BOOK REVIEW: “The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability” by David Chandler and Julian Reid, London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016, 210 pages

Abstract

Neoliberalism has occupied the central focus of research in anthropology and sociology in the past decade and has animated many debates regarding the ways in which the latest stage of global capitalism has to be understood in relation to previous forms of capitalism. There have been many attempts to define this concept and give it a more socio-empirical grounding that can enable capturing the transformations within capitalism and the specific social and economic processes associated with these changes. The field of social sciences have been so much flooded with studies of neoliberalism that some have advocated giving up the term altogether because of the confusions and obscurities it creates (Dunn, 2017). Many of the studies on neoliberalism have dealt with the political processes embedded in the economic structures of global capitalism, but have focused little on what these transformations have meant at the level of subject-formation. How is the self constituted by neoliberalism and what are the inner features the self has to develop in order to be attuned to the new political-economic regime? Neoliberalism cannot function without cultural legitimations that actively sustain the capitalist mode of production in its specific constellations and most of all it cannot function in the absence of social ontologies that regulate the self and corresponding societal relations. Chandler and Reid's book "The neoliberal subject: Resilience, adaptation and vulnerability" constitutes one of the most articulate contemporary attempts to define these processes in terms of how they impacted on the subject and the specific modes of socialization that were enabled by these new political-economic structures which contributed to the institutionalization of a new generalized self-understanding.