The Market Does Not Die Quietly
Margherita Sani
Margherita Sani holds a BA in International and Diplomatic Affairs and a MA in Global Development and International Cooperation from the University of Bologna. After a traineeship at the European Development Agency and at the Institute of International Relations of Prague, Margherita is now an intern for Fern NGO. Their research themes focus on neoliberalism, inequalities and democracy.
For several decades, neoliberalism has been one of the most insistently debated words in academia. It has been blamed, defended, redefined. It has been declared a non-existent concept, but also the very organising principle of contemporary society. And yet, the debate surrounding its end remains obstinately alive.
This persistence is far from accidental. Financial crises, wars, climate emergency, technological acceleration, democratic backsliding, and nationalisms are only some of the ruptures that have been shaking the assumptions on which the neoliberal age seemed to rest. The promises of a frictionless, post-historical, democratic and globalised world order are wavering – to put it mildly. While many scholars interpret these rapid and profound transformations as the unequivocal verdict of the end of neoliberalism, a growing number of critics suggest, instead, the possibility of a hyper-neoliberalisation.
The Rule of the Market
The difficulty begins, notoriously, with definition. Neoliberalism has been defined for decades in very different ways and yet the term is unanimously considered resistant to easy definition. This very elusiveness may be the reason the debate refuses to disappear.
Born in the 1940s with the Mont Pèlerin Society, neoliberalism is often understood as a set of macroeconomic policies ranging from deregulation, privatisation, trade liberalisation to the free market. The 1970s and 1980s marked its global ascendancy as the Keynesian compromise fractured, enabling Thatcher and Reagan to dismantle the traditional welfare state, thus paving the way for the market-centric orthodoxy of the Washington Consensus. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of the conviction that democracy had ultimately triumphed, neoliberalism increasingly merged with the lexicon of globalisation and market-led development.
While the alleged positive effects of this order — such as universal prosperity and individual empowerment — were widely touted, a vast body of literature has progressively been exposing profound structural inequalities and the erosion of democratic foundations. Consequently, Foucault (2008) and Brown (2015) have argued that neoliberalism operates not primarily as an economic theory, but rather as a governing rationality, as it reorganises the relationship between the state, the individual, and the social body around the principles of productivity, competition, and efficiency. What distinguishes neoliberalism from earlier forms of market-oriented thinking is precisely the fact that we no longer simply participate in a market, but become, in Foucault's (2008) terms, ‘enterprises of the self’ — individualised and depoliticised economic actors who act as micro-firms tasked with managing their own skills, debts, risks, and affective labour as assets to be optimised.
A Glimpse of the Debate
Nonetheless, our world has undeniably changed. The rapid and far-reaching transformations of recent decades have generated a cascade of ruptures across the global order, reshaping neoliberalism, capitalism, and globalisation alike. Events and trajectories of extraordinary magnitude have significantly altered not only our contemporary society, but also our way of interpreting it. It is precisely at this historical intersection between the old and the new order that the debate over the status of neoliberalism loudly emerges. It can be, for the purpose of this contribution, summarised as follows.
A first line of scholars has suggested that the 2008 financial crisis precipitated the end of neoliberalism, not merely because it induced a dramatic and massive effective halt to global markets, but also because it fatally undermined the core promises of efficiency and prosperity upon which neoliberalism rested. In doing so, the crisis laid bare the fragility of financialised capitalism and eroded the moral authority of the deregulated market.
Conversely, an emergent body of literature (Crawford 2023; Späth 2025) insists that neoliberalism has died more recently. Although 2008 did represent a major affront, the policy response to it was exquisitely neoliberal in character: austerity. Only the massive and rapid changes of the world order, particularly from 2020 onwards, marked neoliberalism terminal crisis.
A third position in the debate argues that neoliberalism is only changing. Its underlying economic logic has become so ingrained in modernity that it endures in a new and more aggressive form. Scholars such as Brown (2006; 2015) and Slobodian and Plehwe (2020) recognise the reality of contemporary ruptures, yet refuse to equate mutation with disappearance. For them, neoliberalism's mutability should not be mistaken for weakness. Indeed, even if one accepts its demise, the market does not die quietly[AK4] or easily. Rather, the very blurring of neoliberalism's contours may signal its capacity to endure — by mutating into something more openly coercive and authoritarian. And it is precisely this capacity for reinvention that helps explain why we are still talking about it.
The End of Neoliberalism
From 2020 onwards, the pandemic, the return of inflation, the war in Ukraine, the intensification of geopolitical competition, and the growing centrality of the climate crisis have all required, in different ways, a renewed intervention of the state. Simultaneously, reshoring, tariff wars, protectionist measures, migration regimes, and nationalisms appear to sit uneasily with the classical image of neoliberalism.
For Chignola and Mezzadra (2025), these very elements deliver the verdict: neoliberalism has ended. The transformations of the global order cannot be reduced to temporary adjustments as they rather represent a fundamental incompatibility. Free trade is progressively disrupted by tariffs, sanctions, and trade wars. Economic nationalism is no longer a marginal deviation, but a central feature of state policy. Oligopolistic concentrations of corporate power continue to expand, while currencies and monetary instruments are drawn into geopolitical conflict. The international order appears less and less organised around a single liberal and Western hegemony. What takes shape, rather, is a ‘centrifugal and conflictual multipolarism’ fundamentally irreconcilable with the classical neoliberal ethos (ibid.).
The pandemic made this transformation especially visible. COVID-19 was not only a dramatic shock to a globalised and interdependent economy, but it was also a crisis that revealed the material infrastructures upon which that economy depended. The idea that markets could govern themselves, and that states should merely provide the legal framework for competition, was suspended by the practical necessity of public intervention.
Electoral politics seem to tell a similar story. Across different national contexts, anti-systemic or insurgent political forces have gained strength by giving expression to a widespread frustration with the old political vocabulary (Kronauer 2024, 7). Large parts of the electorate appear increasingly unwilling to accept moderate answers to immoderate crises, and thus political responses become more emotionally charged and ideologically intense, as suggested by Boccia Artieri and Farci (2020).
Furthermore, the immense power accumulated by technological, security, AI, and data sectors further signals (according to Chignola and Mezzadra) a definitive break from the neoliberal paradigm, as it created an ‘oligarchy of command’ where political and economic powers are now completely intertwined.
Neoliberalism’s Mutations
Yet, mutation is not necessarily disappearance. The multitude of fractures enumerated thus far certainly signals profound transformations, yet they might represent surface ruptures that do not undo neoliberalism at all.
In this light, the question grows more intricate and returns, once again, to a matter of definition. If we understand neoliberalism as a set of macroeconomic policies, then, by all evidence, the present may indeed appear post-neoliberal. But different understandings yield different conclusions. By contrast, to follow Foucault and Brown is to see that certain planks of the old neoliberal order are under strain, and yet the broader economisation of society has suffered no retreat whatsoever.
An illuminating contribution is offered by Callison and Manfredi (2020). Through what they term ‘mutant neoliberalism,’ they open up ‘novel paths for understanding the relationship between neoliberalism and contemporary political ruptures’ (ibid., 2). For them, neoliberalism should not be grasped as a monolithic ideology destined either to triumph unchanged or to collapse entirely. Rather, it is better understood as a project capable of modifying its own ‘genetic code’ in order to adapt to political crises.
A clear example of this mutation is what Slobodian and Plehwe (2020) have described as neoliberal nationalism. Movements such as the AfD, or segments of the Brexit coalition, do not necessarily mobilise national sovereignty to reject the market. Rather, they mobilise it to pursue market-oriented objectives — but without the democratic, social, or redistributive constraints associated with international institutions, welfare protections, or supranational regulation.
David Harvey (2005) offers a complementary materialist interpretation of this, understanding neoliberalism as a ‘class project’ aimed at the restoration of elite power. To this end, the neoliberal state mobilizes its ‘coercive, juridical, and ideological capacities’ to safeguard capital accumulation, thus revealing an inherent authoritarian trait: whenever the market must be insulated from democratic pressures, state violence is deployed to guarantee its proper functioning.
Moreover, neoliberalism has long been understood as a ‘crisis‑constituted’ regime (Peck 2010; Davies 2014). Again and again, the failure of neoliberal programmes seems to have led not always to their abandonment but to their intensification. Crises become a mechanism of reproduction rather than a moment of rupture.
Democracy too offers a crucial example of this. Brown (2015) has long shown the detrimental effects of neoliberalism on democracy, as technocrats and experts increasingly displace electoral politics, and decisions of profound economic consequence are systematically insulated from democratic deliberation. What is even more dramatic is the crumbling of our democratic ethos, as “We, The People”, became increasingly economised and depoliticised, to the point that the demos (ibid.) appear incapable of sustaining a collective project of self-rule. Our society seems to have melted into fragmented pieces of homo oeconomicus.
Profit remains the new and only God. From hospitals and universities to public infrastructure, the pervasive logic of economisation has transmogrified these former pillars of the social contract into speculative assets, subjecting every dimension of human welfare to the relentless metrics of efficiency and market competition. This systemic reconfiguration re-engineers public institutions to operate according to the 'enterprise-form’, where the pursuit of the common good remains displaced by the dictates of capital accumulation.
Mark Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’ is also tenaciously persistent and represents arguably one of the strongest elements of neoliberalism’s alleged life. Precisely because neoliberalism is showing its most violent face as it is threatened and it is failing, it remains the unchallenged winner. Alternatives do exist, and yet, at the level of common imagination, it seems to brilliantly continue to erect itself as the only imaginable alternative. Even when it fails and exactly when it fails.
Nor should we ignore the structural inequalities through which neoliberalism continues to reproduce itself. Decades of neoliberal rule have taught us, as highlighted by Harvey (2005), that upward redistribution of wealth is not an unfortunate side‑effect but a central design principle. Neither the 2008 crisis nor the ruptures that unfolded after 2020 appear to have reversed this trajectory. Wealth polarisation has not been halted; nor has the power of financial institutions been dismantled. If anything, both have survived as central features of the present.
Geographically, too, we must be cautious about declaring the end. For much of the Global South, neoliberalism never appeared primarily as a benign promise of freedom, prosperity, or empowerment. It was experienced through structural adjustment programmes, debt conditionality, forced privatisation, extractivism, and the systematic restriction of economic sovereignty. It was always perniciously violent. To announce its death from a comfortable metropolitan perch risks reproducing the very asymmetries that neoliberalism itself helped to entrench.
The claim that neoliberalism has ended becomes even harder to sustain once we turn to the subject it continues to produce. Even where free trade or fiscal orthodoxy appear weakened, individuals are still governed as human capital, compelled to treat skills, reputation, mobility and health as assets to be optimised. This injunction, however, is never neutral: it is fractured by race, gender, class, citizenship, and colonial histories. Neoliberalism thus seems to persist in the grammar through which subjects are valued, optimised, or rendered disposable.
Neoliberalism is mutating, yet our society seems to remain, at least in certain aspects, stubbornly neoliberal.
Neoliberalism’s Authoritarian Turn
Donald Trump serves as a paradigmatic example. As he relentlessly presents his political project as an anti-systemic radical break with the old political vocabulary, he also embodies, in many respects, the system itself. He might have succeeded in just reframing neoliberal objectives through nationalist and misogynist rhetoric, as suggested by Tedde (2025). Indeed, his very figure can be interpreted as a culmination of neoliberal subjectivity: the political leader as entrepreneur, brand, dealmaker, and spectacle of wealth. Trumpism might not be simply post-neoliberal, but authoritarian hyper-neoliberal.
The return of the state he embodies is one aimed at securing private accumulation, providing public backstops for corporate risk, intensifying tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and privatizing public functions. Consequently, Cox and O’Connor (2025) describe Trumpism as a ‘proto-fascism’ fundamentally implicated by neoliberal capitalism, where policies like austerity and deregulation generated the ‘resentment and rage’ upon which such authoritarian figures prosper.
This redirection is precisely the central mechanism of ‘mutant neoliberalism’. Neoliberal globalisation is argued to have produced precarisation, debt, weakened unions, eroded public infrastructure, and widespread mistrust in institutions. Yet it did not generate a shared understanding of these injuries as structural effects of political economy. Instead, through the hollowing out of democratic mediation and the erosion of solidaristic institutions, frustration became available to reactionary articulation.
Another decisive arena of this mutation is digital capitalism. Despite certain post-neoliberal elements, the core rationale of platforms is the economization of attention, emotion, and social relation. They deepen the neoliberal penetration of private life by making leisure, friendship, desire, and outrage monetisable. The subject is not only a worker or consumer, but a permanent producer of data and self-branding. Far from weakening neoliberalism, the digital sphere seems to expand its reach into time, bodies, and feelings.
This is why the present cannot be understood only at the level of policy. The resilience of neoliberalism depends also on the sheer difficulty of imagining any credible alternative to the world. Even when people deeply distrust elites, markets, and institutions, they may still experience competition, debt, and self‑optimisation as perfectly natural facts of life.
The political imagination remains, for the most part, thoroughly captured.
Thus, the crisis of legitimacy does not automatically become a crisis of power. An order can lose credibility quite dramatically and still govern — especially when its categories have become the almost invisibly pervasive grammar through which problems are perceived.
Perhaps, then, the most honest answer is also inevitably the least satisfying. Neoliberalism may be definitively dead. It may not be dying at all. But the truth most likely lies somewhere uncomfortably in the grey zone between these two certainties. Neoliberalism is unquestionably mutating and this mutation is occurring neither quietly nor without considerable cost. For as long as the market remains so centrally, almost divinely installed as the organising principle of our societies — the very horizon of the thinkable — how could it ever die quietly?
Copyright, 2026, Margherita Sani
Comments