ABSTRACT
The Washington consensus represented a tacit but powerful agreement among neo-liberal ideologues, academic and government economists, central bankers, global business and financial institutions, publicists and politicians across the political spectrum. It expressed a few simple and seemingly irresistible ‘truths’: that during the post-war period, the state had become too expensive to sustain and too intrusive to tolerate; that if markets were freed of regulatory constraints, they would generate wealth and prosperity both locally and globally; and that wealth and prosperity were necessary (and seemingly sufficient) conditions for democracy and social well-being. The Washington consensus, as might be expected, was quite unsympathetic to any such notion as ‘the public domain’. Moreover, it seldom put ‘governing’ on its agenda, except when emphasizing the need to govern less (by reducing social programmes and market regulation), to govern tougher (by coercing the poor, workers, undocumented immigrants or practitioners of non-standard life-styles), to govern ‘smarter’ (through privatization) or to govern more ‘accountably’ (to corporate interests).
