For more than two decades, neoliberalism, with its core idea that the market rather than the state offers the best means of organising society and economy, has enjoyed a global ideological hegemony unparalleled in modern times. By the turn of the century, it had become the common sense not only of world financial institutions such as the IMF and WTO and of conservative political parties but also of formerly social democratic parties across the globe. Nor was the latter's’ embrace of the market always a reluctant one. Blair and Mandelson, architects of the New Labour project in the UK, frequently expressed satisfaction at the growth in the number of millionaires under their watch, while as late as 2007 Gordon Brown could boast in his Mansion House speech that his policies as Chancellor had secured ‘an end to boom and bust’ (Brown, Reference Brown2007).

All this of course should now be seen for what it was − hubris. Within a year of Brown's speech, the collapse of the merchant bank Lehman Brothers had turned what began as a problem in the US sub-prime housing market in 2007 into a global financial meltdown. For the UK, it resulted in what Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, described in 2011 as ‘the worst crisis since the 1930s, if not ever’ (King, Reference King2011). Yet as Colin Crouch points out in this book, far from that crisis having dealt a death blow, ‘neoliberalism is emerging from the financial collapse more politically powerful than ever’. More than that, ‘whereas the financial crisis concerned banks and their behaviour, resolution of the crisis has been redefined in many countries as a need to cut back, once and for all, the welfare state and public spending’ (p. viii). In a word, austerity.

It is this strange ‘non-death’ of neoliberalism that Crouch seeks to explain in this book (the title borrowed from Dangerfield's classic Reference Dangerfield1935 text on the decline of the British Liberal Party before the First World War). The main reason for neoliberalism's survival, he suggests, is a factor which is usually concealed or obscured by discourses which frame the debate in terms of the market versus the state. That missing factor, he argues, is the dominance of public life by giant corporations. The behaviour of these firms, which are large enough to dominate markets by their own decisions and actions, gives the lie to some of the most cherished tenets of neoliberal theory. These include consumer sovereignty, increasingly replaced by the paternalist concept of ‘consumer welfare’ (in reality the interests of shareholders); the supposed separation of economics and politics, the falsity of which one glance at George W. Bush's cabinet of oil magnates and construction executives should have been sufficient to demonstrate; and the necessity of ease of entry and exit from markets, again in practice undermined and blocked by the existence of firms which are ‘too big to fail’. The result, he argues, is that ‘actually existing capitalist economies do not conform to the pure neoclassical model’ (p. 50).

It's not a new or startling conclusion, but, in developing his argument, Crouch usefully exposes the yawning chasm between the claims of neoliberalism and the reality of their implementation, whether it be in relation to the supposed superiority of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and public–private partnerships as ways of funding public works, the conscious promotion by both Conservative and New Labour governments of private debt as a moral good or the cynical use of by giant firms such as BP of the slogan of ‘corporate social responsibility’ as a marketing ploy.

Any notion, however, that Crouch believes that such an amoral system driven by competition and greed requires replacement or at the very least radical reform is quickly dispelled. On the contrary, as he argues in the introduction to his book, ‘very few people are ever in a position to change the world, and among those few are many who would change it for the worse. There is a far, far bigger audience of people who have to cope as best they can with the world they find. It is for them that this book is written’ (p. xi).

‘Coping’ with the world, it seems, does not entirely rule out resistance. Some hope for the future, he argues, can be found in the ‘power of the powerless’, a variety of civil society actors, including political parties, religions, campaigning groups, the voluntary and charitable sector and the professions. Their role, however, is a very limited one and should not be exaggerated: ‘Civil society . . . operates in the interstices left among the great erections of political and economic power, like little houses springing up busily and untidily, creating vitality in a street dominated by the inaccessible security-controlled doors of skyscrapers’ (p. 161).

The roots of what many will see as being a counsel of pessimism and despair are both economic and political. Firstly, economic, in that while Crouch is able to describe the limitations and contradictions of neoliberal thought, he offers no real theoretical alternative. Thus, in contrast to recent analyses of the crisis developed by Marxist writers such as David Harvey (Reference Harvey2010) or Alex Callinicos (Reference Callinicos2010), his book provides no sense of capitalism as a dynamic system, driven by the needs of competition and accumulation towards concentration and centralisation in which the ‘giant firm’, like the return of crisis, is not some kind of aberration but rather an organic feature of capitalist development. Nor is it the case as he suggests, referring to these same giant firms, that ‘it is difficult to imagine a prosperous life without them’ (p. 52). On the contrary, prosperity is precisely what is currently being denied to millions of ordinary people across the globe by the insistence of ‘the markets’, dominated by these same firms, on the need for more and more austerity.

Politically, Crouch's book reflects a long period of defeats for the Left which has led many to despair of the possibility of ever changing the world and choosing instead either to embrace capitalism or at least, to learn to cope with the world as it is. It is ironic, then, that the same year in which the book was published saw the return of revolution on a scale not seen since the 1960s, resulting in the collapse of dictatorships across North Africa. It was also the year which saw the emergence of a global Occupy movement, whose slogan ‘We are the 99%!’ captured precisely the indignation of many at the global inequalities which more than two decades of neoliberalism have created. And even Britain, which has been experiencing the malign consequences of neoliberalism for close to three decades, saw its biggest strike since 1926 on 30 November 2011 when between two and three million people took action in defence of their pensions. Against that background, analysing the apparent ‘non-death of neoliberalism is a useful thing to do; acquiescing in it, however, suggests a pessimism which the events of the past year show is far from justified.