The Strange Non-death of Neo-liberalism (E-Book) von Colin Crouch

Acknowledgements vi

Preface vii

About this Book xi

1 The Previous Career of Neoliberalism 1

2 The Market and Its Limitations 24

3 The Corporate Takeover of the Market 49

4 Private Firms and Public Business 71

5 Privatized Keynesianism: Debt in Place of Discipline 97

6 From Corporate Political Entanglement to Corporate Social Responsibility 125

7 Values and Civil Society 144

8 What's Left of What's Right? 162

References 181

Further Reading 184

Index 187

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.