Description: What is the impact of three decades of neoliberal narratives and policies on communities and individual lives? What are the sources of social resilience? This book offers a sweeping assessment of the effects of neoliberalism, the dominant feature of our times. It analyzes the ideology in unusually wide-ranging terms as a movement that not only opened markets but also introduced new logics into social life, integrating macro-level analyses of the ways in which neoliberal narratives made their way into international policy regimes with micro-level analyses of the ways in which individuals responded to the challenges of the neoliberal era. The book introduces the concept of social resilience and explores how communities, social groups, and nations sustain their well-being in the face of such challenges. The product of ten years of collaboration among a distinguished group of scholars, it integrates institutional and cultural analysis in new ways to understand neoliberalism as a syncretic social process and to explore the sources of social resilience across communities in the developed and developing worlds.
Brief description: Peter A. Hall is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies at Harvard University, where he has also served at various times as director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, director of Graduate Studies in Government, and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is co-director of the Successful Societies Program for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is an editor of Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make, Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations, Developments in French Politics I and II and European Labor in the 1980s, and the author of Governing the Economy, which won the Woodrow Wilson Award for the best book in political science published in 1986. He has published more than eighty articles on European politics and public policy making and comparative political economy. He serves on the editorial boards of many scholarly journals and on advisory boards at Sciences Po, Paris; the Free University of Berlin; Sheffield University; and the University of Birmingham. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and Chair of the ACLS-SSRC Committee on Western Europe, and served as President of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. He has won many awards for his writing and holds honorary degrees from Sciences Po and Aston University, Birmingham.
Review Quotes: "Well cited and researched, each chapter explores the socially disruptive effects of neoliberal policies and unpredictable, grassroots-level responses to such policies in countries across the world. The book's interdisciplinary nature gives it a fresh perspective. A worthwhile read for students of international, social, and economic policy. Summing up: highly recommended."
R. Price, Choice