Ordoliberal orthodoxy?

Reivew of Raphaël Fèvre, A Political Economy of Power
Raphaël Fèvre, A Political Economy of Power: Ordoliberalism in Context, 1932-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 280pp., £64.00 hb., 978 0 19760 780 0 George Monbiot’s statement in a 2016 Guardian article that neoliberalism is the ‘ideology at the root of all our problems’ still resonates today. A huge body of literature has been dedicated […]

Universities after neoliberalism: A tale of four futures

Dossier: Unmaking the university

We’re used to one-way neoliberalism, regardless of party, in which we keep getting more of its familiar features: public budget austerity, marketisation, privatisation, selective cross-subsidies favouring business and technology, precarisation of professional labour, and structural racism. But under the pressure of international social forces, neoliberalism is increasingly breaking down. These forces include the Covid-19-induced public […]
Cartesian graph. X axis labeled Commons / publicly funded; -X axis signifies privatisation; Y signifies Democratic - rhizome-networked storefronts; -Y signifies Platform; post democratic. X/Y; 3. Equalized: -X/Y; 4. Autonomous. X/-Y: 2. Debt-free; -X/-Y: 1. Fragmented.

Who will survive the university?

Dossier: Unmaking the university

We write as organisers of #CoronaContract, a campaign we co-founded shortly after the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, demanding a two-year contract extension for all casualised university staff (academic and non-academic). In the early days of COVID-19, when previously unthinkable forms of economic rescue took place, this demand functioned as a ‘transitional demand’ […]
Black and white photo of back of man walking past a ripped handwritten sign which reads, "CHIUSO. Sotto questi condizioni non apriamo..." A photograph of riot police holding battons hangs next to it.

Authoritarian and neoliberal attacks on higher education in Hungary

Dossier: Unmaking the university

In April 2017, a law adopted by the Hungarian authorities, and promptly nicknamed ‘Lex CEU’, made the operation of the Central European University (CEU) impossible. The CEU is an English language graduate university with accreditation both in Hungary and in the USA, which was based in Budapest from 1991. Following a long process of attempted […]
Colourful graphitti wall with messages involving discounts, Free Palestine, doodles. It has a prominent pink shelf in centre that reads CHALK. On it is a green sponge, but no chalk.

A liberal poetics of policy: Reading the contemporary fortunes of Indian higher education

Dossier: Unmaking the university

In The Evolution of Educational Thought (1938), Emile Durkheim recounted the historical irony that undergirds the idea of institutionality – by pitting it against the birth of the university in medieval Europe. He noted how the coming into being of a corporative organisation – the universitas – was effectively an attempt at ‘unionising’ the body […]
Sign reading "Everything might be different*"

Of what is Bolsonaro the name?

Dossier: Grammars of Bolsonarismo

[O]ne might refer to the fascist movements as the wounds, the scars, of a democracy that, to this day, has not lived up to its own concept. Theodor Adorno What’s in a name? First things first: to speak of ‘Bolsonarismo’ is not the same as speaking of Bolsonaro voters. Evidently, whatever we can call ‘Bolsonarismo’ […]

Neoliberal antiracism and the British university

Dossier: Decolonising the University

While debates over race and higher education in the UK have long focused on questions of access, in recent years a host of campaigns have drawn attention to the alienation of students and staff of colour who succeed in entering white-dominated institutions. Their claims, often articulated on social media with the pithiness that hashtags require, […]

Ruined resentments

Reivew of Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 264pp., £62.00hb., £22.00 pb., 978 0 23155 053 6 hb., 978 0 23119 385 6 pb. Wendy Brown has been one of the foremost critical theorists and political commentators on the left since the […]

Chilean revolts and the crisis of neoliberal governance

On Friday 18 October 2019, a long series of mass demonstrations began in Chile against the right-wing government led by president Sebastián Piñera. 1 Despite brutal and continuous police repression, these demonstrations persisted, day after day, with remarkable stamina and inventiveness, right through to 13 March 2020, when the risks posed by Covid-19 led Piñera […]

From one Arab Spring to another

The crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism has been unfolding spectacularly under our eyes in recent months, provoking ever greater social upheavals in an ever greater number of places. 1 Events in the Arab region fit into this general global crisis, to be sure, but there is also something specific about the region. There, […]

Who’s a feminist?

Reivew of Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism
Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 239pp., £19.99 hb., 978 0 19090 122 6 It is the best of times and it is the worst of times to declare oneself a feminist today. Presentations of that creature have been shape shifting for decades, though right now she suddenly seems […]

Powerless companions or fellow travellers?: Human rights and the neoliberal assault on post-colonial economic justice

The aim must be to reduce inequality in every area where it is found. To do this therefore we must refashion, or ‘revolutionise’, the laws which lead to the reproduction of the relations of domination and exploitation. Mohammed Bedjaoui 1 Attempts to enforce the NIEO [New International Economic Order] would lead to a Hobbesian war […]

Unlikely hegemons

Reivew of Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies
Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Alresford: Zero Books, 2017). 136pp., £9.99 pb., 978 1 78535 543 1 Kill All Normies sets out to provide an anatomy of the internet spaces in which contemporary ‘culture wars’ are being fought out, and an account of […]

The impossibility of precarity

6. ^ https://sciencefiles.org/tag/lann [archive]‑hornscheidt/page/3 (accessed 9 May 2016). 7. ^ Cf. Bożena Chołuj, ‘“Gender‑Ideologie” – ein Schlüsselbegriff des polnischen Anti‑Genderismus’, in Hark and Vil a, eds, Anti-Genderismus, pp. 219–38. 8. ^ Juliane Lang, ‘Familie und Vaterland in der Krise. Der extrem rechte Diskurs um Gender’, in Hark and Vil a, eds, Anti-Genderismus, pp. 167–82, pp. […]

A neo-Horthyist restoration

A neo-Horthyist restoration Tamás Krausz Since winning the Hungarian general elections in 2010 with a two-thirds majority, Viktor Orbán’s nationalist-populist party Fidesz has introduced an authoritarian administration that is reminiscent of Hungary’s interwar regime, when Miklós Horthy ruled as an ally of Hitler. When state socialism collapsed in 1989, liberal ideologists propagated the idea that […]

A is for apocalypse

A is for apocalypseDavid J. Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, Zero Books, Winchester and Washington DC, 2013. 319 pp., £15.99 pb., 978 1 78099 578 6. Amidst the recent flood of lachrymose reports on the neoliberal assault upon education, this book stands out for its unflinching survey of the extent […]

Smells like Gezi spirit: Democratic sensibilities and carnivalesque politics in Turkey

Commentary Smells like Gezi spirit Democratic sensibilities and carnivalesque politics in Turkey Meyda yeğenoğlu A small protest in Istanbul, which began by aiming to protect the urban greenery, was rapidly turned into a full-blown nationwide resistance. The protests should be regarded as the most important outcry of the Turkish people since the 1980 coup, and […]

Culture and admin

Reviews Culture and adminBéatrice Hibou, La bureaucratisation du monde à l’ère néolibérale, La Découverte, Paris, 2012. 223 pp., €17.00 pb., 978 2 70717 439 0. ^ Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork, Zone Books, New York, 2012. 182 pp., £19.95 hb., 978 1 93540 826 0. The ascendancy of neoliberalism […]