Neoliberalism as Political Technology: Expertise, Energy, and Democracy in Chile, Manuel Tironi and Javiera Barandiarán
▻https://muse.jhu.edu/book/34700
in Beyond Imported Magic, Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America, edited by Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes with a foreword by Marcos Cueto, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2014
Chile ’ s unique policy path can largely be attributed to a uniquely powerful and ideologically coherent team of free-market technocrats, with a long-term vision for the Chilean economy. Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 2002, 545 – 546
Neoliberalism has had a profound impact on contemporary Chile. Neoliberal policies redefined sectors and institutions in industry ( Ffrench-Davis 1980 ), labor ( Foxley 1983 ), health ( Ossand ó n 2009 ), the city ( Portes and Roberts 2005 ; Sabatini 2000 ), and the environment ( Liverman and Vilas 2006 ), from the 1970s through today. Many say that nowhere else has neoliberal restructuring been more extended and aggressive ( Klein 2008 ; Lave, Mirowski, and Randalls 2010 ). In addition, the link between neo- liberalism as a set of policies and as an epistemological framework related to the Chicago School of Economics ( Van Horn and Mirowski 2009 ) is embodied in Chile by the infamous Chicago Boys — a group of Chicago-trained economists, endorsed by the military regime, who overhauled the Chilean economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Although an abundant literature exists on neoliberalism in Chile, we identify two accounts still missing from this history. First, neoliberalism has been understood more as an epochal and abstract force than as situated practices. More detailed analyses of how neoliberalism unfolded in specific sites and through specific controversies are needed to interrogate the material and knowledge practices that enact neoliberalism. Second, while a robust literature has focused on the arrival of neoliberal ideas and the implementation of neoliberal policies in the 1970s, little has been said about how neoliberal ideology adapted to the post-dictatorship settings of the 1990s and 2000s. To tackle these gaps, we examine neoliberalism as a political technology . Neoliberal- ism as technology means it is applied knowledge about how to define, order, and cal- culate the world. Neoliberalism as a political technology draws attention to how this applied knowledge is used pragmatically and purposefully to transform the state and society.