The conclusions discuss the significance of the WCC’s evolving agenda, emphasizing above all the distinctly Christian meaning the ecumenical movement sought to imbue human rights with. Against accounts that exaggerate the scope of the WCC’s commitment to human rights in the 1940s, the book shows the organization’s focus on religious freedom. Contrary to narratives that cast the WCC’s articulation of religious freedom as essentially universalizing and cosmopolitan, the book emphasizes how its advocacy was part of wider ideological contests against specific adversaries. The conclusions discuss the ramifications for our understanding of religious freedom today. With regard to the 1970s, the book demonstrates the significance of Protestantism to progressive Christianity and liberation theology. It also illuminates the difficulties liberation theology faced, and has continued to face. Scholars today debate the utility of human rights in the face of material inequality, exacerbated by neoliberalism. The WCC’s attempt to “radicalize” human rights shows the promise as well as the perils inherent in expanding our current understandings of human rights beyond liberal premises.

This chapter studies the golden years of the PSBR and how this facilitated the rise of neoliberal policy languages. The PSBR acquired magnetic features for policy debates after a combination of government strategic ambiguity, unfavorable international comparisons, erratic forecasting, and weaponization by different actors boosted its salience and left it at the center of national framing contests about the impact of economic policy on, for example, inflation, industrial investment, economic growth, the balance of payments and macroeconomic stability more generally. The chapter first looks at how the 1974-1979 Labour governments lost control of the terms of public economic policy debate and the PSBR became the centerpiece of public economic policy debate despite government elites’ reframing attempts. The government ended up elevating the PSBR to the status of official fiscal policy indicator even if it had not been devised for such purpose and government elites had explicitly discouraged its use for demand management appraisal. The chapter then traces how the PSBR became the deliberate cornerstone of economic policy during the 1980s Conservative governments.

This chapter concerned with Kathy Acker’s experimental novel of 1984 Blood and Guts in High School describes the frisson between material and immaterial forms of labor for the economically disenfranchised. In Acker’s novel Janey is the concomitant tragic figure whose deathward passage from shop worker to sex slave calls forth the very origins of tragedy and tragic theory. This novel combines tragic classicism with an interest in the subsumption of sex sexuality and desire more generally. Commencing in New York City – specifically in that urban milieu’s complete degradation during the 1970s – the novel’s plot reaches outward and away from the United States to what might be described as the peripheries of geopolitical hegemony dovetailing with a story of slavery set within North Africa and the Middle East. Extending and exemplifying the fragmentation of a coherent subjectivity in the pull of neoliberal marketization this novel responds to neoliberalism with tragedy at the moment of its violent imposition as economic shock doctrine.

This chapter continues the discussion of the advocacy agenda of the LGBTQ rights movement by examining the development of the institution-based civil rights advocacy that came to define the movement during the Obama and Biden administrations. During this period, the LGBTQ rights movement secured a rapid expansion of LGBTQ rights through a combined campaign of impact litigation and congressional and administrative lobbying that was bolstered by public advocacy campaigns, corporate outreach, media buy-in, and public education. Although effective in the moment, this approach is highly dependent on functioning democratic institutions and ultimately produced gains that have been revealed to be all too temporal. This chapter critiques the constraints of civil rights advocacy in the age of neoliberalism and explains how institutional-based lobbying fundamentally narrowed the horizon of LGBTQ resistance from a potentially expansive and creative democratic project into to a competitive, rights-bound universe. It concludes that the queer and trans movements must embrace the work of democratic creation and transformation as part of a broader pro-democracy or democratic resistance movement.

Chapter 4 investigates the return of mass unemployment in post-neoliberal Britain. Through close readings of post-Thatcher unemployment novels, the chapter considers the emotional implications of increasing precarity for the genre of unemployment.

This chapter describes how the utopian logic of neoliberalism has come to capture political rationality, chaining political judgment to the grammar of its antipolitical operations while legitimating that rationality within a historical narrative emplotted with its ontological and social imperatives.

The political failure of community is the background against which a range of post-Marxist European philosophers have sought to rethink what community could be. This chapter focuses in particular on Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, who have made substantial contributions to what we might call a new philosophy of community. Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben ask how community, not least because of its promise of solidarity, can continue to serve a political purpose, despite the violence of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, which appears to be the logical endpoint of any conception of community. But Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben also respond to the failure of community’s presumed revolutionary potential to become a site of resistance against both capitalism and the modern state. Should community be conceived in the plural (Nancy), as a gift economy (Esposito), or as a coming community of stateless refugees (Agamben)? Such attempts to save community come at a considerable cost, both philosophically and politically, since they make community irrelevant for a normative theory of democracy.

Martin Amis twice used the title ‘State of England’. This chapter considers his fiction as a series of reports on this subject. Despite a few intriguing and exceptional ventures into pastoral territory, most of Amis’s work is set in and around London, especially West London. From The Rachel Papers’s world of youth, the urban vision darkens into a dirty and dangerous city in which ‘the yobs are winning’. This social change is explored through Success, Money, London Fields, and Lionel Asbo. From Money on, Amis depicts an England influenced by the United States, yet which also retains its seemingly imperishable culture of pub and tabloid. Amis’s treatment of England is grim and biting, but Lionel Asbo allows a last hint of optimism.

Appeals to “community” and to “the common” have become increasingly frequent in political thought. In this chapter, I focus on some of the reasons for the appearance of such appeals in the landscape of contemporary political thought. This chapter also highlights some of the uncanny intellectual links across the entire political spectrum, from European post-Marxist and American communitarian philosophers to the public intellectuals of the neofascist “New Right.” These links emerge and play out in a broader intellectual field that is shaped both by the political economy of Western Europe and North America after 1945 and by the failure to address the obvious shortcomings and negative effects of this political economy. Against this broader background, current appeals to community in political thought can be seen as a response to the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism, which has led to a legitimation crisis of liberal constitutional democracy. But I am also going to suggest that appeals to community invariably tend to drift into an antidemocratic direction.

A renewed focus on “the common” in contemporary political theory, as it gained momentum in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is a direct response to the failure of community in political theory. I argue that Hardt and Negri develop what we can understand as an “insurgent democracy of the common.” On the one hand, such an insurgent democracy of the common seeks to preserve the revolutionary potential of democracy. On the other hand, this democracy of the common also tends toward political romanticism: the legitimacy of “the common” depends on a political subjectivity tied to a paradoxical nostalgia for failed revolutions. As such, the democracy of the common entails an escape from the realities of the political world that undercuts its emancipatory potential. This becomes particularly obvious in the hope that Hardt and Negri place in social movements of resistance, but also in their critique of neoliberal capitalism.

Chapter 5 reviews the tensions that arise between the Liberal ideology’s broader goal of establishing and enforcing the rule of law, including sovereign equality, and states’ perennial interest in using trade as an instrument of influence. The multilateral system is founded upon a bedrock principle of non-discrimination, and yet statesmen have a natural desire to treat allies better than adversaries. The chapter explores how philosophers and statesmen manage these tensions in theory and in practice, distinguishing first between the ideas on the left and the right and then between the strategies of the British and American hegemons. This introduction to the two leaders’ differing objectives and styles sets up the detailed histories that follow.

This chapter identifies in George Saunders’s earlier critiques of neoliberalism in his short stories and his critique of a conservative American version of Christian hell in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a common project with a spiritual alternative in the Buddhist order of compassion. I offer a brief history of the Christian theology of hell and American neoliberalism to show how they share a common idea of a punitive, individualistic sense of natural order, one with a common origin point in the theology of Augustine on the divine will. First tracing the public spiritual commitments expressed by Saunders across a wide range of his interviews, I then show how his sense of the potential of literature to empower a spirituality of compassion informs Lincoln in the Bardo’s rejection of the Christian hell and the novel’s alternative vision of a world where compassion is the order of the universe.

Americans have struggled to reconcile capitalism and war. Over three centuries of history, they have grappled with fundamental tensions between capitalism and security. The combination of war and capitalism often created disruptions and deep inequities that ordinary Americans and their leaders decided must be moderated for the sake of a more successful and politically sustainable war effort. For much of the nation’s history, capitalism was understood to be an insufficient provider of security; the U.S. military economy was semi-socialized, in both peacetime and wartime. But as the record of recent decades has highlighted, Americans have not experienced an ever-higher ratcheting of regulation and socialism, with each new war, over the long run. Rather, the historical record suggests that many postwar demobilizations served to reinforce capitalism. For the nation’s entire history, struggles over the economics of war and national security have been important parts of U.S. political development. This will continue to be the case in the current century, as Americans battle over economic policy and fight new wars, domestically and abroad.

This book has uncovered the role of multinational enterprises in the making of the Single European market by uncovering both firm strategies in the new business environment of an internal market as well as firm mobilization against to various dimensions of market governance. Together, the business cases covered in this book add a new, granular perspective to European political economy, not focused on the theoretical framework of capitalism, but on business strategy that constitutes its praxis. They also demonstrated the very different ways multinationals approached market integration and the Commission’s efforts to establish market regulations for the benefit of consumers and workers, with automakers most enthusiastic about the industrial focus of the market’s design, banks more interested in the new opportunities of market enlargement and its regulation than in deeper market integration, and commerce mobilizing against the threats of producer consolidation and the social dimensions of the Single Market.

In this chapter, Guy Zimmerman identifies innovative situated theater as a defining feature of LA drama, rebutting misperceived clichés about LA as a “placeless” city. Offering both a social history of 1980s and 1990s LA theater and extended readings of work by Reza Abdoh and John Steppling (alongside engagement with Luis Alfaro and Anna Deavere Smith), Zimmerman places LA theater within the broader context of the city’s unique cultural geography. He articulates how exemptions from union pay scales via the “Equity Waiver” partially liberated LA’s vibrant independent theater scene from market forces at a time when the rise of neoliberalism seemed to render such escape impossible, while also acknowledging how more recent years have applied yet greater economic and political pressures on artists attempting theatrical innovation in Los Angeles.