The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism

Winner of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung prize

The financial crisis seemed to present a fundamental challengeto neo-liberalism, the body of ideas that have constituted thepolitical orthodoxy of most advanced economies in recent decades.Colin Crouch argues in this book that it will shrug off thischallenge. The reason is that while neo-liberalism seems to beabout free markets, in practice it is concerned with the dominanceover public life of the giant corporation. This has beenintensified, not checked, by the recent financial crisis andacceptance that certain financial corporations are 'too bigto fail'. Although much political debate remains preoccupied withconflicts between the market and the state, the impact of thecorporation on both these is today far more important.

Several factors have brought us to this situation:

Most obviously, the lobbying power of firms whose donations areof growing importance to cash-hungry politicians and parties;The weakening of competitive forces by firms large enough toshape and dominate their markets;The power over public policy exercised by corporations enjoyingspecial relationships with government as they contract to deliverpublic services;The moral initiative that is grasped by enterprises that devisetheir own agendas of corporate social responsibility.

Both democratic politics and the free market are weakened bythese processes, but they are largely inevitable and not alwaysmalign. Hope for the future, therefore, cannot lie in suppressingthem in order to attain either an economy of pure markets or asocialist society. Rather it lies in dragging the giant corporationfully into political controversy. Here a key role is played by thesmall, cash-strapped campaigning groups who, with precious littlehelp from established parties, seek to achieve corporate socialaccountability.