Readings on Neoliberalism 12/17

1 So....books on neoliberalism. If you're interested in local urban cases, I'd check out The Long Default by William Tabb. Doesn't mention the term--the book was written before the concept comes into common parlance--but deals with the first US case--New York City.

2. I'd also check out The Neoliberal City by @hackworth_1. Notes the spatial aspects of the neoliberal turn.

3. Moving from cases I'd also check out The New Way of the World by Laval and Dardot. Thinking of neoliberalism as a specific type of governing logic, they do an excellent job of tracing the development of that logic.

4. If you can find it, I'd check out Reinventing Government. It's the blueprint for the Clinton years. You won't see the term--but you'll see the logic at work by the people attempting to put it into practice.

5. The full title "Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector" gets at this. They're straight up true believers.

6. Now if you want policy arenas, in education you'd want to check out Pauline Lipman's The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City.

7. In Welfare you'd want Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race by Soss, Fording, and Schram. This one is pretty heavy, methodologically speaking. But it's worth moving through. VERY VERY careful.

8. You'd also want to check out Welfare's End by Gwendolyn Mink. Doesn't contain the term, but this is a nice neat analysis of Clinton era welfare "reform".

9. For police there's still a lot to mine but I'd turn to Stuart Hall's Policing the Crisis (and then to The Hard Road to Renewal for a sense of GB neoliberalization).

10. Oh. And for a general work that takes a hard left approach I'd mention Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

11. But here's the thing. A lot of the work on neoliberalism ignores race entirely. You won't find it in @hackworth_1 The Neoliberal City. Won't find it in Harvey. Won't find it in Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos.

12. You can't understand something like the anti-tax revolt in the US without thinking through racial politics in California. We definitely can't understand the SPECIFIC Tea Party response without thinking about racial resentment.

13. I wrote KNOCKING THE HUSTLE with Undoing the Demos (among others) in mind. Undoing hadn't even come out yet, but I was 98% positive Brown would ignore racial dynamics.

15. (On Harvey.) Take a look at older Harvey. He'll mention THE KERNER COMMISSION without ever noting that it's primary focus was racial unrest.

16. So there's a whole nother thread on the work that places race at the center but ignores political economy. I'd put The New Jim Crow here. Here's the trifling way to think about it.....https://twitter.com/wesinjapan/status/942814575564640258 …

17. Over the course of maybe three or four years I was stopped several times by police officers for cause. Once I didn't have a license, a photo ID, and didn't know whose car I was driving. Didn't get a single ticket. How do we use The New Jim Crow to explain that?

18. Baltimore police are deployed spatially--through the DOJ report, we know where the profiling occurs--those areas are black AND poor. The New Jim Crow is about as bad on political economy as A Brief History and Undoing the Demos (among others) are on race.