Disorienting
Neoliberalism:
Global Justice and the Outer Limits of Freedom
In the world neoliberalism has made, the pervasiveness of injustice and the scale of inequality can be so overwhelming that meaningful resistance seems impossible. Disorienting Neoliberalism argues that combatting the injustices of today's global economy begins with reorienting our way of seeing so that we can act more effectively. Within political theory, standard approaches to global justice envision ideal institutions, but provide little guidance for people responding to today's most urgent problems. Meanwhile, empirical and historical research explains how neoliberalism achieved political and intellectual hegemony, but not how we can imagine its replacement.
Benjamin L. McKean
Benjamin L. McKean is Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University. He is a political theorist whose research concerns global justice, populism, and the relationship between theory and practice. His work has been published in academic journals including American Political Science Review and Political Theory as well as in popular media including The Washington Post and Jacobin.
Academic Publications
“The Politics of Pandemic Precarity” Contemporary Political Theory (forthcoming)
“Populism and Global Justice: A Sibling Rivalry?” Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric Vol. 12, No. 2 (2019)
“Populism, Pluralism, and the Ordinary”
in Mapping Populism: A Guide to Understanding and Studying Populism Eds. Amit Ron and Majia Nadesan (Routledge, 2020)
“Kant, Coercion, and the Legitimation of Inequality”
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (forthcoming)
“Ideal Theory After Auschwitz? The Practical Uses and Ideological Abuses of Utopia in Rawls and Adorno”
Journal of Politics Vol. 79, No 4 (October 2017)
“Toward an Inclusive Populism? On the Role of Race and Difference in Laclau’s Politics”
Political Theory Vol. 44, No. 6 (December 2016): 797-820
“What Makes a Utopia Inconvenient? The Advantages & Disadvantages of a Realist Orientation to Politics”
American Political Science Review Vol. 110, No. 4 (November 2016)
Popular Media
“What COVID-19 tells us about global supply chains” on Oxford University Press’s OUPblog October 25th, 2020
Featured Guest, Flyover Folk Podcast, “Understanding Populism with Dr. Benjamin McKean” July 10, 2019 (episode 20);
“’Blood Money’ and Mass Membership” on understanding the NRA as a social movement in Jacobin Magazine Februrary 20th, 2018;
“A Venezuela of the North?” in the blog of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas October 19th, 2017;
“Is It Possible to Have Populism Without Racism?” The Monkey Cage blog, May 18th, 2016
Response to Disorienting Neoliberalism
“This is the one book you need if you want to understand our world and contribute to the movements that will change it. Brilliant and accessible, grounded in real stories and often heartbreakingly funny, political theorists will love it, but so will organizers and everyone interested in why things are not working. McKean gives us global justice theory as it ought to be: grounded in political economy, oriented towards solidarity, and aiming for a new freedom beyond our exhausted free-market pieties.”
“A neoliberal world of transnational supply chains presents those of us in wealthy countries with a paradox: such chains seem to enhance our well-being and freedom while visiting suffering on others across borders. McKean creatively argues that such chains actually harm our freedom as well as theirs. Thus the basic disposition we should cultivate is not humanitarian pity but rather a political sense of global solidarity. This book is marvelously ambitious and deeply thought-provoking; a real achievement.”
““This book begins with the simple insight that global injustices are easy to identify but ‘figuring out who, if anyone, is obliged to do something about [them] is difficult’. Professor McKean strikes out a refreshing place in the global justice literature. Rather than apply abstractions to a world that doesn’t yet exist, McKean wants to orient global activists to act in the world in which we find ourselves. He does this beautifully with the case of the global supply chain. His analysis shifts Western social justice activists from feeling obliged to save overseas sweatshop workers toward recognizing their solidarity as both being subject—though not in the same ways in with the same material consequences—to globalization.” ”
Contact the Author
