Neoliberalism, Economization and the Paradox of the New Welfare State

Abstract

This paper theorizes the nature of neoliberal social policy, making three substantial contributions. First, processes of “economization” are identified as a central characteristic of neoliberalism: economization constitutes a “bridge” between Foucauldian and (neo-)Marxist accounts of neoliberalism – two perspectives that are in many respects hardly reconcilable – because extending the economic logic to non-economic areas (neoliberalism as a governmental rationality) also potentially increases the profit-making opportunities in previously uncommodified domains (neoliberalism as a capitalist project). Second, the paper links economization processes not only to projects of austerity and welfare retrenchment but also to the more generous “social investment” agenda. Third, the paper highlights the central paradox of neoliberal social policy, whereby higher degrees of economization are associated with more generous social policy: more “social” versions of neoliberalism are those that ironically downplay the social logic, transforming social policies into economic investments. The paper also discusses the problems related to economization in terms of de-democratization.

The discourse and practices of Polish migration policy during the COVID-19 pandemic – economisation as a form of emergency governance

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“…Since the 1990s, popular parties and a majority of voters have often internalised the above rationale. Even in the aftermath of the financial market crisis in the late 2000s, the 'resilience' of neoliberal ideas was startling (Schmidt and Thatcher 2013;Crouch 2011;Fraser 2019;Peck and Theodore 2019;Laruffa 2022). The related policy mantra included the curtailment of regulation reducing an individual's dependency on market forces and the adoption of templates for the orchestration of public service provision from the world of private business (Klenk and Pavolini 2015;Mosley and Rathgeb Smith 2018;Bode 2019a).…”

Prosperity in the Twenty-First Century

“…Our social processes are understood as economic ones, and seamlessly apprehended as governed by the rules of the latter such as markets, outputs, efficiency, value added (Harvey, 2005;McKinnon, 2013). These processes of economisation change over time and are not the product of a single economic logic, but of several intersecting ones (Çalışkan & Callon, 2009;Griffen & Panofsky, 2021;Laruffa, 2022). As a process economisation is never complete, because alternative principles and norms for governing economic life survive alongside it.…”