Provincializing Neoliberalism?

In this short commentary, I respond to Weller and O’Neill’s (2014) presentation of neoliberalism as a “summary word that elides a complex reality and dissuades close political engagement”. Whilst I agree that we need to avoid the easy rhetoric of universality in our research enquiries, our attempts to recognise, explain and theorise paradigmatic changes in capitalism necessitate a comprehension of the global context. Attending to the relationship between local ideas and policies and the ‘global imaginary’ of neoliberalism is critical for understanding and evaluating recent political and economic changes. While we do need to constantly reflect on the perils of reifying neoliberalism as a conceptual category, we might also still need and make use of this category, in a more qualified and variegated form, precisely in order to critique shifts in capitalism through explicit examples and propose alternatives to the global futures imagined in the neoliberal story.