Critique in a Neoliberal Age

Critique in a Neoliberal Age brings a critique of ideology to main debates within economic sociology, populism studies, the neoliberal university, therapy culture, contemporary intimacies and feminism. Over the last decades, neoliberalism has worked to lift social protections and political regulations from the market and to identify modernity with capitalism itself. It has also engaged in an ideological project to screen alternative measurements of progress. Liberal and social democracy have been effectively disabled as grounds for weighing the costs of neoliberal predations. This volume examines the strategies through which neoliberalism has reconstituted and de-politicized liberal precepts such as universal justice, private right and a social democratic project responsive to needs. As such it will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and social and critical theory, political and social philosophy, politics, cultural studies and feminist thought.

Introduction 1. Ideology Critique in a Neoliberal Age 2. Sociology and Critique 3. The Dialectics of Critique and Progress 4. The Embedded Market and Ideology Critique 5. Common Cause? The Political Rationalities of Neo-liberalism and Populism 6. De-politicizing Needs: Therapy Culture and the ‘Happiness Turn’ 7. Rationality Potentials of Intimacy: In Search of a Critical Pulse 8. The Critic’s Role: Debating Nancy Fraser’s Feminism 9. Learning from the Budapest School Women: The Politics of Need Interpretation Conclusion

Pauline Johnson is Associate Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University Australia. She is the author of Marxist Aesthetics and Habermas: Rescuing the Public Sphere and Feminism as Radical Humanism, and co-editor of Culture and Enlightenment: Essays for György Markus and Modern Privacies: Shifting Boundaries, New Forms.