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Culture & Society

Constructions of Neoliberal Reason by Jamie Peck


Nicholas Gane
Theory Culture Society 2013 30: 155
DOI: 10.1177/0263276412456570
The online version of this article can be found at:
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glorication of the artist. They are delightfully light and curiously


profound additions to the contemporary interpretations of the cultural
existence of art.
Nikos Papastergiadis is Professor at the School of Culture and
Communication at the University of Melbourne. [email: n.papastergiadis@unimelb.edu.au]

Constructions of Neoliberal Reason


by Jamie Peck
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010
Reviewed by Nicholas Gane
The global nancial crisis that started in late 2007 and which, in many
respects, is still ongoing, has led many to reconsider the dynamics of
market capitalism in terms of its underlying political economy: neoliberalism. While this term is often used in popular discourse to refer
to a political ideology of laissez-faire or, more simply, a fundamental
belief in the freedom of the market, Jamie Peck advances a more nuanced
understanding of neoliberalism by addressing the complex connections
between the state and market in terms of roll-back (deregulation, privatization and the devolution of state powers) and roll-out (the explosion of market conforming regulatory incursions, p. 23). This
approach is in some ways similar to that of Michel Foucault, who in
his lectures on biopolitics theorizes neoliberalism as a form of governmentality that reverses the logic of classical liberalism by running from
the market to the state rather than vice versa. Peck, in similar vein to
Foucault, treats neoliberalism as a form of market-oriented governance, and argues that neoliberalization is not the antithesis of regulation but rather a self-contradictory form of regulation-in-denial
(p. xiii). But Pecks specic interest, in contrast to Foucault, is in neoliberalism as a lived phenomenon (p. xii), and for this reason he is
concerned with its sociological complexity (p. xiv) as well as its historical geography (p. 8). These concerns underpin the structure of the book,
which is framed around the emergence of two dierent types of neoliberal
reason: the rst coming from the ordoliberalism of post-war Germany,
and the second from the more aggressively market-oriented ideas of the
Chicago School (in particular Milton Friedman). It is through this theoretical framework that Peck addresses the emergence of neoliberal
think-tanks that have been pivotal in providing a response to events
such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina (Chapter 4), before turning to the
soft-neoliberalism of the creative cities movement (Chapter 5) and the
leftish neoliberalism (p. 243) of the Obama presidency (Chapter 6).
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Pecks rst task is to produce a working denition of neoliberalism.


This exercise is far from straightforward, as this form of political economy is said only to exist in messy hybrids (p. 7) and as an oxymoronic
form of market rule that is contradictory and polymorphic (p. 8).
Because of this, Peck argues, the closest one can get to understanding the
nature of neoliberalism is to follow its movements, and to triangulate
between its ideological, ideational, and institutional currents, between
philosophy, politics and practice (p. 8). Nonetheless, it is possible to
identify a line of continuity that underpins all neoliberal thinking:
Neoliberalism, in its various guises, has always been about the capture
and reuse of the state, in the interests of shaping a pro-corporate, freertrading market order (p. 9). The ways in which the state has been
captured and reused in the service of the market, however, has diered
markedly in dierent historical and geographical settings. This book
centres, in particular, on two movements that have been pivotal in the
emergence of contemporary neoliberal reason: the ordoliberalism that
underpinned the emergence of the social market economy in post-war
Germany and the free-market economics of the Chicago School. The
former, associated with the Freiburg School and thinkers such as
Wilhelm Ropke, Walter Eucken and Alexander Rustow, looked for a
way of working between the polar opposites of unfettered capitalism and
state control (p. 60) by pursuing an ideal of a strong state that was both
marketized and committed to extra-economic, indeed moral, regulation
(p. 61). The latter, by contrast, moved from an early position in which the
state was ascribed a range of positive functions (as stated, for example, in
the work of Henry Simons), to one which under the post-war leadership
of Milton Friedman became doctrinally anti-state (p. 17). It is this
problem space between these two strands of neoliberal thinking the
ordoliberal and the Chicago School (which eventually met through
the Mont Pelerin Society, which was founded by Hayek in 1947) that
interests Peck: that space between the free-economy-and-minimalist
state on the one hand, and the socially embedded market order on the
other (p. 17). It is through analysis of this space that Peck addresses the
tensions between roll-back neoliberalism typically associated with
attacks on labour unions, planning agencies, entitlement systems, and
public bureaucracies, or what might be called the Chicago mentality
that spontaneously organizing social and market forces will somehow
automatically ll the vacuums created by the retrenched state institutions
and disorganized collective spaces (p. 22) and roll-out neoliberalism
that, in contrast, reinvents an ordoliberal ethic through practices such
as the selective empowerment of community organizations and NGOs as
(exible, low-cost, non-state) service providers or management by audit
and devolved governance (p. 23).
Peck addresses the points of contact between ordoliberal and Chicago
School thought in Chapter 2, and turns to the reasons for the latters
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emergence as the dominant pole in the ideational universe of neoliberalism (p. xviii) in Chapter 3. The remainder of the book examines the
dynamics of roll-back and roll-out neoliberalism in a range of dierent
settings. Chapter 4 centres on the inuence of conservative think-tanks in
advancing the neoliberal cause. It does so by exploring two main case
studies: New York from the scal crisis of 1975 through to the events of
9/11, and New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. Peck observes that the
scal crisis of the mid-1970s was a signature event for the new urban
right, if not for the transnational project of neoliberalism more generally,
both because it necessitated a protracted period of budgetary restraint,
and in its role as a potent symbol of the eective exhaustion of the welfarist status quo (p. 139). The neoliberal response to this crisis, especially
as articulated by think-tanks such as the Manhattan Institute, was to
argue for the roll-back of the state and Keynesian forms of planning
(through the 1980s), and then the roll-out of new forms of intervention
that involved the regulation of the poor (through the 1990s), through, for
example, policies of workfare. Against this backdrop, the events of 9/11
presented an opportunity for further roll-back in the form of rezoning,
development incentives (not subsidies), deep tax cuts, and a privatesector led rebuilding eort, since [in the words of Manhattan Institute
senior fellow Steven Malanga] no government agency or authority, new
or existing, should under any circumstances be put in charge of planning
or executing the project (p. 150). Peck argues that comparable strategies of roll-back and roll-out were put into play by neoliberal think-tanks
following Hurricane Katrina. The rst step was to oset the funds
needed to redevelop New Orleans against other public spending commitments and, at the same time, to roll-back various forms of market regulation: from the Clean Air Act and restrictions on oil drilling through to
the Davis-Bacon Act (which requires that contractors working on federally funded construction projects should pay the prevailing wage,
p. 158), alongside a broader attack on benet entitlements. In regard
to the latter of these, Peck observes: an urban catastrophe that disproportionately impacted the poor, the inrm, and the elderly perversely
resulted in the paring of programs designed for precisely these groups
(p. 178). The second step was the attempted roll-out of a new New
Orleans through processes of gentrication and moral renewal that
cater explicitly to business, taxpayers, and the middle classes, for who
the restructured city must be made safe and welcoming (p. 170).
This form of revanchist neoliberalism is explored further through a
critical reading of Richard Floridas work on creative cities in Chapter 5.
Peck pays particular attention to Floridas ranking of cities on the basis
of technology, talent and tolerance. Such an exercise, he argues, not only
leads to the promotion of urban competition between cities, but constructs an ideal of what makes a city successful: any big city, with the
right political will, can turn it around, and most of the other urban
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centres at least have a shot, if they possess the essentials like a good
university, some authentic neighbourhoods, a handful of high-tech
employers (p. 200). In such discourse, the driving force for such success
is the creative potential of cities, and their capacity to attract the creative classes. Peck advances a erce critique of this position. He argues
that Creativity plans do not disrupt . . . established approaches to urban
entrepreneurialism and consumption-oriented place promotion, they
extend them (p. 215). For this reason, creative-city strategies are said
to belong to a neoliberalized terrain: They repackage urban cultural
artefacts as competitive assets, valuing them (literally) not for their own
sake, but in terms of their (supposed) economic utility (p. 219). Pecks
analysis of this form of soft neoliberalism, which is saturated in, and
supercially oblivious to, the prevailing market ideology (p. 223), is
accompanied by an attempt to decode Obamanomics in the nal chapter of the book. This chapter pays close attention to the emergence of
Democratic or leftish neoliberalism, or what might otherwise be called
supply-side social democracy. Peck observes that a tension underlying
Obamanomics is that it seeks to blend pro-market scal conservatism
with an ameliorative concern for the entrenched problem of inequality
(p. 238). But, following the global nancial crisis, the former won as
Obama set a double-standard for Wall Street and Main Street (p.
251), and passed up the chance to regulate the excesses of market capitalism. Peck reects, ruefully, that As crisis passed to normalcy, leverage
had been lost. Exhortation and second-best eorts seemed to be all that
were left (p. 261).
In an afterword to this book, Peck tackles the dicult question of
whether the ongoing nancial crisis is likely to spell the end for neoliberalism. His answer is as follows:
Neoliberalisms demonstrated capacity to rise phoenix-like even
from crises of its own making suggests that it has acquired a kind
of exibility in practice that it may some time ago have lost in
theory. Perhaps the stick is now being bent back in favour of
Ordoliberal strategies towards more orderly, restrained forms of
market rule, and away from the buccaneering deregulation of the
Chicago School but this hardly marks a paradigm busting adjustment. Rather, it would represent another instance of neoliberal
adaptation in the face of crisis. (p. 275)
Neoliberalism has indeed fared well out of the nancial crisis (as thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek have observed, it is the Left, paradoxically, that
to date has come o worse). But, arguably, what has resulted from these
events is less a shift from Chicago School deregulation to the social
market of ordoliberalism than the emergence of new congurations
between state and market and, to use Pecks terms, new strategies of
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roll-back and roll-out. In terms of the former, the crisis and the resulting
budgetary decits have provided the perfect opportunity for cuts
in public sector funding, and for the further marketization of the state
and its related institutions. In terms of the latter, the state has become
the lender of last resort or the guarantor of the market, while at
the same time both implementing and being subject to what Peck
calls market-complementing forms of regulation (p. 261). The challenge, as presented by Peck at the outset of this book, is to explore
the space between the market rst model of the Chicago School and
state-centred model of ordoliberalism, and to do so by reading
neoliberalism in terms of competing, and to some extent irreconcilable,
positions on the relation of the state to the market, and on the question
of the appropriate forms and elds of state intervention in the socioeconomic sphere (p. 42).
This book does a ne job of tracing the dierent historical roots of
neoliberal reason and connecting these to the many tensions that lie at
the heart of the contemporary neoliberal project. However, while the
book is rich in historical detail and pays close attention to the ideas of
key neoliberal thinkers such as Mises, Hayek and Friedman, it is not
without limits. If there is a weakness in Pecks account it is the restricted
scope of its historical geography. Peck argues that it was through the
Mont Pelerin Society that ordoliberalism and the Chicago School
became unevenly conjoined into a transnational project (p. 17).
However, for the most part (with the exception of Chapter 2), the primary focus of this book is the US (post-9/11, post-Katrina, and through
the Obama presidency), with the consequence that neither the dierent
national congurations of neoliberalism nor the transnational reach of
neoliberal ideas and practices are explored in detail. This is a little surprising as Peck states early on in the book that
the unsustainable reliance on debt and credit in the American form
of deeply nancialized neoliberalism, in the decade before the crash
of 2008, was clearly predicated not only on a particular conguration of international economic and geopolitical relations, it also
actively enabled a distinctive path of neoliberal development in
China, such that the American and Chinese forms of neoliberalization were eectively coproduced. (p. 10)
Given this statement, some analysis of these geopolitical relations
between the US and China (among others) would bring an extra dimension to Pecks analysis of neoliberal reason. To be fair, such a task probably lies beyond the bounds of this book, which is more concerned with
mapping the points of variance and contact between ordoliberal and
Chicago School thought and addressing how, until recently, the latter
assumed a position of dominance. The only surprise here is that while
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Peck mentions the starting point of the Coasean revolution, the inuence of Ronald Coase on the Chicago School is not dealt with at greater
length, but this is perhaps again due to the connes of space. These
complaints aside, Pecks model for thinking about neoliberalism in
terms of roll-back and roll-out, and between the poles of Chicago and
ordo reason, is potentially a very productive one. Indeed, it is through
an engagement with such a model that we can begin to make sociological
and political sense of new congurations between the state and market
that have emerged since the global nancial crisis, and it is for this
reason, among others, that this book deserves close study.
Nicholas Gane is Reader in Sociology at the University of York and an
Associate Editor of Theory, Culture & Society. His publications include:
Max Weber and Postmodern Theory (Palgrave, 2002); The Future of
Social Theory (Continuum, 2004); New Media: The Key Concepts (with
David Beer, Berg, 2008); and Max Weber and Contemporary Capitalism
(Palgrave, 2012). [email: nbg2@york.ac.uk]

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