The Strange Non-death of Neo-liberalism

The financial crisis seemed to present a fundamental challenge to
neo liberalism, the body of ideas that have constituted the
political orthodoxy of most advanced economies in recent decades.
Colin Crouch argues in this book that it will shrug off this
challenge. The reason is that while neo liberalism seems to be
about free markets, in practice it is concerned with the dominance
over public life of the giant corporation. This has been
intensified, not checked, by the recent financial crisis and
acceptance that certain financial corporations are 'too big
to fail'. Although much political debate remains preoccupied with
conflicts between the market and the state, the impact of the
corporation on both these is today far more important.
Several factors have brought us to this situation:
* The lobbying power of firms whose donations are of growing
importance to cash-hungry politicians and parties
* The weakening of competitive forces by firms large enough to
shape and dominate their markets
* The moral initiative that is grasped by enterprises that devise
their own agendas of corporate social responsibility
Both democratic politics and the free market are weakened by
these processes, but they are largely inevitable and not always
malign. Hope for the future, therefore, cannot lie in suppressing
them in order to attain either an economy of pure markets or a
socialist society. Rather it lies in dragging the giant corporation
fully into political controversy.

COLIN CROUCH is Professor of Governance and Public Management at Warwick Business School, Fellow of the British Academy, and expert consultant to the Directorate for Public Governance and Territorial Development, OECD. His previous publications include Post-Democracy.