ABSTRACT
This chapter considers David Cameron’s Big Society both as an attempt at Conservative Party modernisation and as a new hegemonic basis for the broader neoliberal project. It notes some of the parallels between early Cameronism and Blairism, before going on to describe the transformation of the Big Society project into a more antagonistic political discourse in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and August 2011 riots. Important changes wrought to neoliberal governmentality by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government are also considered, particularly in relation to the dominant mode of the discursive articulation of citizenship (with the image of the citizen co-producer coming to the fore in place of the citizen-consumer), and in relation to the understandings of citizen behaviour (with a movement away from rational-choice understandings of citizen behaviour and towards understandings based on behavioural economics and social psychology, or ‘nudge’).
