Eagleton, meanwhile, was ontic in his classification of different kinds of materialism into i) empiricist, radical, and vitalist materialism ii) cultural, semantic, and somatic materialism and iii) speculative materialism (Eagleton, 2016). He highlighted how ontological debates lie at the heart of politics, “ is about competing visions of how the world is and how it should be… If there were no ontological differences, there would be no politics” (Wight, 2006, p. Wight made the case for using ontology to resolve the gridlock between positivist and post-structuralist international relations scholars and properly comprehend the meanings and analytical connotations contained within their work. Two of the most important contributions to political ontology within IPE are those of Wight and Eagleton. The value of these ontic debates is that they can help us with understanding the process of making and remaking theory, as well as with comparing analyses of a common theme (such as neoliberalism) while understanding their conceptual roots and geneses. The cartography will be constructed through the embedding of neoliberalism as an object of analysis within two ontological debates: material-ideational and structure-agency. In the case of neoliberalism, it will assist readers with analysing: i) the factors underpinning the construction of different theories of neoliberalism ii) how and why conceptualizations of neoliberalism differ within and between theories iii) the thematic implications of these connections/divergences and iv) how to move beyond static analyses of what neoliberalism is onto more dialectical understandings of neoliberalization processes.
The cartography represents a systematized methodology for identifying and articulating philosophical intersections and divergences within IPE scholarship.
The baseline understanding of neoliberalism/neoliberalization adopted in this article is that of the process of the intensification of marketization and commodification (Cahill et al., 2012), although the objective is to provide the reader with a selection of heuristic devices to be combined together to create an analytical cartography for navigating neoliberalism's literary terrain. Amongst other things, neoliberalism is often depicted as a class project (Harvey, 2005), an elitist agenda to subordinate society to market rule (Mirowski, 2013), a geographically specific process of market-oriented restructuring (Peck, 2010), and the reorganisation of “ societies in coercive, non-democratic and unequal ways” that tend to facilitate authoritarian rule (Bruff & Starnes, 2018, p. The manifold debates about it range from questions about the term's overall usefulness to analyses that are firmly rooted in their own specific scholarly disciplines. The translation of this cartography helps to achieve two things, (1) to move beyond the static analyses of neoliberalism and endorse the dynamic understand of neoliberalization processes, (2) to understand why systemic process-based understandings of neoliberalization can create distinctions between analytical understandings of neoliberalism in terms of either the commodification of marketization processes or the marketization of commodification processes.ĭespite being an omnipresent topic in contemporary International Political Economy (IPE), the polysemic nature of the term ‘ neoliberalism’ has turned it into, “ something of a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise, and frequently contested” (Brenner et al., 2010, pp. In so doing, this cartography can provide readers with various heuristic devices to understand the making of theories, why and how conceptualizations of neoliberalism differ between and within theories and pinpoint the thematic implications of these differences. Instead, I suggest a cartography which consists of integrating two ontological debates - structure-agency and material-ideational - through the interplay between the problematiques of structuration and semiosis, and the operational debate on ideas/interests.
The lack of careful ontological considerations leads to confusing and often contradictory usages of the term ‘neoliberalism’, obfuscating its usefulness. In this article, I discuss the importance of ontology and its implications, demonstrated in the examples of different approaches to neoliberalism.
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