ABSTRACT
Historians of ideas have striven to decipher the archaeology of neoliberal thought, often emphasizing mutations and internal competition between “thought collectives” and presenting neoliberalism as a fluid movement of ideas and not a “coherent ideology nor political rationality”. At the beginning of the story, that is, the inter-war period, liberals were all concerned by the threat to freedoms, and not only economic freedoms, that strong interventions from various types of State were posing. In his famous account of the forced conversion of New York City (NYC) to a neoliberal urban agenda during the 1970s, D. Harvey insists on the role of both the US federal government and the investment bank sector to impose fiscal austerity onto the NYC government and to compel it to abandon most of its social programs and downsize public services. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
