Summary of David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The idea of freedom, long embedded in the American tradition, has played a prominent role in American politics in recent years. President Bush stated that the freedom conferred on Iraq was an adequate justification for the war, though he didn’t explain where the Iraqis were supposed to ride the horse of freedom.
#2 The Bush administration’s answer to the question of how to improve the well-being of the Iraqi people was to impose a neoliberal state on them. This state would facilitate the well-being of private property owners and businesses.
#3 The first experiment with neoliberal state formation took place in Chile after the coup on the little September 11th of 1973, which was promoted by domestic business elites threatened by Salvador Allende’s drive towards socialism.
#4 The Chilean economy was rebuilt following the coup d’etat led by General Pinochet in 1973. The country’s economists were brought into the government, and they applied free-market policies. The result was a much more pragmatic and less ideologically driven application of neoliberal policies in the years that followed.

Sujets

• Conservatism
• Liberalism
• Political Science
• Political Ideologies

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822501614
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The idea of freedom, long embedded in the American tradition, has played a prominent role in American politics in recent years. President Bush stated that the freedom conferred on Iraq was an adequate justification for the war, though he didn’t explain where the Iraqis were supposed to ride the horse of freedom.

#2

The Bush administration’s answer to the question of how to improve the well-being of the Iraqi people was to impose a neoliberal state on them. This state would facilitate the well-being of private property owners and businesses.

#3

The first experiment with neoliberal state formation took place in Chile after the coup on the little September 11th of 1973, which was promoted by domestic business elites threatened by Salvador Allende’s drive towards socialism.

#4

The Chilean economy was rebuilt following the coup d’etat led by General Pinochet in 1973. The country’s economists were brought into the government, and they applied free-market policies. The result was a much more pragmatic and less ideologically driven application of neoliberal policies in the years that followed.

#5

The neoliberal turn was not the result of US imperialism, but rather the result of a complex process of geographic and political determination. It was not the US that forced Margaret Thatcher to take the pioneering neoliberal path in 1979, nor was it the US that forced China in 1978 to set out on a path of liberalization.

#6

After World War II, the world was restructured to prevent a return to the catastrophic conditions that had threatened the capitalist order in the Great Depression. Free trade in goods was encouraged under a system of fixed exchange rates anchored by the US dollar’s convertibility into gold at a fixed price.

#7

Embedded liberalism was the economic system that existed in the advanced capitalist countries during the 1950s and 1960s. It delivered high rates of economic growth, but the system began to break down by the end of the 1960s.

#8

Neoliberalism was the answer to how to get the conditions for the resumption of active capital accumulation. It was a tentatively applied solution from state to state, and it was shaped by the interests of political forces and existing institutional arrangements.

#9

The economic crisis of the 1970s affected everyone. It was a clear threat to economic elites and ruling classes, as the upper classes felt their control over wealth slip away.

#10

The Chilean and Argentine examples show that the benefits of capital accumulation are highly skewed under forced privatization. The country and its ruling classes, as well as foreign investors, did extremely well in the early stages. However, the benefits were not evenly distributed.

#11

The top 1 percent of income earners in the United States have doubled their share of the national income from 6. 5 percent to 13 percent since 1982. And when we look further afield, we see extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power emerging all over the place.

#12

Neoliberalization has been successful in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has not been very effective in revitalizing the conditions for capital accumulation. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal.

#13

Neoliberalism is a potential antidote to threats to the capitalist social order and a solution to capitalism’s ills. It was created by a small group of academic economists, historians, and philosophers in 1947.

#14

The battle for ideas is key, and it will take at least a generation to win it against both Marxism and socialism. The Mont Pelerin Society garnered financial and political support, and neoliberal theory began to exert practical influence in a variety of policy fields in the 1970s.

#15

In May 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected in Britain with a strong mandate to reform the economy. She abandoned Keynesianism and adopted monetarist supply-side solutions to cure the stagflation that had characterized the British economy during the 1970s.

#16

The Volcker shock, as it has since come to be known, was a necessary but not sufficient condition for neoliberalization. Other central banks had long emphasized anti-inflationary fiscal responsibility, and governments began to adopt neoliberal policies in other areas.

#17

Reagan’s victory over Carter in 1980 proved crucial, as his administration provided the political backing through further deregulation, tax cuts, and attacks on trade union and professional power.

#18

The OPEC oil price hike of 1973 gave financial power to the oil-producing states, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi. The US was preparing to invade these countries in order to restore the flow of oil and bring down oil prices.

#19

The US imperial tradition had been developing for many years, and it was defined against the imperial traditions of other European powers.