The global neoliberal revolution of the 1980s and 1990s is the defining political-economic development of our era. A voluminous, multidisciplinary literature has documented this shift nearly from its outset. Historian Gary Gerstle's volume The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order adds to this effort a broad American history perspective on the neoliberal turn, stretching from the beginnings of the New Deal to today, which weaves diverse accounts, as well as original observations and interpretations, into a rich, lucid narrative. This narrative does not so much revise as overview and reinforce the existing political understanding of neoliberalism's rise among historians and social scientists. It knits together manifold pieces of knowledge into a coherent, canonical story that will interest experts, students, and lay readers alike.
Gerstle's approach to the historiography of American capitalism centers on his concept of a “political order”: a period in which the agenda of a certain political movement becomes hegemonic, in the sense that its rivals acquiesce to it, and for a time it comes to define the general frame of politics. This approach usefully captures the succession of political orders in terms of pressures for change that destabilize the existing order and a concurrent political mobilization meeting favorable contextual conditions underlying the rise of the next. For instance, Gerstle explains how the racial revolution, the Vietnam War, and economic decline factored to destabilize the New Deal order. The first two—reflecting internal and external processes of decolonization coming of age in the 1960s—served to fracture the national coalition of interests underlying the New Deal consensus. The multifaceted economic crisis of the 1970s finalized the break of an order that emphasized institutionalized social solidarity and public oversight of markets. The stagnation of the Soviet economy, long before an implicit driver of American politics to the left, further encouraged the fall. This story is not unfamiliar, but Gerstle tells it embracingly and vividly.
The core of the book is the narrative in chapters 3, 4, and 5 of neoliberalism's beginnings, ascent, and triumph. For Gerstle, the neoliberal doctrine consisted of three “strategies of reform” (p. 88). The first was a commitment to actively constitute free markets, including by vigorous governmental intervention. Gerstle locates the roots of this principle in classical liberalism's emphasis on “order” (pp. 88–90). The second, more innovative strategy was the extension of market principles to noneconomic realms, as prescribed by human capital theory. The book does not go on to explore numerous other applications of this strategy, such as the neoliberal university or the financialization of everyday life.
Instead, Gerstle dwells on the third strategy, which involved the recuperation of “the utopian promise of personal freedom embedded in classical liberalism” (p. 88). He shows how the classical promise “to re-inject freedom, spontaneity, and unpredictability into politics, society, and economics” resonated with broad popular dissatisfaction with the New Deal order, across society (p. 98). In the early 1960s, Barry Goldwater denounced the conformism nurtured by regulated economic life and called for a market-based “emancipation of creative differences” (p. 95). This view converged with criticisms of “the system” and its subordination of individuality made by the counterculture and New Left avant-garde. Both sides yearned for “the thrill and adventure of throwing off constraints from one's person” that only liberalism could promise (p. 88). Later, high-tech entrepreneurs, techno-utopians, and the Internet revolution would further diffuse visions of market freedom throughout society. Gerstle makes a convincing case for the role of these cultural trends in explaining the popular appeal of neoliberalism despite its sacrifice of social security, which had been so important for the generations shaped by the Great Depression.
The book explores some of the major drivers and expressions of the neoliberal revolution. Among other choices, it emphasizes Ronald Reagan's remarkable personal agency in becoming the “general” of the neoliberal movement. A tireless, politically gifted nemesis of the New Deal order, Reagan's “greatest political achievement was to reconcile a politics focused on restoring white supremacy and godliness with his own neoliberal market orientation,” thus forging a new winning coalition with former Democratic constituents (p. 119). As Gerstle absorbingly describes, the rise of neoliberalism as a political order was couched in several transformations beyond economic deregulation and marketization, notably, the turn toward juridical originalism in the Supreme Court, a turn away from the fairness doctrine in media broadcast regulation, and the development of a carceral state to address individual maladjustment to the order, particularly among racialized minorities.
The final chapters—“Hubris” (chapter 6), “Coming Apart” (chapter 7), and “The End” (chapter 8)—comment on recent events in American politics while suggesting that neoliberalism has fallen. This is a provocative claim, to be sure, which triggered my curiosity as well as, honestly, skepticism. Gerstle's fall thesis cites George W. Bush's failures to extend neoliberalism in Iraq and domestically; the Great Recession; the emergence of protest movements such as the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter; and the ascent of unconventional leaders including Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The analysis does not sufficiently show, however, how these drawbacks and expressions of discontent met the conditions for change posited by Gerstle's political orders theory. Occupy and Sanders perhaps sought to replace neoliberalism, but their blueprint failed to gain dominance, even within the left. (As Gerstle describes, the Obama and Biden administrations have largely continued to operate within the frame of the Clintonian acquiesce to neoliberalism.) At the same time, the populist right of the Tea Party and Trump movements largely refrained from promoting an alternative to the reign of markets; rather, it sought to curtail progressive interpretations of the neoliberal paradigm in such areas as health care, immigration, and international relations. At its worst, the contemporary populist right seeks to constitute an authoritarian version of neoliberalism, as has occurred in Hungary and is now attempted in Israel. With no succeeding political institutions in sight, it seems too soon to determine that neoliberalism has fallen.
Professor Kaplan’s research spans various aspects of global corporate capitalism, including its historical emergence and expansion, business and society politics, corporate power and social responsibility, business elite networks, global environmental politics, and the rise of anti-liberal populism.
