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Many people believe the global economy is unjust, but they don't know what to do about it. What responsibilities do American consumers have to workers in China making their iPhones? Should they still buy clothes made in Bangladesh's sweatshops? Offering an overview of how neoliberalism orients us to the world, Benjamin L. McKean shows the practical shortcomings of neoliberal approaches to the world and develops an alternative way of thinking and acting guided by a compelling new account of freedom.
Disorienting Neoliberalism offers a framework for understanding the politics of the global economy and shows how we can act in solidarity to promote justice.
List of contents
- Introduction: Injustice in a Disorienting World
- Chapter 1: Neoliberal Theory as a Source of Orientation
- Chapter 2: Seeling (Like) Supply Chain Managers
- Chapter 3: The Outer Limit of Freedom
- Chapter 4: Ugly Progress and Unhopeful Hope
- Chapter 5: The Significance of Solidarity
- Chapter 6: Why Sovereignty Is Not the Solution
- Conclusion: Freedom and Resentment Amid Neoliberalism
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
About the author
Benjamin L. McKean is an Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University. He is a political theorist whose research concerns global justice, populism, and the relationship between theory and practice. His work has been published in academic journals including American Political Science Review and Political Theory as well as in popular media including The Washington Post and Jacobin.
Summary
In the world neoliberalism has made, the pervasiveness of injustice and the scale of inequality can be so overwhelming that meaningful resistance seems impossible. Disorienting Neoliberalism argues that combatting the injustices of today's global economy begins with reorienting our way of seeing so that we can act more effectively. Within political theory, standard approaches to global justice envision ideal institutions, but provide little guidance for people responding to today's most urgent problems. Meanwhile, empirical and historical research explains how neoliberalism achieved political and intellectual hegemony, but not how we can imagine its replacement.
Disorienting Neoliberalism argues that people can and should become disposed to solidarity with each other once they see global injustices as a limit on their own freedom. Benjamin L. McKean reorients us by taking us inside the global supply chains that assemble clothes, electronics, and other goods, revealing the tension between neoliberal theories of freedom and the hierarchical, coercive reality of their operations. In this new approach to global justice, he explains how neoliberal institutions and ideas constrain the freedom of people throughout the supply chain from worker to consumer. Rather than a linked set of private market exchanges, supply chains are political entities that seek to govern the rest of us. Where neoliberal institutions train us to see each other as competitors, McKean provides a new orientation to the global economy in which we can see each other as partners in resisting a shared obstacle to freedom -- and thus be called to collective action.
Drawing from a wide range of thinkers, from Hegel and John Rawls to W. E. B. Du Bois and Iris Marion Young, Disorienting Neoliberalism shows how political action today can be meaningful and promote justice, moving beyond the pity and resentment global inequality often provokes to a new politics of solidarity.
Additional text
The political theory of the supply chain presented in Benjamin McKean's Disorienting Neoliberalism is a powerful response to critiques of neoliberal ideology or theories of global justice that remain erroneously unmoored from the concrete conditions of capitalist production in our present. The book's overarching argument is elegantly ambitious. [...] In questions of socialist transition and of circulation worker struggles, McKean's stimulating book will find generative interlocutors with a shared investment in revolutionary justice, theory's own outer limit.
