Neoliberalism in denial

Abstract

In responding to Weller and O’Neill’s ‘Argument with Neoliberalism’, I question the novelty of their approach and the problematics of denying the critical power and associated violence that neoliberalism continues to wield in our world. While they do raise an important epistemic challenge, a closer reading of the geographical literature on neoliberalism reveals that Weller and O’Neill tend to paint with the broad strokes of caricature. Notions of neoliberalism as inevitable or as a paradigmatic construct have long been debunked by human geographers replaced by protean notions of variegation, hybridity, and articulation with existing political economic circumstances. A discursive understanding of neoliberalism further reveals it as an assemblage and thus to hold neoliberalism to a sense of purity is little more than a straw man argument. Despite the positive desire to allow space for alternatives, Weller and O’Neill unfortunately construct their argument in such a way that positions it as part of an emerging genre of ‘neoliberalism in denial’.