《平等的黄昏？新自由主义、文化政治学以及对民主》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《平等的黄昏？新自由主义、文化政治学以及对民主（129页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy Lisa Duggan BEACON Beacon Press, Boston 150 BEACON PRESS 25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892 www.beacon.org Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Associat
2、ion of Congregations. 2003 by Lisa Duggan All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 876 This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992. Text design by Isaac Tobin Composition by Wilsted it ha
3、s never been unified or stable. Yet, it has successfully opposed proliferating visions of an expansive, more equitable redistribution of the worlds re- sources. Beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presi- dency and throughout the 1980s, the overall direction of redistribution of many
4、kinds of resources, in the U.S. and around the world, has been upwardtoward greater concentration among fewer hands at the very top of an increasingly steep pyramid. What happened? How did the forces of upward redistribution so forcefully trump the broad-based, expansive “revolution“ toward downward
5、 redistributions that seemed so vital still in 1972? In the United States, the uneasy and uneven New Deal consensus among busi- ness, government, and big unions, built during the 1930s and more or less in place through the Great Society era of the 1960s, was dis- mantled. But this did not occur in o
6、rder to remedy the undemocratic and antiegalitarian features of that consensus, or in order to generate greater democratic participation, material equality, cultural diversity, and good global citizenship, as many “revolutionaries“ had hoped. Rather, the New Deal consensus was dismantled in the crea
7、tion of a new vision of national and world order, a vision of competition, inequality, market “discipline,“ public austerity, and “law and order“ known as neoliberalism Tracing their descent through capital “L“ Liberalism, as developed in Anglo-Europe since the seventeenth century, the architects of
8、 con- temporary neoliberalism drew upon classical liberalisms utopianism of benevolent “free“ markets and minimal governments. These earlier ideas provided a set of rationales, moral justifications, and politically inflected descriptions of the institutions of developing capitalism. Such institution
9、s, and their associated economic practices and social rela- tions, changed over time and varied across spacecapitalism has never been a single coherent “system.“ Liberalism has therefore morphed many times as well, and has contained proliferating contradictions in INTRODUCTION XI indirect relationsh
10、ip to the historical contradictions of capitalism. In the United States during the twentieth century, the entire spectrum of mainstream electoral politics, from “conservatism“ to domestic “liber- alism,“ has varied largely within the parameters of Liberalism. Only the far right and the left have pro
11、vided illiberal or antiliberal alternatives to the overwhelming dominance of differing and conflicting forms of Lib- eralism in U.S. politics.2 From the 1930s to the 1960s, a very limited form of welfare state liberalism, or social democracy, shaped the U.S. nation state and the political culture su
12、pporting it. The New Deal coalition defeated or marginalized antistatist conservatives (who were also Liberals in the classical sense), and absorbed or marginalized socialists and other pro- gressive left critics of its limited version of equality within capitalism. During the 1950s and 1960s, criti
13、cism of the U.S. welfare state from both the right and the left intensified. Conservative antistatist attacks on New Deal social welfare programs mounted, as the new social move- ments pressed from the left for more equitable distribution of many kinds of resources. Then during the 1970s, the social
14、 movements en- countered a new pro-business activism that ultimately seized the pri- mary institutions of the state over the next two decades. This pro-business activism, the foundation for late twentieth cen- tury neoliberalism, was built out of earlier “conservative“ activism. Neoliberalism develo
15、ped over many decades as a mode of polemic aimed at dismantling the limited U.S. welfare state, in order to enhance corporate profit rates. The raising of profit rates required that money be diverted from other social uses, thus increasing overall economic in- equality. And such diversions required
16、a supporting political culture, compliant constituencies, and amenable social relations. Thus, pro- business activism in the 1970s was built on, and further developed, a wide-ranging political and cultural projectthe reconstruction of the everyday life of capitalism, in ways supportive of upward redistribution of a range of resources, and tolerant of widening inequalities of many kinds.3 Neoliberalism developed primarily in the U.S., and secondarily in XII THE TWILIGHT OF EQUALITY? Europe
