Synopses & Reviews
Variegated Neoliberalism shows how one dominant financial system within Europe came to collapse and evaluates the role of large banking groups which presented politicala economic projects to public institutions arguing that what benefited them also meets the social needs of others.
In reality, their solutions create more problems than they solve. The author suggests that whilst resistance and change is necessary, this goal is complicated by academic accounts which overestimate the power of these agents. Macartney asserts that a more sophisticated understanding than transnational a national separation is required and pervasive varieties of capitalism accounts are also seemingly unhelpful if resistance is the goal.
This book argues the ability for financial elites to impose their projects is limited by the fragility of their consensus on what course of action best suits their interests. The book demystifies the process of neoliberalization, utilizing views from transnational historical materialism and neo-Gramscian IPE. An analysis of three transnationally oriented capital fractions in three key European states shows how neoliberal policies are created.
Variegated Neoliberalism will be of interest to students and scholars of International Political Economy, and the theories of Marx and Gramsci.
Synopsis
We know from the cost of the 2007-09 crisis that transnational finance does not operate in a realm removed from our everyday lives.
Variegated Neoliberalism explains why its inequalities persist and how they undermine more social-minded policies towards finance in the EU.
The book suggests that large financial groups capitalize on broader changes in capitalism and emerging assumptions about what benefits society at large. Those pushing these political-economic projects present policy change to cope with financial globalization as a new common sense. Macartney's argument then contests these assumptions through an analysis of the spatial relations of transnational actors, and the political claims made within finance and research communities.
Rather than relying on umbrella concepts like 'transnational capitalist class', Variegated Neoliberalism emphasises the national-domestic foundations for transnationalization and what we commonly understand as neoliberalism. The book provides comparative analyses of global and European banking communities, and economic research centres, in the UK, France, and Germany. It explains the constellations underpinning the current neoliberal order in global finance, and the realms of possibility for challenges to it.