Political Neoliberalism

One of the world’s leading sociologists, Christian Joppke, has written a compelling intellectual account of the slippery and evasive ideology of neoliberalism. In a superbly researched and richly comparative volume focusing on ideas and ideologies, Joppke distils a core set of principles to define and analyse how neoliberalism spreads into politics and with what effects. Consistently engaged with political debates and intellectual arguments, Political Neoliberalism is an urgent book for a world in which geopolitics and domestic electoral politics are shifting profoundly and swiftly. * Desmond King, Andrew W. Mellon Statutory Professor of American Government, University of Oxford *Christian Joppke is always worth reading, even when-and perhaps especially when-one disagrees with him. Political Neoliberalism offers a bracing and provocative account of the deepening rift between liberalism and democracy. Willing as ever to challenge conventional pieties, Joppke sees both the populist right and the identitarian left as expressions of rather than movements against the neoliberal order. And he argues that neoliberalism not only survived the pandemic-contrary to proclamations of its demise-but emerged in some respects stronger than ever. * Rogers Brubaker, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles *Political Neoliberalism offers a masterful analysis of the genealogy of neoliberalism as a political regime and the deadly symbiosis it has spawned between the “identity left” and the “populist right.” In Joppke’s exceptionally clear-eyed narrative, the economic alignment of these two forces has hollowed out the institutions of social citizenship, while their cultural antagonism has eviscerated those of democratic citizenship. An urgent, and disquieting, read. * Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology and Director of Social Science Matrix, University of California, Berkeley *

Christian Joppke is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Bern and a Senior Research Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS). After earning a PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1989), he taught at the University of Southern California, European University Institute, University of British Columbia, International University Bremen, the American University of Paris, and the University of Bern. Specializing in comparative political sociology, he has written widely and influentially on social movements in West and East, immigration, citizenship, multiculturalism, religion, nationalism, populism, and more recently on liberalism and neoliberalism.