Austerity Against Democracy

Greg Albo and Carlo Fanelli

Published in 2014

An Authoritarian Phase of Neoliberalism?

From its very beginnings, the new doctrine was quite consciously set in opposition to socialism as an alternate economic and democratic order to capitalism and as an unyielding defender of the institutions of private property. In its specific programmatic mandate, neoliberalism was an offspring of the Great Depression and set against Keynesian state intervention. But however much its protagonists set themselves up as outsiders, neoliberalism was never an alien political doctrine to economic and political elites of Western Europe and North America: neoliberal ideas were always incorporated as a legitimate component of state policy discussions.

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