The End of Neoliberalism?

The following essay was first given as a lecture at the conference “The Burden of Our Times: The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis” at Bard College in 2009. It was later published in The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis, ed. by Roger Berkowitz and Taun Toay (2012).

In this essay I want to ask a couple of questions and examine one way of framing the discussion regarding the possible intellectual origins of the current crisis. Those questions and my attempt to frame recent economic events are all a way of asking the following: To what extent is the set of facts that led to the quasi-collapse of the financial system and its rescue by governments a crisis? And, if it is a crisis, what sort of crisis is it?

In order to answer that question we need to know what counts as crisis. My first question, then, is what makes a crisis a crisis? Now to that question, I simply want to answer by saying that a crisis is a specific kind of event — by that I mean a historical, political, and social shift such that we would be able to say that, perhaps after that moment, after that point, things never were the same again. In that respect, I am not sure that the events of financial crisis of last year amount to a crisis event.

We heard repeatedly in the six months following the crisis that it was an event. The crisis, we were told…