Skip to content
LPE Originals

What is the “Free Market Family” and How Can We End It?

By

What drives free-market family policy is a fundamentally wrongheaded view about the economy and the ends it should serve. US policymakers equate the economy with markets alone, and then treat rising GDP as the sum total of economic success. But the economic system, properly conceived, is, simply yet more broadly, the system for getting people the resources they need to flourish—material, caretaking, educational, and leisure—individually and collectively. (This is the first post in a symposium.)
LPE Originals

Algorithmic Imaginaries: The Political Limits of Legal and Computational Reasoning

By

As law and political economy scholars take aim at the deficiencies of dominant modes of legal thought and chart a path for law to promote a more just and egalitarian society, they must also attend to the role of algorithmic systems and algorithmic thought in shaping political imaginations. By the same token, computer and information scientists interested in computation’s role in social reforms would do well to learn from the critiques and proposals of the LPE community.
LPE Originals

Ferment is Abroad: Techlash, Legal Institutions, and the Limits of Lawfulness

By

As critiques of the centrality of neoliberal economic logic gain traction, we must take care that such work does not simply clear the path for an emerging hegemony of neoliberal computational logic. Instead, we must be attentive to proponents of the epistemic and political dominance of computational mechanisms, and we must critique them on similar grounds and with similar urgency.
LPE Originals

Historicizing Consumer Protection

By

Learned Hand once described the task of the Federal Trade Commission as “discover[ing] and mak[ing] explicit those unexpressed standards of fair dealing which the conscience of the community may progressively develop.” In a previous post, I argued that moving consumer protection law beyond consumer sovereignty requires recovering this way of thinking, common among Progressives and…
LPE Originals

Mutant Neoliberalism and the Politics of Culture

By

As other contributors to this symposium have noted, Mutant Neoliberalism effectively illustrates that neoliberalism cannot be reduced to neoclassical economics or the Washington Consensus, but instead must be understood as a constantly mutating cultural and political formation. What I want to address in this piece is the methodological lessons this volume offers those working in LPE.
LPE Originals

Nationalism and Neoliberal Governance

By

There is a tension at the heart of the neoliberal state, between the ambition to install the market as a legally-mandated universal norm, and the ambition to nurture the most innovative, competitive and powerful firms and territories.
LPE Originals

Mutant Neoliberalism, Originary Violence, and Feminist Revolts in Latin America

By

In an interview, Michel Foucault said that when “actually existing” socialism was put in scare quotes, as if it were not exactly “real,” the only thing the scare quotes revealed was the strength of an abstract ideal that theorists invariably used as a measuring stick to evaluate, and theoretically marginalize, whatever was actually happening on the ground. What if we were to apply such an ironic qualification to neoliberalism?
LPE Originals

The Bourgeois Internationale, Part II

By

As I noted in my first post, it is possible that the COVID-19 pandemic will force a reckoning with the democratic deficit in the European Union and prompt a renewal of left-wing politics across the continent. However, the existing constitutional machinery of the five presidencies that make up the EU is both complex and considerably resistant to change, even (perhaps especially) in a crisis.
LPE Originals

Up or Out: Migration and Rated Governance

By

Ken Loach’s 2016 film I Am Daniel Blake (2016) depicts post-crash austerity in all of its bleak barbarity. The plot revolves around the film’s protagonist, a middle-aged carpenter, who attempts to navigate the British welfare system after a heart attack makes it hard for him to work. The message the system sends to our unlucky hero is that he is not worthy: of the state’s resources, of an employer’s goodwill, of anyone’s sympathy, of his own basic humanity. On Michel Feher’s assessment, we might add another shortcoming: he isn’t creditworthy, either.
LPE Originals

The Bourgeois Internationale, Part I

By

Mutant Neoliberalism is an excellent collection of essays canvassing what editors William Callison and Zachary Manfredi rightly diagnose as the changing face of neoliberalism – really, the multiplicity of national, transnational and post-national neoliberalisms – evolving in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Instead of a mortal wounding, the crisis generated the paradox, as several authors in the collection note, that neoliberalism’s failures led to more, not less, neoliberalism.
LPE Originals

Dead Again? Mutant Neoliberalism and Crisis Reinvention

By ,

Will the rise of new political forces and the explosion of global crises sound neoliberalism’s death knell? Or will ostensible challenges to existing political and economic orders instead catalyze new mutations in neoliberalism’s dynamic development? Mutant Neoliberalism, a recent edited collection, brings together leading scholars of neoliberalism—political theorists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists—to rethink transformations…