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Neoliberalism Quotes

Browse 134 quotes about Neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism Quotes

“...those thoroughly incorporated within the inexorable logic of the market and its demands find that there is little time and space in which to explore emancipatory potentialities outside what is marketed as 'creative' adventure, leisure, and spectacle. Obliged to live as appendages of the market and of capital accumulation rather than as expressive beings, the realm of freedom shrinks before the awful logic and the hollow intensity of market involvements”

WealthFreedomCapitalismIndividualityConsumerismNeoliberalismMarket
Author:David Harvey
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“This government has represented benefits as somehow shameful. The point about universal benefits is that they affirm the value of such social tasks as having children, rearing them, or caring for relatives; they make benefits themselves an expression of collective approval for the endeavour, not begrudged hand-outs, stigmatising the recipients as beggars and failures.”

PovertyBenefitsNeoliberalismThatcherismStigmatising
Book:Into the Dangerous World: Some Reflections on Childhood and Its Costs
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“Today, rather than a democracy we have a plutocracy (rule by moneyed interests) in which some of the formal elements of democracy nonetheless remain. Needless to say a real democracy ... is impossible where income, wealth, and power are concentrated and where inequality is growing, that is, in the normal ways of things under capitalism”

WealthPowerDemocracyCapitalismIncomeInequalityNeoliberalismPlutocracy
Book:What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism
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“Psycho-compulsion is therefore not just about instilling people with a so-called correct employability mindset. It is a mechanism for penalising deviation from what it defines as the right set of attitudes and behaviours. ‘What psycho-compulsion therefore attempts to do is silence alternative discourses to the neoliberal myth that you are to blame for your unemployment,’ said Friedli. ‘At the same time, it undermines and erodes alternative frameworks around which people can come together in solidarity to act against the social causes of worklessness.’ In short, psycho-compulsion not only pathologises and punishes a claimant’s dissent, it depoliticises the causes of joblessness (which discourages collective action), and it does so by resuscitating Margaret Thatcher’s earlier myth that unemployment can be reduced to character deficiencies.”

WorkMental HealthWorkersEmploymentDissentNeoliberalismMargaret ThatcherDepoliticisationPsycho Compulsion
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“Neoliberalism insists that if we work hard enough, we can earn as much money as anyone else. Of course, the concept of meritocracy is integral to neoliberalism and erases the reality of capital itself, that capitalism is not just material capital but also, importantly, social and cultural capital. Without these forms of capital, (p. 77) one cannot, in fact, “succeed” in a capitalist culture. One obvious example is the art world, where one can only have their work shown in a gallery if they have connections to that gallery (galleries do not, for the most part, accept unsolicited submissions). All the cash in the world can’t create the generations of social connections of a middle-class family, whose circle might include art collectors, gallerists, critics, and artists. It is also the values and unspoken rules of the ruling class that distinguish who is allowed in and who is not.”

ValuesWorkMiddle ClassCapitalistWorking ClassCapitalNeoliberalismMeritocracy
Book:The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class
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“Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”

NatureDepressionCapitalismMadnessMental HealthMental IllnessIdeologyNeoliberalismFoucaultCapitalist RealismD GLaing
Book:Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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“Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers...a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon... Proudhon in effect took the specifics of bourgeois legal and economic relations and treated them as universal and foundational for the development of an alternative, socially just economic system. From Marx's standpoint, this is no alternative at all since it merely re-inscribes bourgeois conceptions of value in a supposedly new form of society. This problem is still with us, not only because of the contemporary anarchist revival of interest in Proudhon's ideas but also because of the rise of a more broad-based liberal human rights politics as a supposed antidote to the social and political ills of contemporary capitalism. Marx's critique of Proudhon is directly applicable to this contemporary politics. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its own foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx's view, a serious error.”

RightsRevolutionCapitalismEconomicsValueHuman RightsLiberalismIndividualismAnarchismNeoliberalismHarveyMarxUnProudhon
Book:A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1
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“[W]hat counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. … [E]mancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”

NaturePossibilityCapitalismValueIdeologyNeoliberalismCapitalist Realism
Book:Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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“What we need is a profound rethinking of the nature of suffering itself, and what it is trying to highlight and ask us to change. We need to repoliticise emotional discontent in the minds of teachers, parents and policy-makers, rather than continue reducing it to dysfunctions that allegedly reside within the self. We need to acknowledge that suffering also reflects family/socio/political dynamics we would do well to better acknowledge and address.”

SufferingMental HealthTherapyHealthcarePsychotherapyNeoliberalismDepoliticisation
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“Tim Kasser: ‘The heyday of humanistic psychology was in the 1960s and 1970s, when Keynes dominated. But since the rise of neo-liberalism from the 1980s, we’ve seen an influx of cognitive behavioural approaches and psychiatric drugs – technologies that put the cause of the problem right between your ears. The therapies our governments now want all focus on internal not external reform. They don’t see suffering as a call to change external circumstances for the good of our development.”

SufferingPsychologyCapitalismTherapyPsychiatryNeoliberalismKeynesCbt
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“At the same time that the Mayor and City Council acted courageously and progressively in ridding the city of those monuments to a loathsome past, the new regime that removal celebrates, as some skeptics note, rests on commitments to policies that intensify economic inequality on a scale that makes New Orleans one of the most unequal cities in the United States. ... Local government contributes to this deepening inequality through such means as cuts to the public sector, privatization of public goods and services, and support of upward redistribution through shifting public resources from service provision to subsidy for private, rent-intensifying redevelopment (commonly but too ambiguously called "gentrification"). These processes, often summarized as neoliberalization, do not target blacks as blacks, and, as in other cities, coincided with the emergence of black public officialdom in and after the elder Landrieu's mayoralty and continued unabated through thirty-two years of black-led local government between two Landrieus and into the black-led administration that succeeded Mitch. Both the processes of neoliberalization and racial integration of the city's governing elite accelerated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It may seem ironic because of how the visual imagery of dispossession and displacement after Katrina came universally to signify the persistence of racial injustice, but a generally unrecognized feature of the post-Katrina political landscape is that the city's governing class is now more seamlessly interracial than ever. That is, or should be, an unsurprising outcome four decades after racial transition in local government and the emergence and consolidation of a strong black political and business class, increasingly well incorporated into the structures of governing. It has been encouraged as well by the city's commitment to cultural and heritage tourism, which, as comes through in Mayor Landrieu's remarks on the monuments, is anchored to a discourse of multiculturalism and diversity. And generational succession has brought to prominence cohorts among black and white elites who increasingly have attended the same schools; lived in the same neighborhoods; participated in the same voluntary associations; and share cultural and consumer tastes, worldviews, and political and economic priorities.”

DiversityRacismInequalityIntegrationMulticulturalismNew OrleansNeoliberalismEconomic InequalityHurricane KatrinaGentrification
Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
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“Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today, it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.”

AmericaPoliticalPoliticsGrowthMoneyBusinessUnited StatesEconomyRevolutionRepublicanCapitalismEuropeEconomicsLaborDemocratWorkersConservativeEntrepreneurshipRadicalUnited States Of AmericaEconomic GrowthMinimum WageBig BusinessNeoliberalismEntrepreneursLiberalNew DealEuropeanEisenhowerLabor Rights
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“By itself, legal abortion does little for poor and working-class women who have neither the means to pay for it nor access to clinics that provide it. Rather, reproductive justice requires free, universal, not-for-profit health care, as well as the end of racist, eugenicist practices in the medical profession.”

PoliticalJusticeClassFeminismCrisisEqualityAbortionHealthcareNeoliberalismIntersectionality
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“laws criminalizing gender violence are a cruel hoax if they turn a blind eye to the structural sexism and racism of criminal justice systems, leaving intact police brutality, mass incarceration, deportation threats, military interventions, and harassment and abuse in the workplace.”

PoliticalJusticeClassFeminismCrisisEqualityDomestic AbuseNeoliberalismIntersectionalitySystemic Oppression
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“By 1980, the economic theory of neoliberalism, with its faith in free markets, property rights, and individual autonomy, had begun to reshape cultural notions of good citizenship. The good citizen was increasingly imagined as an autonomous, informed individual acting responsibly in his or her own self-interest, primarily through the market, as an educated consumer. Dovetailing with the new health consciousness, the ethos of neoliberalism shifted the burden of caring for the well-being of others from the state to the individual and recast health as a personal pursuit, responsibility, and duty. As the burden of solving social problems and preserving the health of individuals shifted from the public to the private sector, alternative dietary ideals reinforced the increasingly important social values of personal responsibility and consumer consumption.”

PoliticsHealthUs HistoryNeoliberalismDiet CultureFood Politics
Book:Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health
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“A smaller but still significant risk of taking the neoliberal pill is you get more misguided adventures like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, there’s no way that elites could get us into another Iraq today. This at first glance appears to be a good thing, but it’s been at the cost of our culture becoming more neurotic, cynical, parochial, and fearful. Americans wouldn’t go off and die by the thousands in Iraq today because they don’t think anything is worth fighting for or believing in. Young people aren’t even leaving the house. I’d rather be a country that occasionally fights stupid wars than one that shuts itself off from the rest of the world and gives up on any idealistic vision of the future.”

WarIraqAfghanistanForeign PolicyNeoliberalismInterventionismNeoliberal
Author:Richard Hanania
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“Today, we are not just inmates or victims in a foreign-controlled digital panoptic. Originally, the Panoptikum was a prison-like building designed by Jeremy Bentham. The prisoners in the outer ring are guarded by a central surveillance tower. In the digital panoptic, we are not just caught. We are ourselves perpetrators. We are actively involved in the digital panopticon. We even entertain it by cableing ourselves to the body like the millions of quantified self-movements and voluntarily putting our body-related data into the web. The new rule does not silence us. Rather, she is constantly calling on us to communicate, to share, to communicate our opinions, needs, wishes and preferences, to tell our lives.”

PrivacyOpennessDigital AgeNeoliberalism
Author:Byung-Chul Han, Google Translate
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“Historically, the 1 percent have always been indifferent to the interests of society or the majority. But today they are especially dangerous. In their single-minded pursuit of short-term profits, they fail to gauge not only the depth of the crisis, but also the threat it poses to the long-term health of the capitalist system itself: they would rather drill for oil now than ensure the ecological preconditions for their own future profits!”

PoliticalSocietyFeminismRacismCapitalismEconomicsEcologyNeoliberalismIntersectionalityClimate Crisis
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“societal reorganization, has played out several times in modern history—largely to capital’s benefit. Seeking to restore profitability, its champions have reinvented capitalism time and again—reconfiguring not only the official economy, but also politics, social reproduction, and our relation to nonhuman nature. In so doing, they have reorganized not only class exploitation, but also gender and racial oppression,”

PoliticalSocietyFeminismRacismCapitalismEconomicsEcologyNeoliberalismIntersectionalityClimate Crisis
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“We are living through an absolutely crucial juncture in human history, when the externalities of our current economic system are coming home to roost. These include misinformation (courtesy of 'Big Tech'), global heating (thanks to 'Big Oil'), and wealth inequality (exacerbated by neoliberal economic policies). Together, these interlocking crises are buffeting our political institutions, threatening to envelop them in a vortex of partisanship and chronic instability. Looming over these challenges is the threat of societal disruption from AI and the imminent collapse of a rules-based international order. At such a time, what we need more than ever is a big vision, a narrative to help people make sense of the bewildering world we live in, and political courage. Both things that seem distinctly lacking from our political class.”

InequalityGlobal WarmingArtificial IntelligenceMisinformationInstabilityNeoliberalismPolitical Courage
Book:Reforesting Scotland 72: Autumn/Winter 2025
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“Little changes do not transform frameworks that are fundamentally unfair. The last few decades have enabled a record shift of money and power to a very few, but the remedy for inequality is what it has always been: collective action through the organised movement of working people. The trade union movement is the equalising, opposite force against the greed of the wealthy and privileged. This is the reason why the wealthy and privileged are so relentless in their campaign to crush unionism.”

InequalityNeoliberalismCollective ActionUnion Movement
Book:On Fairness
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“Currently, the wealthy who have no pre-existing conditions can afford high-quality health care, while the poor and sick are relegated to hoping for and negotiating whatever health care safety net might exist in their area. This neoliberal form of capitalism structuring health care in the United States has led to those with the highest burden of sickness being simultaneously those with the least access to care.”

InequalityHealth CareNeoliberalismInsuranceHealth Care System
Author:Seth Holmes
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“The feminism we have in mind recognizes that it must respond to a crisis of epochal proportions: plummeting living standards and looming ecological disaster; rampaging wars and intensified dispossession; mass migrations met with barbed wire; emboldened racism and xenophobia; and the reversal of hard-won rights—both social and political.”

PoliticalFeminismRacismCrisisGlobal WarmingXenophobiaNeoliberalismIntersectionalityClimate Crisis
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“The mainstream media continues to equate feminism, as such, with liberal feminism. But far from providing the solution, liberal feminism is part of the problem. Centered in the global North among the professional-managerial stratum, it is focused on “leaning-in” and “cracking the glass ceiling.” Dedicated to enabling a smattering of privileged women to climb the corporate ladder and the ranks of the military, it propounds a market-centered view of equality that dovetails perfectly with the prevailing corporate enthusiasm for “diversity.” Although it condemns “discrimination” and advocates “freedom of choice,” liberal feminism steadfastly refuses to address the socioeconomic constraints that make freedom and empowerment impossible for the large majority of women. Its real aim is not equality, but meritocracy. Rather than seeking to abolish social hierarchy, it aims to “diversify” it, “empowering” “talented” women to rise to the top. In treating women simply as an “underrepresented group,” its proponents seek to ensure that a few privileged souls can attain positions and pay on a par with the men of their own class.”

PoliticalFeminismMediaSolidarityNeoliberalismMainstream MediaIntersectionalityMedia Manipulation
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“Its love affair with individual advancement equally permeates the world of social-media celebrity, which also confuses feminism with the ascent of individual women. In that world, “feminism” risks becoming a trending hashtag and a vehicle of self-promotion, deployed less to liberate the many than to elevate the few.”

PoliticalFeminismMediaSocial MediaCelebrityNeoliberalismIntersectionalityInfluencersLean In
Book:Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
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“As the renowned clinical psychologist Dr Anne Cooke put it to me in conversation: ‘The mental illness narrative encourages us to see mental health problems as nothing to do with life and circumstances, so no wonder we don’t look at structural or social causes; and of course this perspective is a great fit with the current neoliberal approach – where individuals have to reform themselves to fit with existing social structures.’ The trouble with programmes that are blind to the perils of such adaptations is that they essentially neuter political reflection on why distress proliferates in our schools, certainly when compared to schools in most other developed nations.”

PsychologyMental HealthSocial IssuesPsychotherapyNeoliberalismHealthcare ReformDepoliticisationAnne Cooke
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“The crucial lesson of Brexit and of Trump's victory, is that leaders who are seen as representing the failed neoliberal status quo are no match for the demagogues and neo-fascists. Only a bold and genuinely redistributive progressive agenda can offer real answers to inequality and the crises in democracy...We need to remember this the next time we're asked to back a party or candidate in an election. In this destabilized era, status-quo politicians often cannot get the job done. On the other hand, the choice that may at first seem radical, maybe even a little risky, may well be the most pragmatic one in this volatile era...radical political and economic change is our only hope of avoiding radical change to our physical world.”

HopePoliticsEconomyDemocracyNeoliberalism
Author:Naomi Klein
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“[T]hat we collectively value the 'growth' of capital as the final purpose of our economy is not reducible to the reigning ideology of neoliberal capitalism. Rather, the purpose of our economy is beyond democratic deliberation under any form of capitalism, since the defining purpose of capital accumulation is built into how we produce our social wealth in the first place.”

DemocracyCapitalismCapitalNeoliberalismWealth Accumulation
Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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“Arnold Harberger, Milton Friedman & Co. Inc., your modest proposal of partial equilibrium for the general good is not without its own internal contradictions. Moreover, you cannot take complete credit for this program of equilibriation. Although you and your colleagues and disciples at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago may have dedicated two decades to the design of the program and the technical training of its executors, it took the approach of another major economic and political crisis of capitalism, analogous to that of the 1930's, to mobilize the political support and the military force to instal a government prepared to put your program of equilibration and your equilibrating experts to work in Chile - and you, Milton Friedman, are still waiting to put your part of the same program, complete with Brazilian style indexing, into practice at home for the glory and benefit of the bourgeoisie in the USA, whom you so faithfully serve as paid executors and executioners.”

CapitalismBourgeoisieChileNeoliberalismMilton FriedmanArnold HarbergerChicago BoysCrisis Of Capitalism
Book:Economic Genocide in Chile: Monetarism Versus Humanity
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