ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, Neoliberalism and the Dis-membering of Community, examines the emergence of the dominant (for now, anyway) paradigm defining the “little economy,” which stands in contrast to the Great Economy and represents what most would simply refer to as “the economy.” This chapter traces the antecedents and emergence of the “free-market fundamentalism” of neoliberalism in the 1970s, and identifies several characteristics that have particularly pernicious effects on local communities. It introduces two characters that appear in several of Berry’s fictional works, Troy Chatham and Andy Catlett, as a means of illustrating different approaches to being in the world when that world is increasingly reduced to the operations of an abstracted “market” and quantifiable results on balance.
