Publications by Author: Peter A. Hall

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.

For two hundred years, social science has provided the lens through which people view society and the visions animating most demands for political reform – at least since Adam Smith’s efforts to unleash the ‘invisible hand’ of the market without destroying the moral sentiments of society.1 However, the perspectives of social science shift, as each new generation questions its predecessors, with import for politics as well as the academy. From time to time, therefore, we should reflect on them. In this essay I do so from the perspective of political science, mainly about American scholarship and with no pretense to comprehensiveness, but with a focus on the disciplinary intersections where so many have found Archimedean points. Intellectual developments in any one field are often ‘progressive’ in the scientific sense of that term.2 But something can be lost as well as gained in the course of them, and there is reason for concern about the fate of social science over the past twenty-five years. What has been lost becomes clear only if we revisit the path taken.

Comparative political economists have become deeply interested in processes of institutional change, and especially in those taking place in response to the opening of world markets associated with 'globalization' (Pierson 2001; Djelic and Quack 2003; Rieger and Leibfried 2003; Campbell 2004). They are asking a number of questions. When do the institutions of the political economy change? What factors drive change? Are changes in the international economy enforcing institutional convergence on the developed economies?

Governments are often urged to take steps to improve the health of their citizens. But there is controversy about how best to achieve that goal.1 Popular opinion calls for more investment in medical care and the promotion of behaviors associated with good health. But, across the developed countries on which we focus here, variations in the health of the population do not correspond closely to national levels of spending on medical care, and there remain many uncertainties about how governments can best promote healthy behavior.2 Expanding access to health care offers greater promise but, as many chapters in this book note, health care is only the tip of the iceberg of population health.