Neoliberalism and its Discontents: The Ideal of Liberation in the Context of Dialectical Tensions and Planetary Extremification

• Published in: Alternate routes Vol. 33; no. 1; p. 86
• Main Author: Colaguori, Claudio
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Athabasca Athabasca University 01-01-2023
• Subjects: Democracy; Individualism; Law; Liberalism; Neoliberalism; Social problems; Traditional societies
• ISSN: 0702-8865; 1923-7081

This paper offers a critical analysis of the conceptual origins of neoliberal society and its attendant social problems by outlining how traditional concepts founded in Western philosophical liberalism have become intensified in the neoliberal present in a manner that perpetuates domination against the original intention of liberal ideals of emancipation. In particular the paper examines five sites of conceptual distortion that perpetuate domination as follows: From the sovereign individual to possessive individualism; The economic conception of freedom and corporate capitalist empire; The liberal rule of law or the neoliberal unruliness of law; Liberal democracy and its competing identities; The incomplete liberal promise of female emancipation and the neoliberal perpetuation of the patriarchal order of domination.