Rethinking Power: Responding to the Crisis of Neoliberal Hegemony?

Abstract

Over the past few decades, neoliberalism has achieved hegemonic status. Although it has constantly mutated and evolved to adapt to changing political conjunctures, it has become dominant not just as an elite political project but as a new common sense, or doxa (Bourdieu [1990] 2012: 313). Consumerism and the adulation of wealth and entrepreneurialism have become so firmly anchored in the popular common sense that it is hard to imagine any alternative. Neoliberalism has successfully promoted corporate and private interests over the collective via processes of deregulation, privatisation and marketisation, shifting power back to the already rich and powerful, whilst shoring up the legitimacy of its project by demonising and disciplining those who refuse to internalise the neoliberal ideal of the entrepreneurial, independent consumer. Stuart Hall, following Gramsci, reminds us that hegemony is never complete or permanent – the hegemonic project of neoliberalism must be constantly “renewed and revised” – so, although neoliberalism itself is in crisis, the hegemonic project of neoliberalism is ongoing (Hall 2011). There are nonetheless signs that the neoliberal hegemony established in the 1980s is currently facing similar challenges to those faced by social democracy forty years ago, notably regarding the current form of the British state, economic management, access to citizenship, the changing global order and political representation (as highlighted by Gamble 1994). Taken together, this article argues that Britain’s current economic and political crises can be seen to constitute a conjunctural crisis whereby consent for the current hegemony has become tenuous (Jefferson 2014). It then moves on to discussing the possible responses to that crisis. Successive governments from Thatcher to Johnson respond to crisis by resorting to authoritarian populism to build up hegemony (Hall et al. 1978), further reinforcing Socialism and Democracy, 2021 Vol. 35, Nos. 2–3, 73–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2021.2044239