ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Varities of neoliberalism: The political logics of the neoclassical tradition (by Fikret Adaman and Yahya Madra)
Author: Adaman Fikret, Madra Yahya
Neoliberalism is usually seen as a correlate of the Chicago School version of neoclassical economic theory and its ideological sources are usually located in the writings of Chicago economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. In many versions of this understanding of neoliberalism, Friedrich von Hayek’s writings are also referred to as an intellectual source of the neoliberal project— more often than not erroneously included in the Chicago camp. In this paper, we will argue that neoliberalism cannot and should not be reduced to a particular subset of the neoclassical tradition. If neoliberalism is understood as a political, economic and cultural project that aims to govern the social through economic incentives, then the entire neoclassical tradition has to be understood as a theoretical field where neoliberal ideology is (re)produced. Only then will it be possible to see how left-leaning late neoclassical economic approaches (such as New Keynesian economics, post-Walrasian economics, new institutional economics, evolutionary game theory, Analytical Marxism) also belong to the theoretical repertoire of neoliberalism. Even though these left-neoclassical economists are keen to identify the various failures of the idealized market of the traditional neoclassical economic theory (e.g., transaction costs, moral hazard, adverse selection, environmental externalities) and hence, to ajar the door for some dose of “corrective” intervention and institutional design, they also inhabit the neoliberal universe and contribute to the reproduction of the neoliberal project. But perhaps more insidiously, their non-recognition as a part of the neoliberal project enables these approaches to present themselves as a rational alternative to the exuberant and dogmatic market fundamentalisms of the Chicago and Austrian approaches and thereby practically pushing truly alternative conceptualizations of the economic (such as Marxian or Institutionalist approaches) to the beyond of public debate.
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