Against the Terror of Neoliberalism

by Henry A. Giroux

With its dream worlds of power, commercialization, and profit making, neoliberalism has ushered in new Gilded Age in which the logic of the market now governs every aspect of media, culture, and social life-from schooling to health care to old age. As the social contract becomes a distant memory, the new "corporate state" distances itself from workers and minority groups, who become more disposable in a new age of uncertainty and manufactured fear. This is the only book to connect the history, ideology, and consequences of neoliberal policies to education and cultural issues that pervade almost every aspect of daily life. A significantly revised and updated new version of Giroux's 2003 book, The Terror of Neoliberalism, this book points to ways in which neoliberal ideology can be resisted, and how new forms of citizenship and collective struggles can be forged, to reclaim the meaning both of a substantive politics and of a democratic society. Against the Terror of Neoliberalism was featured in the New York Times in the Stanley Fish Stanley Fish Blog

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

American cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory.

A high-school social studies teacher in Barrington, Rhode Island for six years, Giroux has held positions at Boston University, Miami University, and Penn State University. In 2005, Giroux began serving as the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Giroux has published more than 35 books and 300 academic articles, and is published widely throughout education and cultural studies literature. Since arriving at McMaster, Giroux has been a featured faculty lecturer, and has published nine books, including his most recent work, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex.

Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in 2002.

Reviews

[Adam Fletcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Teachers, youth workers, and parents who want to change the world: Read this book. Henry Giroux has written the essential book for anyone who wants to understand the powerful forces that are changing our world today, and the effects these forces are having on the most important people we work and live with everyday: children and youth. If you are tired of the over-simplified Fox News-style explanations of increased poverty, demoralized social fabric and machoistic militarism that come from most mainstream progressive sources, then Giroux's new book is a great read. He puts everything into context: education reform, the American empire, and increased jailing all find their places in the mess of modern U.S. culture, and better yet, Giroux doesn't hesitate to tell it like it is.

As a parent, an educator, and as a youth worker I recommend this book strongly to anyone yearning to understand why, how, and where our young people fit into - and need to fit into - the world today. Because of this book I am looking in my own "educated hope," and am now recommitted to "make the promise of a democracy and a different future worth fighting for." I hope you are, too.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing overall, it's a very broad analysis of, and attack on, neoliberalism that covers a lot of ground, and then covers it again. And then again. Without going deeper. That said, with some very serious editing this could have been much better, as there were some good points. The importance of education in the creation of hegemony, and pedagogies of resistance. The second chapter on race was good. I wish he'd gone more into neoliberalism as a cultural project, but sadly, he didn't. As well as definitions of democracy that go beyond liberal tradition. But I do think he's right in his identification of some of the key points for resistance.

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a good bit of insightful and valuable analysis here-- but Giroux's points are often unnecessarily repeated and recirculated.