Gary Gerstle - The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order

Gary Gerstle offers a brilliant, engaging, and provocative first-draft history of the last half century, a period sorely in need of scrutiny. With characteristic big-think flair, he shows that the neoliberal wisdom of that erathat markets would bring democracy, that the age of big government was overemerged from specific historical forces and circumstances. He also suggests that many of those ideas can and should now be consigned to the past.

Beverly Gage, Yale University Just beneath the surface of our fractured and polarized polity, Gary Gerstle argues that there has been a Neoliberal Order under which both parties worked in the 1990s and early 2000s. Even as they bitterly disagreed, the nations political debate moved far away from the class-based pillars of the New Deal. In another of his characteristically eye-opening analyses, Gerstle takes readers through the rise and fall of the political order that has shaped our leaders and electoratethat is, until powerful forces over the past decade, on the right and left, have opened the door to a new era.

Julian Zelizer, Princeton University

Gary Gerstle

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Gary Gerstle 2022

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gerstle, Gary, 1954 author.

Title: The rise and fall of the neoliberal order : America and the world in the free market era / Gary Gerstle.

Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2022. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021056521 (print) | LCCN 2021056522 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780197519646 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780197519660 (epub) |

ISBN 9780197628751

Subjects: LCSH: NeoliberalismUnited StatesHistory. |

ConservatismUnited StatesHistory. | CapitalismPolitical aspects United StatesHistory. | Free enterpriseUnited States. |

United StatesForeign economic relations. | United States Foreign relations19451989. | United StatesForeign relations1989 Classification: LCC JC573.2.U6 G485 (print) | LCC JC573.2.U6 (ebook) |

DDC 320.510973dc23/eng/20220105

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056521

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056522

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197519646.001.0001

For the Dinner Crew

this idea for this book was born at a 2015 University of California, Santa Barbara, conference to mark the 25th anniversary of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 19301980. The book took further shape across a series of Cambridge-Oxford-Harvard workshops on work and inequality in 20162017. It acquired depth in a 20182019 graduate studentfaculty neoliberalism study group at Cambridge. And it received critical inspiration at a 2018 Seattle conference that dared to imagine a politics lying beyond the neoliberal era. I owe a great deal to the organizers of these eventsNelson Lichtenstein, Alice OConnor, Jennifer Hochschild, Desmond King, Daniel Coleman, Richard Saich, Angus Burgin, Steven Teles, and Heather Boushey (and the Center for Equitable Growth).

I debuted my own thinking on The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order in a lecture to the Royal Historical Society in 2017 and then refined that thinking for two keynote addresses, one at Oxford and another at the University of Chicago. The feedback I received from these lectures and on the publications that issued from them was incredibly helpful and encouraging. For that feedback, I wish to thank, in particular, Sven Beckert, Margot Canaday, Liz Clemens, Liz Cohen, Nancy Cott, Gareth Davies, Steve Fraser, Art Goldhammer, Joel Isaac, Alex Jacobs, Ira Katznelson, Russ Kazal, Desmond King, Robert Kuttner, Jonathan Lear, Jon Levy, Nelson Lichtenstein, Peter Mandler, Lisa McGirr, William Novak, Alice OConnor, Christopher Phelps, Daniel Rowe, Barbara Savage, Steve Sawyer, Stephen Skowronek, Adam Smith, and Jim Sparrow. I also wish to acknowledge the generous Cambridge University Press policy that has allowed me to reproduce in this book portions of an article that first appeared in the 2018 Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

I intended to debut a key chapter of this book () at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians. When the pandemic made that presentation impossible, three of the commentators who had signed on for the session kindly agreed to carry out a private Zoom workshop with me. Angus Burgin, Melinda Cooper, and Quinn Slobodian delivered commentaries that were learned and penetrating. Margot Canaday and Ira Katznelson later weighed in with their own insightful readings of the chapter. Im not sure I have addressed all of these readers concerns, but their comments helped me to lift my thinking on the genealogy of liberalism and neoliberalism to a higher level.

At Cambridge, I have been privileged to be part of a remarkably robust and engaged group of Americanists, including Andrew Preston, Sarah Pearsall (recently departed for Johns Hopkins), Nick Guyatt, Julia Guarneri, Bobby Lee and John Thompson; visiting Pitt professors Margaret Jacobs, Barry Eichengreen, Ira Katznelson, Heather Thompson, Naomi Lamoreaux, Kathleen Brown, and Theresa Singleton; Mellon fellows Stephen Mawdsley, Seth Archer, Emma Teitelman, and Emily Snyder; a talented array of junior research fellows who year-in and year-out enliven and replenish our ranks; and the spirited Cambridge American History Seminar that has persisted through strikes, storms, and a pandemic.

Beyond the ranks of American historians, I wish to thank these Cambridge colleagues: Peter Mandler, my stalwart friend and comrade; Joel Isaac (now at the University of Chicago), Saul Dubow, and Eugenio Biagini, co-editors and co-authors on projects addressing themes similar to those I explore here; David Runciman, Helen Thompson, and Catherine Carr, all of