Global Neoliberalism as a Cultural Order and Its Expansive Educational Effects

Abstract

Abstract The global neoliberal era has sparked a burgeoning literature. Most accounts emphasize the political economy of the period, focusing on global markets and privatization. By contrast, we conceptualize neoliberalism as a broad cultural ideology that has reshaped how we think about people and institutions in all arenas of life, not just the economy. We delineate three main assumptions of neoliberalism as a cultural model. First, neoliberal ideology re-envisions society as consisting not of structures but of individual human persons who are attributed immense agency, entitlement, and rationality. Second, the neoliberal model redefines natural and social contexts in a manner that supports such imagined human actorhood, depicting them in terms of abstract rationalistic principles that apply universally. A third assumption, building on the previous two, is that progress is seen as emerging from universalized and abstracted human knowledge, rather than, for instance, from the material capacities of the state. Altogether, these assumptions amount to a dramatic cultural shift with broad consequences that include, but stretch far beyond, free markets. We illustrate these consequences by considering their expansive effects on education, drawing on existing studies and descriptive data. Overall, we expand sociological understandings of the cultural dimensions of neoliberalism.