John Iduh Blog

In the early 1980s, neoliberal ideas found a powerful institutional expression in a new model of public administration known as New Public Management (NPM). Emerging first in Anglo-American contexts and rapidly diffusing across the globe, NPM operationalized neoliberal modes of governance within the everyday practices of state bureaucracies. Its central ambition was to remake the public sector in the image of the private market by importing managerial techniques, entrepreneurial values, and competitive logics into government institutions. At the heart of New Public Management lies a fundamental redefinition of the relationship between the state and its citizens. Rather than conceiving citizens as members of a political community entitled to public goods, NPM recasts them as “customers” or “clients” whose needs are to be met through efficient service delivery. Public servants, in turn, are encouraged to abandon traditional bureaucratic norms of neutrality, rule-following, and public du...

Neoliberalism is a broad and often contested concept, commonly used to describe an economic paradigm that rose to global prominence in the late twentieth century, particularly from the 1980s onward. Rooted in the classical liberal ideal of the self-regulating market, neoliberalism is not a single, uniform doctrine but a complex configuration of ideas, practices, and institutions. A useful way to understand its reach and durability is to conceptualize neoliberalism as operating simultaneously across three interrelated dimensions: as an ideology, as a mode of governance, and as a policy package. First, neoliberalism functions as an ideology. Ideologies are systems of widely shared ideas and patterned beliefs that provide societies with interpretive frameworks for understanding political and economic life. They simplify complex realities into accessible narratives about how the world works and how it ought to work. In doing so, ideologies encourage particular forms of action while discour...

In the three decades following the Second World War, egalitarian liberalism underpinned an era of remarkable economic performance across much of the industrialized world. High growth rates, rising wages, low unemployment, modest inflation, and expanding systems of social security characterized what has often been described as the “golden age” of controlled capitalism. By the early 1970s, however, this postwar settlement began to unravel under the weight of a series of profound economic disruptions. The economic crises of the 1970s exposed vulnerabilities that Keynesian policy frameworks struggled to address. External shocks—most notably the oil crises of 1973 and 1979—dramatically increased energy prices, triggering inflationary pressures across advanced economies. At the same time, these economies experienced the unprecedented combination of rising unemployment and high inflation, a phenomenon that came to be known as “stagflation.” Declining productivity growth and falling corporate ...

The upheavals of the twentieth century cast serious doubt on the core assumptions of classical liberalism. Economic crises, mass unemployment, and social dislocation exposed the limitations of the belief that self-regulating markets, left to their own devices, would naturally produce stability and prosperity. Although elements of classical liberal thought would re-emerge in revised form with the rise of neoliberalism in the late twentieth century, the intervening decades witnessed the ascendance of a different liberal tradition—commonly described as egalitarian liberalism. The decisive turning point was the Great Depression of the 1930s. Its depth, duration, and global reach shattered confidence in the classical liberal vision of the state as a mere “night watchman.” Leading thinkers such as John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi concluded that markets were neither self-correcting nor socially neutral. Yet these theorists diverged sharply from Marxist interpretations that viewed recurrin...

Classical liberalism emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a powerful intellectual and political response to the mercantilist order that dominated early modern Europe. Mercantilism rested on the assumption that economic wealth—measured primarily in gold and silver—was finite and that the state, typically under monarchical authority, must exercise extensive control over trade and production to secure national power, often for military ends. Against this backdrop, classical liberal thinkers articulated a radically different vision of economic life, one grounded in individual freedom, market exchange, and limited government. Central to classical liberalism were economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, whose writings challenged the mercantilist fusion of political power and economic control. Smith, writing in The Wealth of Nations (1776), argued that economic prosperity did not arise from state accumulation of bullion, but from the productive labor of individ...

“Neoliberalism” is among the most contested political and economic concepts of the modern era, emblematic of a broader proliferation of ideological “isms” that have emerged alongside globalization. The term itself did not originate as a polemical weapon, but rather as a modest intellectual project. It was first coined in post–World War I Germany by economists and legal scholars associated with the Freiburg School, who sought to revive classical liberalism in a moderated form—one that acknowledged the need for a regulatory framework to preserve market competition. The concept re-emerged in a very different context during the 1970s, when Latin American economists employed neoliberalismo to describe a set of pro-market reforms emphasizing privatization, deregulation, and fiscal discipline. By the early 1990s, however, the term had undergone a decisive semantic shift. Critics of market-oriented reform, particularly in the global South, infused “neoliberalism” with sharply pejorative conno...

Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510) occupies a distinctive place in the cultural and political history of the Italian Renaissance. To understand Botticelli is not merely to study an individual artist, but to examine the social forces, religious tensions, and power structures of late fifteenth-century Florence. His work reflects a society poised between humanist optimism and profound spiritual anxiety, a tension that defined the age. Born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Botticelli was trained in the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi, from whom he inherited a refined linear style and an emphasis on graceful, expressive figures. Unlike later High Renaissance artists such as Leonardo or Michelangelo, Botticelli showed limited interest in anatomical realism or mathematical perspective. Instead, his paintings privilege line, rhythm, and symbolic meaning—qualities that align closely with the intellectual climate of Medici Florence. Botticelli’s rise was closely tied to the patronage of the Medici fa...