Abstract
In a context marked by a notable decline in welfare provisions and sharpening structural inequalities, the process of personal responsibilization came to perform as essential ideological function. Understanding this character requires one to locate the process within the political context of neoliberal societies, to explore its symbolically cultivated dimension and recognize its status as object of symbolic production. The task of this chapter, therefore, consists in defetishizing the process by exposing some of the decisions responsible for its emergence and symbolic cultivation.
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Notes
- 1.
Contrary to Hayek, ordoliberals believed in “securing an institutional basis for competition” (Bröcking 2016: 54).
- 2.
Exploring the various nuanced differences between their respective accounts of the individualization thesis in detail falls outside the scope of the present discussion. For such a discussion, please see Atkinson (2010) and Howard (2007).
- 3.
For Giddens (1991), though, this is followed by a process of “re-embedding.”
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Masquelier, C. (2017). Personal Responsibilization. In: Critique and Resistance in a Neoliberal Age. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40194-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40194-6_5
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