The rise and fall of empathy in an era of financial crisis: rethinking the neoliberal imaginary

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to place the explosion of popular interest in empathy within a specific historic context: the financial crisis of 2008. The financial crisis, and the years of economic recession that followed, led to a general discontent with the neoliberal system. The paper argues that key texts of the post-crisis discourse of empathy tapped into this malaise by advancing a radical critique of the neoliberal worldview on the basis of care theory. However, the embrace of global empathy ironically became entangled with the ethos of neoliberal globalism that it sought to supersede. The post-crisis vision of an empathetic world thus ended up reinforcing the very paradigm it critiqued. The paper posits that the awkward alliance between the ethos of empathy and the neoliberal imaginary may explain the recent backlash of popular aversion to the discourse of empathy and its rejection in present-day politics.