Rebellion was in the air. Workers were on strike, students were demonstrating on campuses, discipline was breaking down. No relation of domination was left untouched the relation between the sexes, the racial order, the hierarchies of class, relationships in families, workplaces and colleges. The upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s quickly spread through all sectors of social and economic life, threatening to make society ungovernable. This crisis was also the birthplace of the authoritarian liberalism which continues to cast its shadow across the world in which we now live.

To ward off the threat, new arts of government were devised by elites in business-related circles, which included a war against the trade unions, the primacy of shareholder value and a dethroning of politics. The neoliberalism that thus began its triumphal march was not, however, determined by a simple state phobia and a desire to free up the economy from government interference. On the contrary, the strategy for overcoming the crisis of governability consisted in an authoritarian liberalism in which the liberalization of society went hand-in-hand with new forms of power imposed from above: a strong state for a free economy became the new magic formula of our capitalist societies.

The new arts of government devised by ruling elites are still with us today and we can understand their nature and lasting influence only by re-examining the history of the conflicts that brought them into being.

Grégoire Chamayou is a researcher at the CNRS, Paris

Table of contents:Introduction

Part I. Indocile workers

Chapter One. Indiscipline on the shop floor

Chapter Two. Human resources

Chapter Three. Social insecurity

Chapter Four. War on the unions


Part Two. Managerial revolution

Chapter Five. A theological crisis

Chapter Six. Ethical managerialism

Chapter Seven. Disciplining the managers

Chapter Eight. Catallarchy


Part Three. Attack on free enterprise

Chapter Nine. Private government under siege

Chapter Ten. The battle of ideas

Chapter Eleven. How to react?

Chapter Twelve. The corporation does not exist

Chapter Thirteen. Police theories of the firm


Part Four. A world of protesters

Chapter Fourteen. Corporate counter-activism

Chapter Fifteen. The production of the dominant dialogy

Chapter Sixteen. Issue management

Chapter Seventeen. Stakeholders


Part Five. New regulations

Chapter Eighteen. Soft law

Chapter Nineteen. Costs/benefits

Chapter Twenty. A critique of political ecology

Chapter Twenty-One. Making people responsible


Part Six. The ungovernable state

Chapter Twenty-Two. The crisis of governability of the democracies

Chapter Twenty-Three. Hayek in Chile

Chapter Twenty-Four. The sources of authoritarian     liberalism

Chapter Twenty-Five. Dethroning politics

Chapter Twenty-Six. The micropolitics of privatization

Conclusion

Notes

Index