William Davies “The Limits of Neo-Liberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition” (Sage,

In his new book, The Limits of Neo-Liberalism: Authority, Sovereignty, and the Logic of Competition (Sage, 2014), William Davies, from Goldsmiths College University of London presents a detailed and challenging account of the dominant ideology of our age. The book’s five chapters chart the emergence of neo-liberalism within economics and political philosophy, through the international networks that were influential in propagating the ideas, to finally demonstrate, via the use of fieldwork in the US and Europe, how neo-liberalism exists in practice. The book is keen to move beyond the use of neo-liberalism as a mere description of events or practices that are disliked by parts of contemporary global political discourse. Neoliberalism, for Davies, is the pursuit of the disenchantment of politics by economics. The book shows how this plays out from the initial work of key neo-liberal thinkers, such as Hayek, to more recent defenses of neo-liberal approaches by governments, management theorists and think tanks in the post-crash era. Finally the book offers a reflection on the nature of contemporary critical sociology. Drawing on the work of Luc Boltanski, the French pragmatist sociologist, The Limits of Neo-Liberalism, shows the importance of description and history in setting out the structure of our current global settlement in order to challenge it.

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