The Making of Modern Liberalism

Introduction: Neoliberal Culture / the Cultures of Neoliberalism

“…Neoliberalism can be situated as a revived and reoriented transformation of some basic tenets deriving from classical liberalism, founded on 'an idea of limited government, the maintenance of the rule of law, the avoidance of arbitrary and discretionary power, the sanctity of private property and freely made contracts, and the responsibility of individuals for their own fates' (Ryan 2012, cited in Gane 2015.3 Neoliberal proponents (most obviously in Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, originally published in 1944) effectively constructed a historical narrative in which these principles had become derailed through the rise of socialism. With all best intentions of enhancing social wellbeing, centralised state intervention could only end up eroding it through the frustration of the basic human drive to creative enterprise and self-expression.…”

France’s #Nuit Debout Social Movement: Young People Rising up and Moral Emotions

“…In referring to a liberal project, we refer to narratives that are part of a liberal tradition [87,88], which emphasise ideas that people are rational, utility calculating, freedom seeking autonomous agents and political is an aggregate of those individual dispositions. From these accounts of human action came powerful narratives about representative democracy that rely on the assumption that the political or politics is technical action.…”

False Starts, Wrong Turns and Dead Ends: Reflections on Recent Developments in Criminology

“…In this context, it is felt that there has been erosion of liberal ideals and the main objective the seen to be the reduction of state power, developing more benign and informal methods of crime control and in general to restrict what is viewed as the unnecessary overreach of social control. As Alan Ryan (2012) concludes in his examination of modern liberalism:…”