A Brief History of Neoliberalism

by David Harvey

For at the heart of liberal and neoliberal theory lies the necessity of constructing coherent markets for land, labour, and money, and these, as Karl Polanyi pointed out, ‘are obviously not commodities… the commodity description of labour, land, and money is entirely fictitious’. While capitalism cannot function without such fictions, it does untold damage if it fails to acknowledge the complex realities behind them.