Quotes About Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism emerged by defining itself against what it labelled as an unrealistic and unsustainable programme of social welfare and public spending.

Beneath the saccharine, air brushed girls-can-do-anything image is a ruthless contempt for women and girls who have not sold themselves to the right bidder by performing the neo-liberal strip tease of self-empowerment.

In American popular usage today, 'liberalism' means left-liberalism – not to be confused with 'neoliberalism' ... and is expressly contrasted with 'conservatism'. In this usage a liberal is one who leans consciously towards the underprivileged, supports the interests of minorities and socially excluded groups, believes in the use of state power to achieve social justice, and in all probability shares the egalitarian and secular values of the nineteenth century socialists.

There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.

Whereas classical liberals seek maximum freedom from government, neoliberal individuals are perpetually responsive to the state's engineering of their environment. In the former, government is idealized to the extent that it stays out of people's lives, thereby maximizing individual choice; in the latter, the state creates the conditions that enable people to choose to behave in ways it has determined are best for the collective good

Neoliberalism must be grasped as an individualist social philosophy whose main locus of attention is the self, and whose main anthropological assumption, as Aschoff argues, is that 'we are all independent, autonomous actors meeting in the marketplace, making our destinies and in the process making society. The consequence of neoliberalism was a widespread collapse of the social in favour of the psychological.

We argue that if happiness has come to be so prominent in neoliberal societies, it is because it has proven a very useful concept for rekindling, legitimizing and re-institutionalizing individualism in seemingly non-ideological terms through science's 'neutral' and authoritative discourse.

Autonomy in the workplace is highly valuable in neoliberal organizations because responsibility is no longer vertically distributed but horizontally spread and diffused.

the neoliberal system therefore has an important and necessary by product ad politicized citizenry marked by apathy and cynicism. If electoral democracy affects little of social life it is irrational to devote much attention to it.

Because that's not what the B-man is, either. You think he's this crazy old hobo, but he's not. He's a poet. And a philosopher. And a teacher. And it's not him that's crazy, Benny Oh. It's the fucking world we live in. It's capitalism that's crazy. It's neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that's crazy.

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who was the pope of the neoliberal right, and a leading critic of the drug war.

Humans are incapable of functioning and living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of values intact. That's why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind.

The neoliberal policies implemented first by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s and continued by New Labour and the current coalition have resulted in a privatisation of stress.

Neoliberalism is a panoply of cultural and political-economic practices that sets marketized competition at the center of social life – even as the sole ruler of social life. It aims to create a society that does not merely include markets but is based on the market and where there are, right down to the dirt under the fingernails of flesh-and-blood individuals, only agonizing private enterprises

Neoliberalism considers the discourse of equality, justice, and democracy quaint, if not dangerous and must be either trivialized, turned into its Orwellian opposite, or eviscerated from public life.

Since the 1980s, we've been living in this era, really, of corporate rule, based on this idea that the role of government is to liberate the power of capital so that they can have as much economic growth as quickly as possible, and then all good things will flow from that.

Corporate engineers have looked at how women are with each other, borrowing the best tips from female neighborhood culture and then transporting them back into the bosom of capitalism. They've feminized capitalism.

It is a job requirement of U.S. envoys to El Salvador to be skilled in the art of the threat. And Aponte, named ambassador in 2010, is a pro. In particular, she's been tasked with making sure the former insurgent FMLN, which first won the presidency in 2009 and was reelected in 2014, reconciles itself to neoliberal reality.

Human rights advocates can work to extricate themselves from their neoliberal companionship, even as others mark their limitations, in order to restore the dream of equality to its importance in both theory and practice. If both groups are successful, they can save the ideal of human rights from an unacceptable fate: it has left the globe more humane but enduringly unequal.

Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism.

A neoliberal disaster is one who generates a mass incarceration regime, who deregulates banks and markets, who promotes chaos of regime change in Libya, supports military coups in Honduras, undermines some of the magnificent efforts in Haiti of working people, and so forth.

Since the crash of 2008 and during the neoliberal retrenchment known as austerity, many commentators have muttered that the left is dead, watching social democrats in their timidity lose elections and respond by becoming ever more timid and neoliberal. They deserve their defeats.

NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.

For the South African White minority, neo-liberalism is apartheid with a clean conscience, called Democracy.