ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on localism, which is introduced from the top by the national government, is the spatial manifestation of 'post-social' technologies of neoliberal governmentality, which began with 'the birth of the community' a few decades ago by drawing on a Foucauldian perspective. It discusses liberalism and its emergence in the eighteenth century in West. The first half of twentieth century saw the rise of a revisionist approach to liberalism. This, in contrast to classical liberalism, did not see an intimate or necessary connection between liberty and a private-property-based market. This leads to the second difference between welfarism and neoliberalism, namely their understanding of relationship between society and economy. On coming to office in 1997, the Labour government softened the hard edges of the neoliberal dismissal of the social as a mere heap of individuals by reconstructing a new social; one that was not imagined as totalising, organic whole, but as a sum of associations of free and responsible individuals.
