Introduction: The Multiple Janus Faces of Neoliberalism

Abstract

This introduction is designed in three parts, in which the main idea is to schematize the content of the book and give a propaedeutic account about neoliberalism. The first part is focused on neoliberalism’s “traditional” key social and theoretical practices, the second part opens a conceptual description of neoliberalism, and the third has as its goal the summarization of the book chapters showing their inter-relationships. In the first part, the central goal is to summarize some of the well-known features of “traditional” neoliberalism, such as its economic approach and political regimen. “Towards a Conceptual Description” is the second part. From mass media and social networks to the academic context, there are different and countless definitions of neoliberalism, and, only as a first approximation, we analyze here a few conceptual approaches as a springboard for our systematics reflections. The third part of this introduction, “Book Content: Connections”, describes how we have divided the book into two parts that interact, but can also be considered as two alternative ways of reading: one that provides some basic axes for the discussion of the main theoretical components of neoliberalism, and the other that is structured around central issues of what we can call “living-the-neoliberalism”.