ABSTRACT
An oxymoron is a gure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction. Starting from about the mid-1990s, a gure of speech seems to have found its host in what have been called ‘oxymoronic creatures’, that is ‘capitalist moralists or business ethicists … lamenting the “state of the world” and drawing up new rules to generate trust in the executors of capital’s will’ (Caffentzis, 2006: p. 15). From about the mid-1990s, these ‘oxymoronic creatures’ have been increasingly inuential in shaping the rhetorics and policies of national governments and supranational institutions. This happened to such an extent that even Paul Wolfowitz, once he became president of the World Bank, seemed at ease with all the inclusive talk designed to manage and articulate ‘sound’ business and economic priorities with social and environmental causes.1 Talk about ‘good governance’, ‘sustainability’, ‘trust’, ‘community’, and
even ‘commons’ – all terms that prima facie would arouse in us a sense of what is ‘good,’ positive and desirable, have been associated with the no-nonsense gures of speech that from the late 1970s became the landmarks of the neoliberal era: efciency, competitiveness, the ‘economy’. This oxymoronic terminology that we can call ‘neoliberal governance’, emerges as an attempt to manage clashing value practices in line with the requirements of capitalist priorities in an increasingly marketised, socially polarised and environmentally unsustainable world.
