ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to illuminate 'neoliberalism' as a concept and historical phenomenon. The term 'neoliberal' combines 'Neolclassical' and 'Liberal,' and intellectual neoliberalism incorporates features of each of these nineteenth-century schools of political and economic thought. Stuart Hall's linkage of the economic policy of Monetarism with the philosophical inclination towards individualism is characteristic of the combination of policy and philosophy that neoliberalism often presents. Due to neoliberalism's range as referent, from matters of policy to those of personhood, literary scholars are also invested in how neoliberal economies and culture arise and are addressed within literary texts. In Mathias Nilges' account of the relationship between postmodernism and neoliberalism, on the other hand, the latter emerges out of the former, as neoliberalism instantiates postmodernism's cultural critique of the socio-economic order into a fully blown 'social and cultural regulation' of, well, everything.