Critical accounts over the past years have focused on neoliberalism as a subject of knowledge; there has been a recently growing interest in neoliberalism as an object of knowledge. This article considers the theoretical, epistemological and political implications of the relationship between neoliberalism as an epistemic subject and neoliberalism as an epistemic object. It argues that the ‘gnossification’ of neoliberalism – framing it an epistemic project, and deriving implications for political engagement from this – avoids engaging with numerous ambiguous elements (...) of the production of knowledge. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘scholastic fallacy’ and Boltanski and Chiapello’s work in sociology of critique, the article lays out a framework for the study of the relationship between epistemic, moral, and political elements of critique of neoliberalism, including the conditions of its own production in contemporary academic contexts. (shrink)

The relationship between academic freedom and freedom of speech features prominently in public and political discussions concerning the role of universities in Western liberal democracies. Recently, these debates have attracted increased attention, owing in part to media framing of a ‘free speech crisis’, especially in UK and US universities. One type of response is to regulate academic expression through legislation, such as the UK’s 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. This article offers a critical analysis of the assumptions concerning (...) the performativity of speech in this kind of legal intervention. It extends Judith Butler’s discussion of the concept of ‘harmful speech’ as reported by Butler (Excitable speech: a politics of the performative, Routledge Classics, London, 1997) to conceptualize speech-acts as performative not only when it comes to populations, but also when it comes to institutions. Reconceptualizing universities as producing as well as being constituted by speech-acts, the article argues that the effects of free speech legislation need to be considered in the context of the transformation of universities and other political actors (including governments and student unions) in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that legal enforcement of free speech at universities further obscures the distinction between negative and positive liberties identified by Isaiah Berlin (Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1958), and considers this shift as part of the reconfiguration of political ontology in late modernity. (shrink)

The aim of the study is to assess current trends, regularities and contradictions in the Marxist critique of neoliberal capitalism. The methodology of the study is built on a comparative analysis of the latest scientific works, an approach based on quantitative analysis of the global neoliberal development in the period 1980–2020. For the analysis this authors used the data of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund(IMF) on the group of ‘Big Seven’ countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, (...) United Kingdom, the United States and China. A comparative analysis shows a significant lag in the countries with a neoliberal model of global economic growth. It can be argued that the neoliberal model of economic development proved effective at the initial stage of its practical application in overcoming the inflationary shock caused by the oil crisis of the 1970s, as well as in the conditions of highly competitive industrial production. At the same time, in the context of the post-industrial formation of the digital economy, neoliberal ideology no longer meets the challenges of the times and is no longer able to support sustainable economic growth as well as prosperity. (shrink)

This article examines a frequent assumption of sociological accounts of knowledge: the idea that knowledge acts. The performativity of knowledge claims is here analysed through the prism of ‘sociological excuses’: the idea that sociological explanations can act as ‘excuses’ for otherwise unacceptable behaviour. The article builds on Austin’s distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary effects to discuss the relationship between sociological explanation, sociological justification and sociological critique. It argues that understanding how (and if) sociological explanations can act requires paying attention to (...) social and political conditions of performativity and their transformation in late liberalism. (shrink)