A particular fashion and lifestyle aesthetic called kankokuppo (Koreaish) has gained popularity among young Japanese women in the early 2020s, who increasingly admire what they perceive to embody the “atmosphere (fun’iki)” of South Korea. This article examines the semiotic rendering of a sensuous perception of Korea identified as “Koreaish” through aesthetically embodied practices and mediatized discourses. The analysis reveals the centrality of what I call a “soft unity”: softness that arises from ambiguated boundaries, taken up across discrete objects, practices, and social value regimes. Alongside growing calls to change Japanese society from a divisive to a borderless one, this softness is valorized as the quality of idealized sociality despite its association with highly normative femininity. The emergent “Koreaish” is emblematic of the postfeminist reformulation of the feminine ideal in neoliberal Japan, which manifests as a nexus of the demanifestation of differences and the reversion to conservative feminine values.

There are multiple intersecting crises afflicting society, from environmental devastation to the collapse of democracy, from economic exploitation to gratuitous violence, in the so-called “metacrisis.” Universities have both contributed to these crises in various ways, but have also tried to prevent them In this paper, we consider our responses to the metacrisis from our various disciplinary perspectives as four university educators from different scholarly traditions in one institution in Aotearoa New Zealand, We draw from our teaching experiences and our theoretical perspectives to engage in a reflective conversation with each other about how we may address the challenges of the metacrisis. Our conversation illustrates the potential benefits that such reflections, amongst colleagues who are intimately connected to a range of crises, may have to elucidate knowledge, power and performativity, and considers how humility, in a variety of forms, may be important to navigate the metacrisis.

This series of comments brings together four historians of neoliberalism, each of whom focuses on a different part of the world but whose work has implications that are transnational if not global. Quinn Slobodian reconstructs the rise of the category of neoliberalism among historians and identifies the different paths of inquiry it is generating. Priya Lal, offering an Africanist’s perspective, moves beyond the reduction of the neoliberal narrative of the continent to one of linear declension and abjection by way of structural adjustment to show continuities from the colonial era to early independence. Gary Gerstle, an Americanist by training, offers a macro take on the move from a Keynesian and social democratic order to a neoliberal one while insisting we attend to the diverse ways policies and elite neoliberal ideas are taken up by populations for whom promises of freedom may mean something different from what intellectuals intended. Finally, Tehila Sasson, a historian of modern Britain and the world, explores the left-wing features of what has come to be called neoliberalism, insisting we keep a keen eye out for unintended consequences and unlikely origins. Together, the comment offers a satellite’s eye view of a subfield reaching maturity.

The article examines the European Commission's use of its legal powers over mergers. It discusses and tests two views. One is that the ‘neoliberal’ Commission has ended previous industrial policies of aiding ‘national champion’ firms to grow through mergers and instead pursues a ‘merger‐constraining’ policy of vigorously using its legal powers to block mergers. The other is that the Commission follows an ‘integrationist policy’ of seeking the development of larger European firms to deepen economic integration. It examines Commission decisions under the 1989 EC Merger Regulation between 1990 and 2009. It selects three major sectors that are ‘likely’ for the ‘merger‐constraining’ view – banking, energy and telecommunications – and analyses a dataset of almost 600 Commission decisions and then individual merger cases. It finds that the Commission has approved almost all mergers, including by former ‘national champion’ firms. There have been only two prohibitions over 20 years in the three sectors and the outcome has been the creation of larger European firms through mergers. It explains how the Commission can pursue an integrationist policy through the application of competition processes and criteria. The wider implication is that the Commission can combine competition policy with achieving the ‘industrial policy’ aim of aiding the development of larger European firms.

What effect do pro‐market economic policies have on labour rights? Despite significant debate in policy and academic circles about the consequences of economic liberalisation, little is known about the labour rights effects of pro‐market policies. Extant literature has focused only on the possible outcomes of market‐liberalising policies, such as trade and investment flows, rather than directly assessing market‐friendly policies and institutions. Moreover, this line of research has found mixed results on how these outcomes influence labour conditions. To provide a comprehensive assessment of this linkage, this article combines data on five distinct policy areas associated with economic liberalisation with data on labour rights for the period 1981–2012. The results indicate that pro‐market policies – except the ones involving rule of law and secure property rights – undermine labour rights. Thus while there are some positive economic and political outcomes associated with market‐supporting policies, economic liberalisation comes at the cost of respect for labour rights.

Reading Friedrich Hayek's late work as a neoliberal myth of the state of nature, this article finds neoliberalism's hostilities to democracy to be animated in part by a romantic demand for belonging. Hayek's theory of spontaneous order expresses this desire for belonging as it pretends the market is capable of harmonizing differences so long as the state is prevented from interfering. Approaching Hayek's work in this way helps to explain why his conceptions of both pluralism and democracy are so thin. It also suggests that neoliberalism's assaults upon democracy are intimately linked to its relentless extractivism. Yet the romantic elements in Hayek's work might have led him toward a more radical democratic project and ecological politics had he affirmed plurality for what it enables. I conclude with the suggestion that democratic theory can benefit from learning to listen to what Hayek heard but failed to affirm: nature's active voice.

Focusing on selected “Western” conceptions of democracy, we expose and normatively evaluate their conflictual meanings. We unpack the white democracy of prominent ordoliberal Wilhelm Röpke, which comprises an elitist bias against the demos, and we discuss different assessments of his 1964 apologia of Apartheid South Africa. Our critical-historical study of Röpke's marginalized meaning of democracy traces a neglected anti-democratic continuity in his work that is to be contextualized within wider elitist (neo)liberal discourses: from his critique of Nazism in the 1930s to the defense of Apartheid in the 1960s. We provide an alternative, marginalized meaning of democracy that draws on Marxist political science. Such a meaning of democracy helps explain why liberal democratic theory is ill-equipped to tackle anti-democratic tendencies re-emerging in liberal-democratic polities.

This article suggests that a “crisis of democracy” can be understood not simply as a deterioration of specific representative institutions but as a repositioning of democratic politics vis-à-vis other principles of social coordination, most notably the capitalist market, and the attendant decline of democratic subjectivity—people’s attunement to claims appealing to the common good. I trace this process to the post–World War II era. I show that the crisis of democracy was shaped by the substantive imperative of fusing democracy with free-market capitalism. Many postwar democratic theorists believed that the welfare state could manage the tension latent in this fusion. But an analysis of Friedrich Hayek’s theory of neoliberal democracy, which recognizes that tension more acutely, reveals that the incorporation of free-market capitalism creates tendencies that undermine democracy from within.

Solidarity is a fundamental concept in social sciences, explaining the motivation for collective action and understanding how social cohesion institutions are structured. Its conceptualization, however, is often taken for granted in solidarity economy literature. This article investigates its emergence in solidarity economy organizations and the transformation through practices and discourse in public policies. We conducted a qualitative single-case study of COOPERCENTRAL VR, a family farming cooperative center with 13 organizations in Brazil. In conclusion, we demonstrate the paths of solidarity in the construction of a new socioeconomic reality and the role of the relationship between civil society and governments in forming and maintaining this process. The organization is indicated as an essential factor in bonding subjects and society.

This article is concerned primarily with the relationship between academic ideas and the ‘real world’ of politics. Disciplinary histories often assume a one-way influence of ideas, that of the academy into political practice. This article reverses that relationship and explores the way in which real-world ideas about politics have the potential to influence the way in which the academy develops, and the kind of responses it might offer. The primary focus is upon England and the marketisation of higher education; it asks are we burning all our books? This article also raises broader questions about the relationship between academia and that which it observes, with specific reference to political science.

Drawing on a range of fieldwork interviews, this paper discusses the opposition of civil society to nonferrous metals mining in Guatemala. Guatemala’s mineral resources, and government efforts to encourage their extraction, are discussed, as is the emergent civil society of that nation. Guatemalan civil society has opposed mining due to the impacts of its environmental effects upon the poor engaged in subsistence agriculture. This opposition has involved protests, community consultations against mining, and networking with the forces of global civil society. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this opposition to mining is a manifestation of the opposition to neoliberalism currently underway in Latin America.

This article argues that democracy is on life support in the United States. Throughout the social order, the forces of predatory capitalism are on the march—dismantling the welfare state, corrupting politics with outside money, defunding higher education, expanding the corporate-surveillance-military state, widening inequalities in wealth and income, and waging a war on low income and poor minorities. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish—from higher education to health care centers—there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values, and the common good. This article argues that given this current crisis, educators, artists, intellectuals, youth, and workers need a new political and pedagogical language centered around the notion of radical democracy in order to address the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources—financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological—to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control.

The article examines the recent emergence of ‘volunteering’ as a publicly significant notion and practice. Based on an extensive fieldwork in a prominent intermediary NGO in Israel, the article follows the efforts to promote and expand ‘volunteering’ pursued by the organization’s board and staff members. Affiliated with the privileged social strata of Ashkenazi (European) Jews, whose hegemonic position has been eroded during the neoliberal transformations in Israel, the NGO staff seek to retain their privileged status through a managerial activity in the field of ‘volunteering’. They promote a particular, liberally inspired construction of ‘volunteering’, while universalizing it as a professional, a-political and consensual realm. Inspired by critical studies of ‘whiteness’, the article describes how the privileged character of this managerial activity is being successfully obscured through the representation of ‘volunteering’ as an all-inclusive aspiration.

This study offers a first empirical test at a truly global level of two contradictory models of global civil society in the global governance system that are put forth by neo-Gramscian thought. The first model posits that global civil society is coopted by hegemonic capitalist and political elites, and promotes hegemonic interests by distributing neoliberal values and providing a façade of opposition. The second model views global civil society as the infrastructure from which counter-hegemonic resistance, and ultimately a counter-hegemonic historic bloc will evolve and challenge neoliberal hegemony. The predictions that these two views make as to the structure of global civil society networks are tested through network analysis of a matrix of links between 10,001 international NGOs in a purposive sample of INGOs extracted from the database of the Union of International Associations. The findings provide partial support to the predictions of both models, and lead to the conclusion that at present global civil society is in a transitional phase, but that the current infrastructure provided by the global INGOs network is conducive to the development of a counter-hegemonic historic bloc in the future, providing the northern bias in network is decreased. Strategic steps needed to achieve this are presented.