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own societies, especially as reformists of the centre left and right (Clinton, Blair) came to dominate the party-political scene after Thatcher and Reagan embedded the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s. After the Cold War, in other words, the liberal world order was a fact of life. In Margaret Thatcher’s immortal words, ‘there is no alternative’. The consequences of this focus on private enterprise, mobile money, weakened unions, reduced state welfare and regulation and lower taxes are all too visible today in areas like wealth inequality and
This book explores the issue of a collective representation of Ireland after the sudden death of the 'Celtic Tiger' and introduces the aesthetic idea that runs throughout. The focus is on the idea articulated by W. B. Yeats in his famous poem 'The Second Coming'. The book also explores the symbolic order and imaginative structure, the meanings and values associated with house and home, the haunted houses of Ireland's 'ghost estates' and the fiscal and moral foundations of the collective household. It examines the sophisticated financial instruments derived from mortgage-backed securities that were a lynchpin of global financialization and the epicentre of the crash, the question of the fiscal and moral foundations of the collective household of Europe. A story about fundamental values and principles of fairness and justice is discussed, in particular, the contemporary conflict that reiterates the ancient Irish mythic story of the Tain. The book suggests correspondences between Plato's Republic and the Irish republic in the deformations and devolution of democracy into tyranny. It traces a red thread from the predicament of the ancient Athenians to contemporary Ireland in terms of the need to govern pleonexia, appetites without limits. The political and economic policies and practices of Irish development, the designation of Ireland's 'tax free zones', are also discussed. Finally, the ideal type of person who has been emerging under the auspices of the neoliberal revolution is imagined.
particular vividness that critical moment of rapid political transformation that saw the crisis of social democracy prepare the ground for what would in time be termed ‘the neoliberal revolution’. While this narrative threads its way through the band’s entire body of work, it is rendered with especial clarity at certain specific moments in their extensive back catalogue. A case in point is one of the few numbers on London Calling that doesn’t stray far from the musical conventions of rock. Track nine on the band’s magnum opus is listed on the back cover as ‘Clampdown’ but
fall of Athens, and also of Rome, and during periods of Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, revolution, and so on): what is characteristic of de-symbolization in the global neoliberal revolution is that a particular process of re-symbolization is taking place too. The new servitude of the liberated in an age of total capitalism (Dufour, 2008) means the reducing and recoding of all values and meanings in terms of monetary value alone. The weakening of other chains of symbolization and their monetization, so that, increasingly, ‘the only nexus remaining between
9780719079740_C04.qxd 4 22/2/10 15:10 Page 71 Loïc Wacquant The use and abuse of the prison in the age of social insecurity In this essay, I draw selectively on my three books on the nexus of penality, poverty and politics to present the skeleton of an argument explaining the expansion and glorification of the penal mission of the state in the early twenty-first century as part and parcel of the neoliberal revolution and an exercise in state-crafting.1 The prison boom we are witnessing around the world today, qualifying as the ‘third age’ of carceral
benefits including higher education and healthcare provision give much, and perhaps disproportionately more, to those in the middle and higher-income groupings than to those with lower incomes if only because the former make more intensive use of that provision. This may do much to explain why, four decades after the neoliberal revolution began, some forms of social provision still enjoy widespread legitimacy and support in Europe. Because there is cross-class usage, they have captured cross-class support. In the US, however, and this also has important implications
neighbourhood community’; an ‘executive residence’ in an ‘exclusive gated enclave’; all simulacra of the wholeness and continuity of neighbourhood, community, society and of collective life. ‘There is no such thing as society’, IRELAND’S HAUNTED HOUSES 27 Margaret Thatcher famously declared at the beginning of the neoliberal revolution. ‘There are individual men and women, and there are families.’ It is the soul-less individuals of this market dogma and its empty, solipsistic theology who occupy Ireland’s new, haunted houses. Ghosts of the Faithful Departed is a memento
the demands of Spanish employers. The implementation of such measures was indicative of a wider overhaul of periphery institutions which was driven by external forces. In analysis of the effects of the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain, Armingeon and Baccaro ( 2012 ) contended that common external restraints had prompted neoliberal revolution of national institutions. Conservative elites in these countries generally supported and often initiated such reforms, yet a precondition for their success was the existence of external
the Games were a shining emblem for the Reagan revolution – a neoliberal revolution yearning for limitation of the role of the state in the economy, in order to allow a free society, as American society was, to create the talents and resources needed to reaffirm American primacy. In this Olympic apotheosis, Reagan found an example of the successes of the private sector because American athletes had ‘proved the profits reaped from a free economy can be used to help our young people compete on an even footing with the state subsidized athletes of other countries’.75
much larger state than in those years, the existence of a social ‘safety net’ and the belief that government had a responsibility for the common good in periods of crisis. In other words, the Thatcherism and the neoliberal ‘revolution’ constrained classical Keynesian notions and moved them a long way down the economic policy agenda, but they were not removed altogether. Indeed, the pre-crisis policy regime has been described in terms of ‘new Keynesianism’ (Hall, 2013: 146). Furthermore, because the government’s crisis The advent of crisis and the building of