Classics Revisited

Apparitions of neoliberalism: revisiting ‘Jungle lawbreaks out’

Jamie Peck* and Adam Tickell***Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2, Canada

Email: jamie.peck@ubc.ca; a.tickell@bham.ac.uk

**Vice-Chancellor’s Office, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B16 2TT

Revised manuscript received 19 February 2012

The authors revisit their paper, ‘Jungle law breaks out: neoliberalism and global-local disorder’, publishedby Area in 1994, commenting on the theoretical and political context of that time and on the subsequentcourse of debates around neoliberalism. Focusing on the Thatcherite strain of neoliberalism as amanifestation of post-Keynesian crisis politics, and along with its associated strategies of deregulatorydevolution, the paper called particular attention to the project’s reactive moment and to its distinctivemode of scalar politics. Subsequent experience has underlined the stubbornly adaptive character of theneoliberalisation process, which nevertheless continues to be animated by crises (of a contingent andconjunctural nature), while propagating yet more asymmetrical forms of regulatory rescaling. It might besaid that a kind of jungle law, in this sense, continues to hold sway.

Key words: neoliberalism, regulation theory, Thatcherism, scale, localism

IntroductionLooking back can be an unsettling thing. It can be espe-cially unsettling when the backwards look spans a periodof almost two decades, in this case to a paper written in1993, when the two of us were just getting started andwhen the frailties of (the British variant of) neoliberalismseemed rather more apparent than did its stubbornentrenchment. Our Area paper was written at a timewhen both of us were midway on a journey from a rela-tively orthodox reading of (Parisian) regulation theory,which we had each used in our doctoral work in the1980s, towards a more heterodox form of institutionalpolitical economy (Tickell and Peck 1992; Peck andTickell 1994b). This would continue to be influenced bywhat Bob Jessop (1990) was already styling as a regula-tion approach, or sensibility, especially in its concernwith the medium-term reproduction of political-economic forms and forces (understood ‘integrally’ ratherthan mechanistically or parsimoniously) and with thejointly constituted (and potentially open) search for new‘institutional fixes’. But the direction of our own workwould entail delving increasingly deeply into the ‘social

regulation’ side of the equation, rather than extrapolatingfrom post-Fordist accumulation dynamics, and it wouldseek to work consciously between those local, nationaland international scales of analysis that so often wereselectively prioritised or effectively naturalised as thedomains of particular social processes of regulatory func-tions. Hence our concern with neoliberalism, and itsscalar political economy in particular.

Our intention had been to pursue these concernsthrough a collaborative research project on the political-economic and social-regulatory transformation of theSouth East of England, exploring the transnationalentanglements, localised contradictions and extra-localexternalities of what for the country was a special kind of‘problem region’. However, two attempts failed to con-vince the powers that be at the Economic and SocialResearch Council that this was a feasible endeavour. Anespecially negative referee’s report on our resubmittedresearch proposal spluttered that it was ‘typical of thework being conducted by young economic geographersthese days’, which in retrospect we would take as a back-handed compliment, even though it was clearly notintended as such.1 Our work on the South East never

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really got past the statement-of-intent phase (Peck andTickell 1995b), and was soon to be comprehensivelysuperseded by an innovative programme of research con-ducted at Bristol and the Open University (Leyshon andThrift 1997; Allen et al. 1998). Undeterred, we went on toaddress related questions in a parallel project on growthpolitics in Manchester (Peck and Tickell 1995a; Cochraneet al. 1996; Tickell and Peck 1996; Jessop et al. 1999). Inthis work, we continued to be inspired by, but also wrestlewith, regulationist problematics, although many of itsmethodological tools proved to be rather blunt whenapplied at the urban scale. This prompted some furtheradaptations, but also selective borrowing from comple-mentary approaches in urban political economy and criti-cal local governance studies.

Looking back at the Area paper, it strikes both of us ascompletely inseparable from this moment of methodologi-cal transition; it was a creature of that time. More funda-mentally, it was also a product of a very British conjuncture– the long hangover that followed the decade of Thatcher-ism. Maybe that particular hangover has passed, but thepattern of addictive behaviour has clearly not. In light of thefundamentalist turn in Coalition policies since the 2010election, there are more than a few unwelcome resonancesbetween our early 1990s arguments and those of the‘restructuring present’, even if history never repeats itself.There are certainly echoes of the self-administeredshock treatment that was Thatcherite monetarism, and theaccompanying ravages of deindustrialisation, in the Coa-lition’s policy of self-flagellating austerity, which threatensnot only the incapacitation of the social state but anyprospect, surely, of sustainable growth. Maybe there issome progress, if (even) the New York Times has taken toopenly mocking Britain’s austerity programme as a ‘quackcure . . . a deliberate ideological choice by [the] coalition’,which has ‘failed and can be expected to keep failing’(New York Times 2011, A18). Yet as a restless and alwaysfrustrated project, neoliberalism continues to lean into itsfailures, which establish the perverse preconditions forfurther rounds of malintervention.

Such have been the cumulative, but deeply contradic-tory, dialectics of neoliberalisation, which we were juststarting to grapple with in the Area paper (cf. Peck andTickell 2002 2007). Neoliberalisation has (since) exhib-ited a crisis-riven but nonetheless ‘forward’ momentum,describing a nonlinear pattern of evolution that hasremained contextually specific yet at the same timedeeply constituted with extra-local logics, networks,incentives and constraints. If David Harvey’s metaphor ofa ‘moving map’ captures the underlying sense of thisrolling form of creative regulatory destruction (Harvey2005; Brenner et al. 2010), ours was a situated and rather‘early’ view of this process, visualised from just one pointon the map.

The n word

Our reading of neoliberalism in the Area paper was situ-ated in at least two important respects. Geographically(and, one might say, politically) it was shaped by thevigorous debates over Thatcherism that had preoccupied(and to some degree divided) the British left in the 1980s(see Hall and Jacques 1989; Jessop et al. 1988). Thatcher-ism, as we would certainly emphasise more strongly now,was not a prototype or template or premonition of otherneoliberal transitions; it was a conjuncturally specificcase, albeit a critical and consequential one (Peck 2004;Peck and Tickell 2007). It established one of the keycoordinates in what would become an increasingly mul-tipolar universe of less-than-total but ever-more intercon-nected neoliberalisms. Since we were anticipating furtherempirical work on the spatial and scalar constitution ofThatcherism (and its aftermath), our approach in the paperwas at least implicitly shaped by this conjunctural forma-tion, but we were also at the beginning of thinking abouthow the problematic of neoliberalisation might be ren-dered methodologically tractable in a more general sense.

A second way in which our early 1990s work wassituated relates to the debts that our argument clearly owedto regulation theory. Correspondingly, it turned on thecontradictory nexus of political-economic dynamics andinstitutional experimentation, framed in the historicalterms provided (in this case) by the crises of Fordism-Keynesianism.This said, we argued then (and would main-tain now) that we were working with this framework in anopen-ended and reflexive manner, rather than in a rigid ordeterministic way, or indeed out of some nostalgic belief ina Keynesian restoration. Specifically, we were reactingagainst the interpretation, which was gaining some tractionat the time, that neoliberalism could be understood assome kind of like-for-like ‘successor’ to Keynesianism, or amore-or-less functional counterpart to post-Fordist accu-mulation dynamics.This may explain why Jamie Gough, ina reply to our article, damned us with the faint praise ofworking within a ‘critical’ variant of regulationism (Gough1996, 397; cf. Larner 2000). Our approach was criticalin the sense that we were beginning to think about thedistinctive logics and dynamics of neoliberalisation inregisters beyond those of the regulatory ‘needs’ of still-emergent forms of post-Fordist accumulation, and to someextent also beyond the realm of crisis-managing institu-tional adjustments. If anything, this would subsequentlytake us further away from Gough’s (1996, 392) understand-ing of neoliberalism as a purgative or ‘therapeutic’ resto-ration of the capitalist law of regulation by value, intoexplorations of its distinctive and diverse (but less thancoherent) ideational, institutional and ideological currents(Peck and Tickell 2007; Peck 2010). Variegated neoli-beralisations have certainly been actively co-produced

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(especially) with deepening financialisation, intensifyingglobal economic integration, accumulation by disposses-sion and ‘flexibilisation’ across the spheres of productionand reproduction, but they are not simply or singularlyreducible to one or the other of these logics.

Subsequent work on neoliberalisation has developedthese arguments in increasingly sophisticated ways. But itis worth recalling that, prior to the early 1990s, the social-scientific literature on neoliberalism was extremely sparseand generally inchoate; its conceptual and political signi-fiers remained highly unstable. Across the scattered pre-1994 literature, the most coherent discussions were to befound in critical development studies and Latin Americanpolitical economy (see Colclough and Manor 1991;Lomnitz and Melnick 1991) and in governmentalitystudies (see Rose and Miller 1992; Barry et al. 1993),albeit with almost no cross-cutting conversations, whilethe term would pop up occasionally in a range of othercontexts, and with different signifiers, in political theory(see Schoolman 1987; May 1993), international relations(see Wendt 1992; Niou and Ordeshook 1991), compara-tive political economy (see Garrett 1993; Aimer 1988),and in left commentary in the UK and, to a lesser extent,the United States (see Plotke 1986; Jessop et al. 1990).There was an extremely high degree of dissensus, acrossthis literature, concerning the meaning, scope and conse-quences of neoliberalism. With the significant exceptionsof governmentality and development studies, none ofthese fields were to establish much programmaticmomentum; indeed the term almost lapsed into disuse inmainstream political science and sociology, prior to itsselective rediscovery in the last few years. And so contin-ues the troubled history of neoliberalism as a ‘rascalconcept’, which goes back as least as far as the MontPelerinians’ apparent decision to distance themselvesfrom the word that they and their associates had onceused – and to advance their cause, instead, througheuphemistic and technical means – from some time in theearly 1950s (cf. Friedman 1951; Peck 2010).

The critical social-science literature on neoliberalism inthe past two decades has been moved, most conspicu-ously, by the alternating currents of poststructuralist andpolitical-economic analysis. In rather unhelpfully stylisedterms, these are often associated, respectively, with small-nand big-N conceptions of neoliberalism, where the latter isheld to stand for hybridity, (local) groundedness, contin-gency and fluidity, while the latter, often presented as a foil,signifies systemicity, global reach, structural logics andhierarchical power. While there are, to be sure, real ten-sions and elements of irreconcilability between these twoapproaches (see Barnett 2005; Ong 2007), some of whichcan be traced to their ultimately Foucauldian or Marxianorigins, in practice this is hardly a stark choice betweenbinary alternatives. Working within the political economy

tradition, for example, need not lead inexorably towardsglobal structuralism, top-down diffusion modelling,bluntly universal theorising, or expectations of convergentdevelopment. On the contrary, process-based approachescan be attentive to the role of networks and (local) institu-tions, and they are quite consistent with conceptions ofhybridity and variegation (Peck and Tickell 2002; Peck2004 2010; Brenner et al. 2010; Fairbanks in press). Giventhat neoliberalisation is an always incomplete and inescap-ably contradictory process, it must dwell (awkwardly) withits others, even its subordinate ones. As a result, both itssocial form and its politics are always, to some degree,contextual and conjunctural, not to say unstable and con-tradictory. Historical geographies of neoliberalisation aretherefore always about more than filling in the details oradding texture; they are constitutive of the process itself, itseffects and its limits. Above all, perhaps, the process is anopen-ended one.

Old new localismsOur principal motivation in writing the Area article wasnot, at the time, to develop the concept of neoliberalism,but to advance a critique of contemporary forms of spatialpolitics. While sceptical of the orthodox globalisationthesis, with its emphasis on market-driven convergenceand one-best-way policy advocacy, we had neverthelessbecome convinced that those ‘localist’ strategies on offer atthe time were intrinsically limited in the face of the dullcompulsion of inter-local competition (the ‘jungle law’ ofregulatory downgrading, races to the bottom and exter-nally induced fiscal constraint). For us, this had been asmuch a practical as a theoretical conclusion. It is easy toforget now how provincial were the methodological beatsof a great many economic geographers at the time (andcertainly our own). Most of our previous work had beenconceived and executed in (and to some extent for) theNorth West of England.2 Socialised in Manchester, thecradle of industrial capitalism, which had latterly sufferedfrom rapid and calamitous deindustrialisation, we werealmost reflexively suspicious of tales of economic resur-gence emanating from the sunnier climes of California orBritain’s M4 corridor, and we had witnessed at first handthe breakdown, or gradual dilution, of municipal-socialiststrategies in cities like Manchester and Liverpool. Whatpassed for local economic development strategies, by theearly 1990s, were increasingly depolicised and techno-cratic; parroting competitive mantras and drawing on anarrow and increasingly feeble repertoire of market-friendly policies, they seemed destined to degrade into aform of symbolic politics that, if anything, was symptom-atic of the wider neoliberal malaise.

If neoliberalism was increasingly shaping the rules ofthe game, especially with respect to inter-local competi-

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tion, fiscal restraint and downward responsibilisation,then even the most effective local economic strategieswere going to be running into a headwind. Truly radicalalternatives seemed likely to be suffocated at birth, or tobe penned into defensive enclaves. The solution, as wesaw it, was not to redouble local efforts, but to challengeand ultimately transcend those extra-local rules of thegame that were being shaped by the rolling process ofneoliberalisation, since the potential of local initiativeswould always be limited by an essentially antithetical,competitive inter-local settlement. These challenges, inturn, were framed by the intrinsically regressive scalarpolitics of neoliberalism, which duplicitously conferredon local agencies and interests responsibility withoutpower, while brazenly granting global institutions andactors power without responsibility (Peck and Tickell1994a). Subsequent mutations and metasticisations ofneoliberalism have rendered these scalar asymmetriesmore, not less, of a constraint on (local) progressive orextra-neoliberal action. ‘Local alternatives’ can indeed bea spur to the radical imagination (see Wright 2010), but atthe same time, the fact that they not only begin, but oftenremain, local is testament to the corrosive capacity ofneoliberal Realpolitik and to the continuing ‘ecologicaldominance’ of market rule at the global scale (see Jessop2000; Peck 2011).

It is a further reflection of how times have changed,perhaps, that Jamie Gough felt that the Area article ‘over-estimated the possibilities for progressive economicregulation’ (1996, 392). Our argument about the need formore cooperative, reciprocal and responsible inter-localrelations, against the prevailing culture of competitivederegulation, was however one of analytical and politicaladequacy; it was not a prediction. And it is a position thatwe would broadly hold to now. Progressive ‘postneolib-eral’ strategies will be going nowhere, practically ormetaphorically, if they continue to privilege the local overother horizons of action and intervention. Constrainingthe operation of neoliberalism’s ‘permanent economictribunal’ (Foucault 2008) at extra-local scales, and makingroom for the propagation of reciprocal and cooperativeextra-local relations (including active sociospatial redis-tribution, neoliberalism’s antithesis) must be a definingfeature of progressive movements beyond market rule (seeMassey 2007; Peck et al. 2010). None of this will be easy,but we would argue that it remains necessary. True, theremay have been an element of wishful thinking in ourdiagnosis of effectively terminal crisis tendencies inneoliberalism (one way, perhaps, that we were extrapo-lating from Thatcherism’s untidy end). But in retrospect,neoliberalism’s character as an endemic form of crisispolitics has become, if anything, more evident. If, toborrow an apt phrase from George W. Bush, we weresomewhat guilty of ‘misunderestimating’ neoliberalism,

back in 1994, this was perhaps because we failed fullyto appreciate its adaptive plasticity, and its capacity forcrisis-assisted mutation across contexts as variable asthose of post communism, post developmentalism andpost Keynesianism. In principle, we would still firmly holdto the view that neoliberalism is not infinitely adaptable.But it may continue to mutate, into ameliorative as well aspathological forms, until it encounters an opposing ideo-logical project of corresponding force. On their own,crises – even global crises – may not be enough, as theregressive consequences of the Wall Street crash of 2008appear to confirm. Jungle law, in this sense at least, con-tinues to rule.

Notes

1 Whether, in our frustrated pursuit of research council funding,we were victims of an inherently conservative methodologicalhegemony or, more prosaically, a mix of inexperience andover-ambition must remain an open question (cf. Tickell 1993).

2 If there was an exception that proved this rule, it was ourcolleague Peter Dicken, whose ‘global shift’ occurred in themid-1980s (see Dicken 1986). While these had become ‘main-stream’ concerns for economic geographers by the 1990s (inpart due to Dicken’s own influence), it represented a significantbreak with the national-and-regional orientations of most in thefield in the previous decade (see Peck and Yeung 2003).

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