Abstract
For a while the global health crisis that erupted in 2020 seemed to sound the death knell for the neoliberal policies implemented since the 1970s in the UK and the US, and subsequently in most parts of the world. But could the return of Keynesianism in COVID-19-battered economies durably undermine the resilience of the Anglo-American neoliberal paradigm? To address this question the chapter focuses on the history of economic ideas and public policies on both sides of the Atlantic over the past fifty years, as well as on resulting institutional change. First, it makes the case that the shift to neoliberalism was a gradual process and that the model which emerged was distinctively “Anglo-American” not only for reasons of timing, but also because of ideational, policy, and institutional convergence. Secondly, it focuses on factors accounting for the resilience and influence of the model until 2007 before analysing how this was challenged by the financial crisis and its aftermath. Finally, it considers whether the anomalies revealed during and after the financial crisis, combined with the experience of the health crisis and a renewal in economic thinking could provide opportunities for paradigm change in the future.
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Notes
- 1.
As the origin of the word “crisis” suggests. The Greek word Κρίσις is derived from ϰρίνειν which means to separate, judge, or decide.
- 2.
Although the shift to “neoliberal” policies can be traced back to the mid-1970s in the UK and US it was only in the first decade of the twenty-first century that they were commonly labelled as such (Cahill et al., 2018: xxv).
- 3.
“An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasised viewpoints into a unified analytical construct. […] In its conceptual purity, this mental construct […] cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality” (Weber, 1903: 90).
- 4.
See, below, Catherine Mathieu’s contribution to the present volume.
- 5.
See, below, Peter Dorey’s contribution to the present volume.
- 6.
See, below, Virgile Lorenzoni’s contribution to the present volume.
- 7.
See, below, Peter Dorey’s contribution to the present volume.
- 8.
Part III of the present volume explores the paradigm’s influence in Europe.
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Azuelos, M. (2022). Standing the Test of Time? The “Resilience” of the Anglo-American Neoliberal Paradigm in the Post-financial Crisis, Post-Covid Era. In: Lévy, N., Chommeloux, A., Champroux, N.A., Porion, S., josso, S., Damiens, A. (eds) The Anglo-American Model of Neoliberalism of the 1980s. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12074-9_4
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