Are you a neoliberal subject? On the uses and abuses of a concept
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A spate of social scientific literature gives the impression that societies in the twenty-first century are overrun with ‘neoliberal subjects’. But what does it actually mean to be a neoliberal subject? And in what ways does this concept relate to ‘neoliberalism’, more generally? In this article, I distinguish between four common ways of thinking about ‘neoliberalism’: (1) as a set of economic policies, (2) as a hegemonic ideological project, (3) as a political rationality and form of governmentality and (4) as a specific type of embodied subjectivity. I argue that while neoliberalisms (1), (2) and (3) potentially hold clear conceptual connections to one another – notwithstanding the quite real tensions between them – their relationship to neoliberalism (4) is often (although not always) tenuous at best. That is, the evidence routinely offered to demonstrate the existence of neoliberalism (4) bears almost no necessary relationship to neoliberalisms (1), (2) or (3). I conclude that, for both academic and political reasons, scholars should be more careful when invoking the monolithic notion of a ‘neoliberal subject’.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it