberal technologies and intellectual paradigms upon contemporary counterterrorism – where the neoliberal era frames counter-terrorism within an endless war against political uncertainty. Others resist the notion that a separation ever existed between neoliberalism and counter-terrorism. These contributions explore how counterterrorism is already itself an exercise of neoliberalism which practices a form of ‘Class War on Terror’. Finally, other contributors investigate the representation of terrorism within contemporary cultural products such as video games, in order to explore the perpetuation of neoliberal and statist agendas. In doing all of this, the book situates post-9/11 counter-terrorism discourse and practice within much-needed historical contexts, including the evolution of capitalism and the state. Neoliberalism and Terror will be of great interest to readers within the fields of International Relations, Security Studies, Terrorism Studies, and beyond. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism.

Neoliberalism, Education, Terrorism: Contemporary Dialogues is a collaborative effort among four established public intellectuals who deeply care about the future of education in America and who are concerned about the dangerous effects of neoliberalism on American society and culture. It aims to provide a clear, concise, and thought-provoking account of the problems facing education in America under the dual shadows of neoliberalism and terrorism. Through collaborative and individual essays, the authors provide a provocative account that will be of interest to anyone who concerning with the opportunities and dangers facing the future of education at this critical moment in history.

Violent Neoliberalism explores the complex unfolding relationship between neoliberalism and violence. Employing a series of theoretical dialogues on development, discourse and dispossession Cambodia, this study sheds significant empirical light on the vicious implications of free market ideology and practice.

This book explores the consequences of the last three decades’ substantial neoliberal securitisation of freedom of speech, democracy and social security of racialised groups. Its empirical material contains in-depth interviews with racialised politicians, journalists, academics and civil society activists in Sweden. Like many other countries, Sweden has combined a neoliberal reorganisation of society with securitisation policies in which ‘the war on terror’ has played a central role. In order to understand the complexity of neoliberal securitisation policies and the analysis of the empiric material, the study makes use of central theoretical concepts, such as ‘the spiral of silence’, ‘symbolic violence’, ‘governmentalisation’ and ‘neoliberal racism.’ It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of political sociology, social policy and social work.

Offering new approaches to thinking about political ideologies and sports, Sports and Neoliberalism explores the structures, formations, and mechanics of neoliberalism. The editors and contributors to this original and timely volume examine the intersection of sport as a national pastime, but also as an engine for urban policy - e.g., stadium building - as well as a powerful force for influencing our understanding of the relationship between culture, politics, and identity. Contributors include: Michael Atkinson, Ted Butryn, CL Cole, Norman Denzin, Grant Farred, Jessica Francombe, Caroline Fusco, Michael D. Giardina, Mick Green, Leslie Heywood, Samantha King, Lisa McDermott, Mary G. McDonald, Toby Miller, Mark Montgomery, Joshua I. Newman, Jay Scherer, Kimberly S. Schimmel, Brian Wilson.

Untangling the long history of neoliberalism Neoliberalism is dead. Again. Yet the philosophy of the free market and the strong state has an uncanny capacity to survive, and even thrive, in times of crisis. Understanding neoliberalism’s longevity and its latest permutation requires a more detailed understanding of its origins and development. This volume breaks with the caricature of neoliberalism as a simple, unvariegated belief in market fundamentalism and homo economicus. It shows how neoliberal thinkers perceived institutions from the family to the university, disagreed over issues from intellectual property rights and human behavior to social complexity and monetary order, and sought to win consent for their project through the creation of new honors, disciples, and networks. Far from a monolith, neoliberal thought is fractured and, occasionally, even at war with itself. We can begin to make sense of neoliberalism’s nine lives only by understanding its own tangled and complex history.

Leading writer Boris Kagarlitsky offers an ambitious account of 1000 years of Russian history.