Posts com a Tag ‘História Intelectual do Neoliberalismo’

In the last two decades, there has been a great number of books on the history of neoliberalism. As most scholars in this debate recognize it, the literature is divided into three currents: the first understands neoliberalism as a “scheme” designed by the elites in a time that their profits declined, being the retreat of the State a remedy to that situation (exemplified by 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism of British Marxist professor David Harvey); the second is the Foucauldian strain that focuses on neoliberalism as governmentality, a new mode of subjectification that takes the individual as an enterprise and the third takes neoliberalism as an intellectual project, or a network of individuals with similar ideals united through a series of institutions that emerged in the twentieth century.

Niklas Olsen also recognizes these three trends in the introduction of his book but wants to steer us away from them. As a biographer and admirer of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck, Olsen puts in motion the method of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history), pioneered by Koselleck, to analyze the emergence of neoliberalism. As the author explains it, he “analyzes social-political concepts as reflecting phenomena that are shaped in historically concrete situations by historical actors who use concepts to make sense of and order the world, employing them as tools or weapons to meet their political visions”. (OLSEN, 2019, 7) Leia Mais