Apparitions of neoliberalism: revisiting ‘Jungle law breaks out’

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