SOC 395-01 - Advanced Special Topic: Neoliberalism: Ideology, Crisis, and Resistance

4 credits (Spring)

The term “neoliberalism” is typically associated initiatives and strategies intended to recognize the functions of the state in line with corporate interests, and in ways that diminish life chances for poor and working people and increasing inequality, overall. But how did this shift in policy preferences come about? Where did it emerge, and why, and with what implications, domestic and global? What is “new” about neoliberalism? How does it differ from what came before? The course sets out to answer these questions beginning with a look into increased competition between industrial powers in the US and Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. The course continues with an assessment of the technological, financial, and communications innovations that followed, and which reverberate to this day. We will then seek to connect these innovations and related shifts in the functions of the state and actions of political and economic elites to a series of economic crises: Latin America, in the 1980s; Asia, in the 1990s; the United States, in 2008; and in Greece and China, more recently.

Prerequisite: SOC 111, ANT 104, ECN 111, PHI 111, or POL 101.
Instructor: Inglis