The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition.

• Author: Aydin, Yahya
• Position: Book review

The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition

By William Davies

London: SAGE Publications, 2017, 223 pages, $24.00, ISBN: 9781526403520

During the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, neo-liberal-ism first emerged as a reaction to the worldwide recession, and is associated with the retrenchment and privatization of the welfare state. The main aspects of neo-liberalism can be explained in terms of open, competitive, and unregulated markets; a liberated state in terms of all its forms. Based on this general view and expectation about neo-liberalism, William Davies discusses the limitations of neo-liberalism in relation to authority, sovereignty and competition, with attention to the key role of politics and the market.

The Limits of Neoliberalism is well-organized and includes contributions from some key scholars (i.e., Hayek, Coase and Schumpeter), as well as interviews and policy documents to discuss the history of competition in order to better examine the transformation and current situation of neo-liberalism in the U.S., the UK, and the EU, with special attention to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. In the first chapter, Davies defines neo-liberalism as the "disenchantment of politics by economics" (p. 6). Based on this view, he discussed value, ideology, authority, and justification in terms of economic efficiency. The quantitative results of the economy become more important than the qualitative. The results of this chapter show that everything converts to a form of market in contemporary life due to neo-liberal policies. He suggests that we "will one day live in a society which offers more choices than merely 'winning' or 'losing' in a competitive game" (p. viii), and he believes we are extremely close to this situation.

According to Davies, the market is not completely unregulated; it has its own policies, and has battled with politics throughout the history of neo-liberalism. To understand market power, he focusses on the Chicago School to exemplify monopoly and competition in the current market. He claims that while neo-liberalism has changed over time between the 1980s and 2000s, the first time neo-liberalism lost was in the recent financial crisis (2007-2008), after which its concepts began to decline. Davies notes that neo-liberalism is like a "zombie" (p. 187); he effectively 'kills' neo-liberalism gradually with each additional chapter of his book using existing academic sources in...