The rise and fall of the neoliberal order America and the world in the free market era

Gerstle (emer., history, Univ. of Cambridge, UK) has written an intellectual history of a self-defined neoliberal order and its rise and fall from dominance in American politics and policy. Gerstle argues that progressives claimed liberal terminology from the New Deal to the 1970s, leaving those anxious to refute the progressive liberal order with no effective or agreed-on label for the many strands of neoliberalism. Indeed, Gerstle stipulates at least three major strands of neoliberalism, each with aspects that conflict with the others. He equates the climax of the neoliberal order with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the New Democrats under Clinton, thereby conquering party differences in the US. Only with the Great Recession and the subsequent withdrawal of global US leadership did the neoliberal order falter under Obama and collapse with Trump's 2016 election. With no apparent return to the neoliberal order or the older liberal order, Gerstle leaves the reader with little resolution, and despite his excellent effort at defining neoliberalism, Gerstle leaves unaddressed many questions with few obvious answers. Nevertheless, this book rewards readers with an adept intellectual analysis of the past 50 years of US politics and policy. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. --Jim Rogers, Louisiana State University at Alexandria

A survey of the profound political changes that have marked the last 50 years. Historian Gerstle connects the current state of American politics--characterized by a rise of enthnonationalism and populism, distrust of open borders and free trade, and disillusion with democracy itself--with the fall of neoliberalism, which had prevailed from the 1970s through the 1990s. He traces the germs of neoliberalism to the 18th century, when classical liberalism promised "new forms of government, new ways of organizing the economy, and new possibilities for cultivating the self." In the 1920s and '30s, liberalism, often conflated with progressivism, shaped Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, whose "broad commitment to the public good" included government oversight of capitalism to control the dangerous market forces that led to the Great Depression. In the 1950s, however, what appeared to be an "organized and bureaucratized society" was assailed as "suffocating the human spirit," a feeling that became exacerbated in the next decade. The oil crisis and recession of the 1970s opened the door to Ronald Reagan, the "ideological architect" of neoliberalism. Reagan melded a policy of deregulation, open borders, and globalization with a revival of neo-Victorian values of order, discipline, strong families, and self-reliance. "Many of the principals in the story of neoliberalism's rise," Gerstle notes, came to identify themselves as conservatives. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a push to foster the "capitalist penetration" of new markets in parts of the world that emerged from communist rule further fueled the tenets of neoliberalism--and positioned Bill Clinton as its "key facilitator." Gerstle sees failing economic and political policies under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as the recession of 2008, as giving rise to the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter: protests from left and right that laid the groundwork for Donald Trump. Acknowledging that neoliberalism is broken, Gerstle sees the nation's prevailing disorder and dysfunction auguring both "great possibility" and "great peril." A cogent, erudite historical analysis. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.