A Brief History of Neoliberalism

The problem with brief histories is that they sometimes leave one with the sense that their brevity was achieved at the expense of everything that matters. Rather than presenting a judicious selection of the most important facts and analyses, they leave one with the sense that there are important facts and analyses out there, but that considerations of space kept them out of the book at hand. The good news is that David Harvey's Brief History of Neoliberalism is not one of those. Rather, he presents, in the space of just a couple of hundred pages of lucid prose, the facts one needs and enough explication to help one make sense of them. An excellent primer on how a utopian ideology has come to dominate political and economic thinking, and the consequences of that sad state of affairs. The problem with brief reviews is . . . .