by Metatone
Sat Jun 8th, 2013 at 10:08:27 AM EST
Over the years, I've made quite a few references to "The Right Nation" by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. It wasn't written to be a history of the way the right created what may be called the "neoliberal project" but in the course of the book, that's what it does.
This convinced me, along with the documentaries of Adam Curtis and all the discussions over the years at ET that part of "how we got here" is that the right engaged in a cultural project on whole range of levels, including:
- Writing a narrative of the 70s that justified their economics
- Working to undermine collective action as a justified response to anything
and many more.
All this alongside other projects in influencing academics and politics in a more direct fashion.
So anyway, over this time it seems to me that I haven't read a definitive history of all this - so I'm looking for book recommendations:
Googling led me to David Harvey's book - which andrethegiant wrote about here on Eurotrib in 2007:
European Tribune - David Harvey's 'A Brief History of Neoliberalism'
I've just written a summary (for my own work) of David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Having followed all the excellent diaries here recently on various economists (and Jerome's neolib reference today) I thought Harvey's ideas might be of interest to some of us around here.
Because I've summarized Harvey's work in some detail, the post is quite long, so I will be splitting it up over several days. The first few diaries will be more or less just a plain summary. When I get to the end, I will try and open up the discussion with some outside sources (by Harvey and others) to put this particular work in context...
Somehow I've never gotten around to reading it - time to fix that.
So that's the first on the list - but I'd welcome more suggestions...