Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era

What is the impact of three decades of neoliberal narratives and policies on communities and individual lives? What are the sources of social resilience? This book offers a sweeping assessment of the effects of neoliberalism, the dominant feature of our times. It analyzes the ideology in unusually wide-ranging terms as a movement that not only opened markets but also introduced new logics into social life, integrating macro-level analyses of the ways in which neoliberal narratives made their way into international policy regimes with micro-level analyses of the ways in which individuals responded to the challenges of the neoliberal era. The book introduces the concept of social resilience and explores how communities, social groups, and nations sustain their well-being in the face of such challenges. The product of ten years of collaboration among a distinguished group of scholars, it integrates institutional and cultural analysis in new ways to understand neoliberalism as a syncretic social process and to explore the sources of social resilience across communities in the developed and developing worlds.

Peter A. Hall is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies at Harvard University, where he has also served at various times as director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, director of Graduate Studies in Government, and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is co-director of the Successful Societies Program for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is an editor of Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make, Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations, Developments in French Politics I and II and European Labor in the 1980s, and the author of Governing the Economy, which won the Woodrow Wilson Award for the best book in political science published in 1986. He has published more than eighty articles on European politics and public policy making and comparative political economy. He serves on the editorial boards of many scholarly journals and on advisory boards at Sciences Po, Paris; the Free University of Berlin; Sheffield University; and the University of Birmingham. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and Chair of the ACLS-SSRC Committee on Western Europe, and served as President of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. He has won many awards for his writing and holds honorary degrees from Sciences Po and Aston University, Birmingham.

Michèle Lamont is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and is co-director of its research program on Successful Societies. Past responsibilities include chair of the Council for European Studies (2005–9) and senior advisor on Faculty Development and Diversity, Faculty of the Arts and Sciences, Harvard (2008–10). Professor Lamont has published on the topics of inequality, culture, race, immigration, knowledge, theory, qualitative methods and comparative sociology. She taught at Princeton University for fifteen years before moving to Harvard in 2003. She is the author of more than 80 articles and a dozen books and edited volumes, including How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems) and Money, Morals and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Her research has been supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Center for Advanced Research in the Behavioral Sciences, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Russell Sage Foundation.