"Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world" by Stephen Metcalf

As regular readers of this blog know I have long thought that, alongside fundamentalist religion, neoliberalism is one of the chief threats to the possible future well-being of our world. It's an ideology that needs to be called out for the pernicious evils it makes possible and encourages and then it should be consciously consigned to a museum to be studied by all as a social, political and economic project that must never be repeated.

In the church setting I have sometimes been challenged about using the word, primarily because (or so it is claimed) its meaning is too contested and slippery to be useful. However, I have always disagreed with this challenge and the following article from today's Guardian newspaper is, to my mind, an excellent and highly informative piece supportive of my own position.

The word has become a rhetorical weapon, but it properly names the reigning ideology of our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human. 

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