Introduction

Neoliberalism, in its many variants, has involved a sustained attack on ideas, institutions and formations of the ‘social’, including those of traditional social welfare systems and more recent movements towards social reform. This disposition is pungently described by Wendy Brown (2018: 16) as ‘the neoliberal attack on the social, which includes an attack on equality, social belonging and mutual social obligation, and also an attack on the replacement of traditional morality and traditional hierarchies (including racial hierarchies) by social justice and social reform’.

But does this mean that neoliberalism is simply ‘anti-social’? As Brown indicates, there are certainly arguments for treating it as such, not least the impacts on health, wellbeing and longevity that have followed in the train of neoliberalism’s inequality-generating policies and practices in many places. The turn to ‘austerity’ that was the dominant response to the global financial crisis intensified such consequences (see, for example, Stuckler and Basu, 2013). Nevertheless, this chapter will argue that the view of neoliberalism as ‘anti-social’ risks reifying a particular conception of the social and misses critical ways in which neoliberalism not merely contests but has sought to reconstruct older conceptions and institutions of the social. Instead, we might take a more conjunctural view of the processes of neoliberalization, highlighting three questions in particular:

• • What conceptions of ‘the social’ has neoliberalism promoted (rather than attacked)?

• • What has happened to older conceptions of ‘the social’ (expressed in social welfare and wider notions of public-ness)?

• • What are the ‘emergent’ possibilities through which people lay claim to the idea and sensibility of ‘the social’?

The remainder of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of these questions.

In search of the social

Two orientations underpin the discussion. This chapter takes a view of the social that treats it as a shifting and contested field, composed of imaginings, representations and their institutionalizations rather than a fixed formation more or less associated with the ‘Golden Age’ of welfare states (Huber and Stephens, 2001).

Such conceptions of the social tend to locate it in a long history of struggles (in the Global North) to mitigate, redress and reform the effects of capitalism that began with the workers’ movements of the late 19th century and culminated in the social democratic accomplishments of the period following the Second World War.