東京大学大学院総合文化研究科
言語情報科学専攻
Language and Information Sciences, University of Tokyo
This class will consider the recent rise of populist movements across America and, to a lesser extent, across Europe. We will work off the premise that the return to populist politics began as part of a reaction to the advance of neoliberalist policies since the late 1970s, and the endemic forms of inequality and disenfranchisement that they have produced in that span of time.
Neoliberalist policies were largely seen as bankrupt in America and Europe in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, leading to widespread populist opposition against them on both the right (e.g., Tea Party) and the left (e.g., Occupy Wall Street). But it is the right-wing version that has made the boldest political inroads in recent years, in the form of Trump administration in the United States, the vote in Britian to leave the European Union, and in the rise of parties such as the Alternative for Germany, France’s National Front, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Austrian People’s Party, and the Jobbik Party in Hungary. In many cases these populist right-wing parties have made significant gains or won outright majorities in their respective parliaments, not only through the scapegoating of immigrants and foreigners, but by appealing to those disenfranchised by neoliberalist policies enacted by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
The situation has been further complicated in America where the rightwing populist reaction against the established neoliberal hegemony has conversely led to further entrenchment of it. Although the advent of the Trump administration has resulted in the temporary retreat of certain aspects of the neoliberal project—withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), for example, and the threat to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), along with anti-immigration policies—it has advanced numerous others, including widespread deregulation, the general dismantlement of the administrative state and its social support programs, tax cuts for the elite, and the consolidation of economic-political power in the wealthiest one-percent. The result is that neoliberal hegemony, which had gradually assimilated itself into both the right and left in the United States and Britain in the 1990s and beyond, has now moved decidedly to the right, embracing discourses and policies of discrimination, racism, abuse, and xenophobia.
Is this the new form that neoliberalism has taken in the wake of the financial crisis? Has neoliberal hegemony made a pact of convenience with the populist radical right in order to ensure its survival? Or were the two always closer than anyone cared to admit? Where is the left in all this? Does it even have a future? We will approach these and other questions through readings drawn from figures such as Mark Blyth, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Ernesto Laclau, Wolfgang Streek, Yanis Varoufakis, and Slavoj Zizek. We will begin by first considering the history of neoliberalism and the conditions that led to its emergence as a hegemonic form of economic-political thought, before turning to its current coopting of the populist reaction against it.
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation
Week 3: Fredrick von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Week 4: Mark Blyth, Great Transformations
Week 5: Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics
Week 6: Wendy Brown, Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
Week 7: Wolfgang Streek, Buying Time: The Delayed Crises of Democratic Capitalism
Week 8: Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence
Week 9: Justin Gest, The New Minority
Week 10: Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Week 11: John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion
Week 12: Ernesto Laclau: On Populist Reason
Week 13: Slajov Zizek, The Trouble in Paradise
Weeks 14-15: Final paper
Students will be responsible for presenting the reading material to the class and generating discussion. One to two students will present each week.
Evaluation will be based on quality of the presentations, regular participation in the class, and the final paper.
John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics
Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century
Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
Frederico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History
Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism
Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
Geoff Mann, In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keyensianism, Political Economy, and Revolution
Nancy Maclean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
Philip Mirowski, The Road from Mont Pelerin; The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective
Benjamin Moffit, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation
Francisco Panizza, ed., Populism and the Mirror of Democracy
Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason
Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics
Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order
Wolfgang Streek, Buying Time: The Delayed Crises of Democratic Capitalism
Wolfgang Streek, How Will Capitalism End?
Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
No auditing permitted.
