Situating Discussions of Neoliberalism
As a starting point, we found it useful to ask how “neoliberalism” is understood in social science discussions. On the one hand, virtually all such discussions associate neoliberalism with a specific historical conjuncture in the 1970s and 1980s, delimited by the oil shocks, fiscal crises of states, perceived crises of welfare systems, declining productivity growth in many industrial countries, and the effects of collapsing world commodity prices on many non industrial countries.