A Brief History of Neoliberalism

By: David Harvey

Narrated by: Clive Chafer

Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

©2005 David Harvey (P)2017 Tantor

Superb book

Short but dense. Reader was coherent. Does a great job of explaining a very mystified and complicated subject. Recommend 100%.

insightful

Gives a very straightforward fact based account of the history of the current ruling policies. Nice to read a book on politics that is not just propaganda

Absolutely wonderful primer

David Harvey's Brief History of Neo-Liberalism rings more frighteningly true in 2018 than it did back when it was published in the previous decade. must listen/read for anyone seeking to understand the ideology which currently runs our modern world.

The dangers of neoliberalism

A must read book to understand America and the dangers of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the return of the ruling elite.

The long term chess game that is played

The book gives good insight into the theory of Neo-Liberalism, and how the strategy has played out over the last few decades.

Essential introduction to neoliberalism

This is truly an essential reading if one is to fully appreciate how class, industry, and capital coalesced into neoliberalism; and the concomitant and compounding influence it has had on domestic and global markets and human potentiality. Very comprehensive overview.

Also, I found the narrator to be perfectly tolerable. Worth the investment, for sure.

A book everyone should listen to/read.

If you have people in your life that you care about, if you have any stake in the future of humanity, the dynamics, knowledge and realities revealed in this book must be considered in our search for solutions to saving ourselves from the imminent destruction of our world by Neoliberalism.

Monotone reader

This is a great book if you're interested in a western history of the rise of Neoliberalism or if you need to read it for school like I do. However this reader is terrible! Half way through every sentence he raises his pitch and ends every sentence on a low note. It was extremely annoying

Informative, Dense, Well-Researched, Well-Read

Other reviews say the reader is annoying. I don't see it. Might be a xenophobic bias toward other accents; might just be a matter of taste. But the content, it seems to me, is emphatically *not* a matter of taste. It's just straight-up true. The neo-liberal and neo-conservative movements have led to our current political situation, with frightening consequences for the environment and people -- esp. in the global south, for reasons the author details. (The consequences may well also doom neo-liberal/neo-conservative policies, depending on how 2020 turns out.) One reviewer noted that the info on China is outdated. Fair point. Another noted that it's not objective, but provided no examples of this. It's true that the book is written from a leftist perspective, but it's not fair to use that as a criticism, rather than a challenge to debate the facts/evidence presented.

A Solid Crash-Course on Neoliberal Progression

For anyone looking for a rundown of what exactly neoliberalism is - its relation to socialism, capitalism, and neoconservatism - and how it has evolved and affected the world's political landscape over the last century or so, this is a great rundown. For anyone who does not already have a very intimate familiarity with things like American imperialist history, Cold War proxy-conflicts, or even just wasn't alive during the Thatcher/Reagan era, David Harvey gives a broad-strokes lesson on the whole thing and helps get you up to speed. If you're interested in learning more about neoliberalism, I would suggest this as a starting point before transitioning into books which cover more specific countries, timeframes, and the like.