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Mary Einbinder:

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey, a geographer and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at CUNY, portrays the process of globalization through an economic perspective. Harvey describes the gradual shift throughout the global market towards economic and social policies that progressively gave an increased liberality and centrality to markets, market processes, and to the interests of capital. Harvey sets his analysis in the context of the rise of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is an alternative to realist thinking that avoids the utopian excesses of earlier liberalism. During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a good deal of international relations concerned trade and investment, travel and communication, and similar issues that were especially prevalent in the relations between the liberal democracies of the West. Neoliberalists share old liberal ideas about the possibility of progress and change but repudiate idealism. Through this book, the author seeks to explore "the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated so comprehensively on the world stage.”

The story of neoliberalism is a complicated one. Harvey gives a narrative account of how neoliberalism developed differently in different parts of the word in different times, where neoliberalism came from and how neoliberalism worked through uneven geographical development. “Neoliberalism” is often associated with “globalization." This book does not solely refer to economic neoliberalism. Harvey describes the theory of neoliberalism through worldwide historical actors. He argues that the neoliberalisation of the world economy deepens the penetration of capitalism into political, social as well as cultural domains.

In the chapter Neoliberalism on Trial, the author argues that capitalism changed from a mode of production into a set of political imperatives. Taking the most influential figures of the period, Deng Xiaoping, Thatcher and Reagan, Harvey describes the influence of globalization on their policies. He explains that these major political figures were not the creators but actors in the process of globalization. “Neoliberalism is in the first instance of a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

Since the 1970s, there has been a global movement towards neoliberalist thinking. According to the author, the development of neoliberalist thinking was coupled with a notion of “creative destruction,” not only of institutional frameworks but of living standards and habits. Across the world, divisions of labor, social relations, welfare provisions, ways of life and thought were challenged by this new way of thinking.

Globalization is portrayed as a process of extension of the geographical range that emphasizes the pursuit of information technologies. Information technology is the privileged technology of neoliberalism. Information technology is widely seen as a promoter of the construction of an integrated and connected global economy. Harvey does not agree with this last argument. He sees neoliberalism as a subterfuge to restore class power disguised as an attempt to advance the cause of individual freedoms. Corporations, the media and numerous institutions that constitute the civil society(universities, schools, churches or professional associations) spread neoliberal thinking. Harvey agrees with Karl Polanyi, they both fear that neoliberal regimes will erode institutions of political democracy and “the freedom of the masses would be restricted in favor of the freedoms of the few.”

Perhaps the most interesting chapter related to our study of globalization is Chapter 4. In this chapter, Harvey argues that the progress of neoliberalization was impelled through mechanisms of uneven geographical developments. He claims that as the degree of neoliberalization of the world economy was rising, the pressure was put on all states to adopt neoliberal reforms in order to keep up with the rest. Standardization of trade arrangements through international agreements such as the WTO was a characteristic of the period. The WTO set neoliberal standards and rules for interaction in the global economy. Its objective was to open up as much of the world as possible to promote capital flow. As artificial barriers to movement of capital and commodities were reduced the pressure was put on all states to look to at the quality of their business climate “as a crucial condition for their competitive success.”

The US and UK models of neoliberalism were defined as the answer to global problems. The author shows how, in the 1990s, the process of economic globalization was mainly Western. According to him, Clinton and Blair set the tone and consolidated the role of neoliberalism both domestically and internationally. Neoliberalism holds the assumption that international competition is healthy and promotes efficiency and productivity. International agreements are therefore put in place to guarantee the rule of law and freedoms of trade (WTO, Bretton Woods agreements, etc). States should collectively seek and negotiate the reduction of barriers to movement of capital across borders and the opening of markets to global exchange. This theory is therefore an economic model that secures peaceful international relations set in the final strand of neoliberalism: republican liberalism. The European Union was created as an answer to the dramatic wars in Europe and favored by a common European market economy. This strand picks up on a theme developed in the earlier liberal thinking. It is the idea that liberal democracies enhance peace because they do not go to war against each other. The author, in Neoliberalism on Trial, seeks to explain why many are persuaded that neoliberalism through globalization is the “only alternative” and that is has been a success.

Harvey stressed out the political problems within neoliberalism; the contradiction between possessive individualism and the desire for a meaningful collective life. Faced with social movements that seek collective interventionism the neoliberal state is itself forced to intervene, sometimes repressively. It can therefore deny the freedoms it is supposed to defend. In this situation, international competition and globalization can be used to discipline movements opposed to the neoliberal agenda within individual states. Internally, the neoliberal state is necessarily hostile to all forms of social solidarity that put restraints on capital accumulation. Independent trade unions or other social movements which acquired considerable power under embedded liberalism have therefore to be disciplined if not destroyed.

From the standpoint of the upper class, neoliberalization has been a huge success. Harvey’s argument is rooted in the concept of revolution from above to restore class power. Neoliberalism has restored class power to ruling elites or created conditions for capitalist class formation. On p.31, the author argues that neoliberalism did not automatically bring the restoration of class power. He takes the example of the UK when Margaret Thatcher went against the aristocratic tradition that dominated in the military, the judiciary, the industrial and the financial sectors. Harvey defines the importance of the powerful rich class of corporations and financiers that possess power and the lack of it in lower classes. Neoliberalism is positive for the wealthy but does not make us all better off. He then identifies the general trends of neoliberalism; the first is for the privileges of ownership and management of capitalist enterprises to fuse by paying CEOs in stock options, the second trend is to reduce the historical gap between money capital earning dividends and interest, on the one hand, and production, manufacturing, or merchant capital looking to gain profits on the other.

Harvey defends his argument through different case studies. He shows how neoliberalism was forced on the people in Chile, through the dictatorship of Pinochet. In the United States, through subterfuge, through an alliance of big business and inherited wealth funding think tanks and media to change the minds and thinking of Americans to accept the notions of the "free market". In the UK, as a success through Thatcherism. In France with the election of Sarkozy. Class power is not a specific class today but is represented by rich individuals in the corporate, finance, trading and developer world who got rich because of the opening up of entrepreneurial opportunities. Internationally, they possess a certain accordance of interests that recognizes the advantages to be derived from neoliberalization. They exercise immense influence over global affairs and possess a freedom of action that no ordinary citizen possesses.

David Harvey not only gives an analysis of the political and economic dangers of neoliberalism, he offers alternatives. In the last pages of the book, he stresses the importance of a reconnection between theory and practice. Harvey’s anti-capitalist reflection is embedded in the hope that neoliberalism will come to an end. The massive economic inequalities will be impossible to deny and social movements will be able to gain a political voice.

Mary Einbinder is an NYU graduate student in International Relations, Diplomacy and International Law.