UCL Press

The Neoliberal Age?

Britain since the 1970s

Edited by Aled Davies, Ben Jackson, and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

ISBN: 9781787356856

Publication: December 01, 2021

Open Access PDF £0.00 Paperback £25.00 Hardback £45.00

This title has not yet been published. Please bookmark this page and come back on the publication date when it will be freely available to download.

‹ Previous Next ›

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets, and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven to be highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political/public debate.

Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics. According to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks, and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal Age? suggests this narrative is too simplistic.

Where the standard story sees neoliberalism as right-wing, this book points to some left-wing origins, too. Where the standard story emphasises the agency of think-tanks and politicians, this book shows that other actors from the corporate world were also highly significant. Where the standard story can suggest that neoliberalism transformed subjectivities and social lives, this book shows other forces which helped make Britain more individualistic in the late twentieth century.

The analysis thus takes neoliberalism seriously but also shows that it cannot be the only explanatory framework for understanding contemporary Britain, and that ‘neoliberal’ cannot be the only descriptor used to categorise Britain in the past 50 years. The book showcases cutting-edge research, making it useful to researchers and students, as well as to those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped our recent past.

Aled Davies is Career Development Fellow in Modern History at Jesus College, Oxford University.

Ben Jackson is Associate Professor of Modern History at Oxford University.

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite is Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century British History at UCL.

List of figures

List of tables

List of contributors

List of abbreviations
Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: A neoliberal age?
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Aled Davies and Ben Jackson

2. What came between New Liberalism and neoliberalism? Rethinking Keynesianism, the welfare state and social democracy
David Edgerton

3. Intellectual histories of neoliberalism and their limits
Ben Jackson

Part I. Welfare State and Social Policy

4. Welfare in a neoliberal age: The politics of redistributive market liberalism
Peter Sloman

5. The failures of neoliberalism in Britain since the 1970s: The limits on ‘market forces’ in a de-industrialising economy and a ‘New Speenhamland’
Jim Tomlinson

6. British varieties of neoliberalism: Unemployment policy from Thatcher to Blair
Bernhard Rieger

Part II. Work and Family

7. ‘I don’t know how she does it!’: Feminism, family and work in ‘neoliberal’ Britain
Helen McCarthy

8. Workers’ voice and the moral economy in Britain’s ‘Neoliberal’ Age
Jim Phillips

9. Where was entrepreneurship in post-war Britain? Freedom, family, and choice in modern British shopping cultures
Sarah Mass

Part III. Politics

10. ‘The privatisation of the struggle’: Anti-racism in the age of enterprise
Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Rob Waters

11. Neoliberalism and the Labour Party
Mark Wickham-Jones

12. Neoliberalism and Conservatism in Britain
James Freeman

Part IV. Political Economy

13. Organised business and the rise of neoliberalism: The Confederation of British Industry 1965-1990s
Neil Rollings

14. The roots of Britain’s financialised political economy
Aled Davies