The strange non-death of neoliberalism / Colin Crouch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Crouch, Colin, 1944-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Neoliberalism.

Economic policy.

Corporations--Political activity.

Corporations.

Physical Description:

xii, 199 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2011.

Summary:

The financial crisis of 2008-9 seemed to present a fundamental challenge to neoliberalism, the body of ideas that has constituted the political orthodoxy of most advanced economies in recent decades. In this important new book Colin Crouch argues that neoliberalism will shrug off this challenge. The reason is that although it seems to be about free markets, in practice neoliberalism is concerned with the dominance over public life of the giant corporation. This has been intensified, not checked, by the financial crisis and by an acceptance that certain financial corporations are 'too big to fail'. Although much political debate remains preoccupied with conflicts between the market and the state, the impact of the corporation on both these is far more important today.

Several factors have brought us to this situation:

the lobbying power of firms whose donations are of growing importance to cash-hungry politicians and parties;

the weakening of competitive forces by firms large enough to shape and dominate their markets;

the power over public policy exercised by corporations whose contracts for public services deliver special relationships with government;

the moral initiative grasped by enterprises that devise their own agendas of corporate social responsibility.

Democratic politics and the free market are both weakened by these processes, but they are largely inevitable and not always malign. Hope for the future, therefore, cannot lie in suppressing them in order to attain either an economy of pure markets or a socialist society. Rather, it lies in dragging the giant corporation fully into political controversy. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 The Previous Career of Neoliberalism 1

2 The Market and Its Limitations 24

3 The Corporate Takeover of the Market 49

4 Private Firms and Public Business 71

5 Privatized Keynesianism: Debt in Place of Discipline 97

6 From Corporate Political Entanglement to Corporate Social Responsibility 125

7 Values and Civil Society 144

8 What's Left of What's Right? 162.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [181]-186) and index.

ISBN:

9780745651200

9780745652214

0745651208

0745652212

OCLC:

682095502

Publisher Number:

60001411285