As his critics pointed out, however, it did not actually explain the historical processes at work. Bell’s detractors and political opponents of growth coalitions’ urban redevelopment plans included labor leaders, rank-and-file workers, and some academics on the Left. As they confronted political and economic restructuring, they struggled to develop a language adequate to explain the uneven social, spatial, and economic changes underway. On the ground in economically troubled cities, “deindustrialization” and “postindustrial society” functioned as rhetorical devices through which urban constituencies articulated competing visions for cities after the decline of manufacturing. Planners and politicians embraced the positive connotations of the forward-looking “post-industrial society.” Labor activists preferred the term “deindustrialization,” which evoked powerful place-based imagery of abandoned factories and boarded-up buildings in a way that “post-industrial” did not.24 Scholars, however, have been exceedingly skeptical of both terms, contending that neither convincingly explains the social relations of the economic transition from basic manufacturing to the dominance of other types of economic activity.25
Within the academy, critics on the Left instead described the related processes of remaking the geography of state power and the social, cultural, and economic geography of cities in the late twentieth century first as “postmodern,” then as “post-Fordist,” and most recently as “neoliberal.”26 No matter which they term they employed, critics of contemporary capitalism argued that a crisis in the 1970s led to disinvestment in the industrial mode of production and the emergence of flexible production models and service- and finance-based economies.27 After neoliberalism supplanted postmodernism and post-Fordism as the lingua franca of social criticism, scholars commonly associated policy tactics such as deregulation, privatization, devolution, and the evisceration of the welfare state with the implementation of neoliberal political projects.28 Under neoliberalism, state retrenchment occurred in some policy areas, such as social welfare provision, while at the same time state involvement expanded in other areas, such as military spending, corporate tax incentives, and the repression of labor unions.
Contemporary scholars of neoliberalism tend to fall into one of two groups: those who are interested in the intellectual history of the term and its progenitors, the economists of the Mont Pèlerin Society; and those who engage neoliberalism as an analytical framework to explain the features of contemporary capitalism. Members of the first group, composed primarily but not solely of historians, have charted the political and economic influence between the 1930s and the 1980s of ideas first advanced by “market advocates” such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. Academics on the Left and social critics in the second group began to use neoliberalism broadly to refer to market fundamentalism and the unmaking of North Atlantic welfare states. They adopted neoliberalism as rhetorical shorthand for their outrage over the hollowing out of the middle class and the widespread acceptance of inequality that accompanied economic shifts.29
Critics have pointed out that scholars tend to invoke neoliberalism without defining the term and often fail to differentiate between its historical and contemporary meanings. One scholar characterized neoliberalism as “one of the boom concepts of our time,” an “all-purpose descriptor” for wide-ranging phenomena.30 Another quipped that “neoliberalism” is used so imprecisely in many texts “that one is tempted to pencil one’s objections in the margins as one might in a student essay.”31 Historians, on the whole, have objected to anachronistic uses of the term, pointing out that, unlike liberals, conservatives, or neoconservatives, the historical actors typically labeled neoliberal—Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan among them—would not have used the term to describe themselves.32 Even as historians caution against too-broad invocations of neoliberalism, however, they agree that, in the 1970s, the liberal order broke down without a clear successor.33
The rapidly proliferating scholarship on the subject amply demonstrates that actually existing neoliberalism did not have a single germinal moment. It did not spring forth, fully formed, like a Venus of Mont Pèlerin. There were instead many overlapping paths to neoliberalism—through routes as diverse as international development organizations and financial institutions, U.S. foreign policy initiatives, and welfare state reforms—which began at different times and in different places. In the global South, neoliberalism often followed aid packages from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which required developing countries to implement wrenching social and economic reforms. If the strings attached to IMF loans pulled Calcutta, Mexico City, and Lagos to neoliberalism, postindustrialism forged the path for Pittsburgh, Essen, and Rennes.34
Postindustrialism thus represented one trajectory to neoliberalism among many, and urban sociologists and geographers have argued that cities quickly became testing grounds for neoliberal policy experiments. Scholars cite capital subsidies, place promotion, supply-side intervention, central-city makeovers, and place branding as the urban manifestations of the widespread privatization and devolution that accompanied market orthodoxy.35 They describe public-private partnerships as an essential marker of neoliberal urbanism and the primary mechanism through which privatization and devolution took place. Public-private partnerships took varied forms, all of which involved marshaling the powers of the local state in service of business interests, usually through a public subsidy for private development designed to serve individual or corporate, rather than collective or public, interests.36
The social and political processes at work in postwar Pittsburgh and Hamilton illustrate the range of ideas about political realignment, spatial change, and urban citizenship that social scientists now call neoliberal. They also demonstrate that the institutional arrangements for privatization (particularly through public-private partnerships) and devolutionary urban policy were not developed in response to a break or rupture in the 1970s. Instead, they were in place well before social scientists argue that neoliberalism became ascendant in North Atlantic nations.
The decline of manufacturing and rise of services that Bell predicted would yield a socially just post-industrial society instead turned out to be harbingers of the rising inequality critics associated with neoliberalism. Yet, in troubled manufacturing centers, the late twentieth-century changes to local economies, to the built environment, and to social relations are best understood as an acceleration and intensification of processes that began in the early postwar period. The people involved did not, of course, use the term “neoliberal.” Instead, they described their activities in the narrower context of “economic diversification” in the 1950s and 1960s and, after Bell’s book was published, adopted his rhetoric of post-industrial society. They began to talk, too, of an emerging “knowledge economy” or “information society,” in which the production of knowledge and the manipulation of information would replace basic manufacturing’s central role in advanced capitalist economies.37
Neoliberalism has supplied scholars with a framework through which to make sense of disparate tactics with broad and diverse constituencies that were implemented for a host of pragmatic reasons over several decades that by the 1980s had become commonsense. Policies originally intended to revive declining cities were used to justify government retrenchment from the urban sphere in the United States, Canada, and other advanced industrial economies, especially the UK. A consensus emerged among policymakers across partisan and political boundaries that public incentives for private-sector economic and urban redevelopment projects were not just one way but, instead, the only way to confront urban problems. Planners, elected officials, and corporate elites in declining manufacturing centers around the world shared common understandings of the problems facing their cities and sought to create similar institutional arrangements to address those problems, most often through public-private partnerships modeled on those developed in the United States.38 There was nothing essentially neoliberal, or even particularly new, about such policies—most had long histories as urban development tactics. They were merely deployed in new ways, with different intentions, and in changing institutional settings, at a time when liberals and conservatives increasingly came to share the same sense of political possibilities.
Postindustrialism
