The Idea of Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism, as a set of ideas, represents the 1970s rebirth-rebranding-of classical liberalism, which originated in the mid-eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment. This book is about those ideas. It assembles an archetypal ideational construct of neoliberalism, so permitting the demarcation of its worldview, grounded in a set of framing assumptions (organizing ideas) and associated blind spots (reality obfuscations), which enables social reality to be consistently-but incompletely-described, explained, and understood as Neoliberalism presume it to be. This is the methodological tool used to mark out and analyse the incompleteness of the dogma-the Holy Grail-of neoliberalism. The conclusion drawn is that, metaphorically, the emperor's clothes-all made made in a bygone era-are threadbare for the twenty-first century. Professor John Dixon B Econ, M Econ, PhD (Public Management and Administration) is Professor of Public Administration in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. He is Emeritus Professor of Public Policy and Management at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy of the Social Sciences in 2004, and has been an honorary life member of the American Phi Beta Delta Honor Society for International Scholars since 2006, nominated by the Public Policy Organization and the American Political Science Association.