Image Credits: George Monbiot, The Guardian
(2016) - Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems - George Monbiot
In this 2016 essay, George Monbiot argues neoliberalism has driven nearly every major crisis of the last fifty years, from the 2008 crash to the erosion of public health and education, precisely because it's rarely named or treated as a choice. He traces its deliberate construction by economists like Hayek and its rollout under Thatcher and Reagan, noting the irony that "freeing" markets required immense state power to impose. It draws attention not just to who benefits from deregulation and privatization, but to how thoroughly those beneficiaries have succeeded in making their preferred arrangement look like simply how the world works. If the people who benefit most from an arrangement are also the ones best positioned to make it look like simply how the world works, what else might we see as a natural order when, in reality, it is just well-defended?
So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution.