NEO‐LIBERAL IDEOLOGY: HISTORY, CONCEPTS AND POLICIES ‐ by Rachel S. Turner
| Author | Pete Dorey |
| Published date | 01 March 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2012.02089.x |
| Date | 01 March 2013 |
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NEO-LIBERAL IDEOLOGY: HISTORY, CONCEPTS AND POLICIES
Rachel S. Turner
Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 248 pp., £19.99 (pb), ISBN: 9780748642991
Rachel S. Turner clearly could not have planned the circumstances in which this paperback
edition of her book was published, but this lucid study of the ideology of neo-liberalism is
remarkably timely in view of the global economic crises prompted by the 2008 banking col-
lapse. After 30 years of hubristic neo-liberal triumphalism, and the apparent evisceration of
any socialist alternative to the free market, the current economic problems afflicting many
Western nations provide an opportune context in which to re-examine the intellectual ori-
gins, foundational principles, and policy objectives which underpin neo-liberalism. Quite
apart from constituting an interesting scholarly exercise in its own right, such a reappraisal
might elicit greater understanding of how and why the supposedly self-regulating free
market has now generated serious economic problems and concomitant political paralysis.
This highly-engaging and clearly-written study is divided into two discrete parts,
the first of which delineates the intellectual and contextual origins of neo-liberalism,
while the second part examines the core concepts which constitute contemporary neo-
liberalism, and the manner in which these have influenced a plethora of policies in
Germany in the 1950s, and then in Britain and the United States in the 1980s. Although
the antecedents of neo-liberalism are to be found in the variants of classical liberalism
originally propounded by figures such as Adam Smith (although Smith was not the pure
advocate of untrammelled free markets that his self-confessed acolytes invariably assume)
and David Hume in Britain, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in the United States, and
Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt in Germany, neo-liberalism per se was a
reaction to three particular twentieth-century ideological developments, namely the rise
of Socialism in general, the horrendous experience of Nazism in Germany in the late 1930s
and early 1940s, and the ‘New Liberalism’ associated with T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse. and
John Hobson in Britain, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States. This
new or ‘progressive’ Liberalism, of course, entailed an expanded and more interventionist
role of the state, in terms of both economic regulation and social provision, and it was
this variant which figures such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises
strongly challenged via the development of Neo-Liberalism.
Constituting, in effect, a third wave of Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism is characterized by
four core tenets, Turner explains: (a) veneration of ‘the market’ as providing the most
efficient mechanism for generating wealth and allocating resources through a spontaneous
and self-regulating order which, in turn, ascribes only a minimal role for the State, and
thereby maximizes individual liberty; (b) belief in a residual welfare state only, in order
to foster virtues such as independence, personal responsibility, and self-reliance; (c) a
constitutional framework of government and politics, entailing a separation of powers,
whose prime purpose is to guarantee liberty, enforce contracts, and maintain the rule of
law; and (d) promotion and protection of private property, be it residential or commercial,
and thus entailing associated rights pertaining to the lawful acquisition of wealth or
capital accumulation, inheritance, and independence from the State. Of course, this then
provides the basis of the market economy based on private enterprise and ownership of
the means of production.
Although Neo-Liberalism is most commonly associated with Britain and the United
States in the 1980s, Turner notes that the ideology was initially adopted and applied
Public Administration Vol. 91, No. 1, 2013 (232–250)
©2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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