Explaining (with) Neoliberalism

The paper takes the form of a reflection on the explanatory status of neoliberalism, before and since the global crisis of 2008. Prior to the crisis, political-economic conceptions of neoliberalism as a hegemonic grid and as a relatively robust regime of state-facilitated market rule were being received with growing skepticism by some poststructural critics, while some ethnographers found the accompanying conceptual tools rather too blunt for their methodological purposes. The fact, however, that the global crisis—far from marking an inauspicious end to the regime of market rule—seems to have brought about something like a redoubling of its intensity and reach has prompted a reconsideration, in some quarters, of the explanatory and political status of neoliberalism. This, in turn, has opened up some new avenues of dialog between structural and poststructural treatments of neoliberalism, and between ethnographic and political-economic approaches, while at the same time highlighting a series of continuing tensions, both epistemological and ontological. The paper provides a critical commentary on this emerging terrain.