ABSTRACT
For a moment, it seemed, another world might just be possible. The greed is good, no such thing as society, the business of business is business lie, loadsa-money culture and end-of-history proclamations that had enabled the ideology of neoliberalism to pervade virtually every aspect of public policy, every social and economic practice, every major private and public institution, seemed to be at an end. Neoliberalism, understood as the relentless and fundamentalist promotion of market forces as morally and practically essential to capitalist economic development, had faltered – perhaps fatally. In 2008 capitalism was not only facing yet another of its periodic cyclical crises, necessary for its restructuring and renewal, but was actually confronting a potential meltdown of its values, its rationale and its own propaganda. Richard A. Posner, a leading and highly respected figure among advocates of the free market as well as being a US federal judge and Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, publicly argued that the crisis was the logical outcome of unregulated market capitalism (Posner, 2010, 2011). The prospect of endless wealth had been transformed to one of disaster and catastrophe. The financial scams that had engulfed Enron, the speculative real estate bubble, the reckless expansion of consumer credit and the global fall-out following the collapse of Lehman Brothers required a rethink, retrieval and re-evaluation of ideas, theories and propositions that had earlier been gleefully thrown into the trashcan of history. The financial storms had blown off the lid and the opening decade of the twenty-first century saw the work of Keynes and, indeed, Marx being taken seriously once again. The iconic status of the great business gurus such as Peter Drucker and Milton Friedman all came under a close, intense and critical scrutiny … at least for a moment.
