ABSTRACT
The chapter use the terms 'neoliberal capitalism' and 'extreme neoliberalism' as names for the dominant order of politico-economic and cultural power in what were the capitalist and socialist democracies of the global North. The British geographer Danny Dorling has thus suggested that neoliberal societies are approaching a conjuncture in which despair, expressed through depression and mental illness, is becoming tolerated as an inevitable part of social life. In critical theory and pedagogy, neoliberalism has become shorthand for the brutal new forms of market capitalism that became ascendant in the late-twentieth century. Some define it as a class ideology which has guided the implementation of capitalist and anti-democratic policies across the world. While both capitalism and neoliberal rationality operate in states of perpetual crisis, neither is collapsing. The contemporary crisis of hope has other roots, including the permeation of technological rationality into wider realms of culture, politics and intimate life, and the integration of this into both capitalist and fascist power.
