ABSTRACT
Like any assemblage, this ‘historic compromise’ was never fully stable, and there were always tensions and resistances from without and within; including the communists who always claimed that the achievements of social democracy would be short-lived without a world revolution, the beatnik refusers of Fordist conformity, or the right-wing economists who bemoaned the fate of entrepreneurial man in the era of the welfare state. Perhaps the most succinctly sophisticated account of neoliberalism is that offered by John Clarke. The most important dimension of this account, however, is clearly that which stresses neoliberalism as a hegemonic project. Considering the hegemonic project of neoliberalism as uneven in its effects, defined by what it makes possible and what it closes off, brings our account of this hegemonic project close to another potential term with which to understand neoliberalism. So at certain levels of abstraction and operation we may conceptualise neoliberalism as both abstract machine and hegemonic project.
