Rethinking the Anglo-American Road to Neoliberalism: Public Finance and Welfare from the Gold Standard to the 2008 Crisis and Beyond

This dissertation seeks to contribute to a new understanding of the American and British roads to neoliberalism. It develops a novel theoretical framework that combines Gramscian political economy with critical literature on the welfare state and social reproduction to provide a more integrated approach to the study of international and comparative political economy. This framework is applied to examine two interconnected themes in the developmental histories of the US and Britain that are typically studied independently.

First, this thesis explores the emergence of depoliticization as a model of liberal economic governance predicated on the insulation of economic policymaking from popular political contestation. Against a backdrop of uneven patterns of state formation and capitalist development, the origins of this approach to economic governance are traced in the US and Britain from the gold standard through the post-World War II period. I then examine its role in the emergence and consolidation of Anglo-American neoliberalism. Despite institutional variegation between the US and Britain, I argue that depoliticization has remained a cornerstone of macroeconomic governance in both countries since the late 1970s.

Second, this dissertation analyzes the political coalitions associated with the welfare state in each country, focusing on the social antagonisms and class divisions generated between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. I contend that the politics of anti-welfarism, and the historical blocs mobilized around welfare reform since the 1980s, have been deployed as a divide-and-rule hegemonic strategy to generate political support for Anglo-American neoliberalism. By examining these themes concurrently, this study offers an original analysis of how policies and practices that have eroded democratic control over economic policymaking in the US and Britain have nonetheless continued to generate popular political support.

Finally, this dissertation examines these themes amidst the re-emergence of crisis management, austerity, and welfare restructuring in the decade after the 2008 global financial crisis. It argues that both countries have experienced an ongoing crisis of social reproduction, which has contributed to an unfolding crisis of legitimacy within Anglo-American neoliberalism.