Memory, Identity, and the Market: Neoliberalism as a Regime of Historical Representation

Abstract

This paper examines neoliberalism not only as a theory of economics, a political strategy, or a regime of governance, but also as a history of representation that influences the way societies remember, the way they constitute themselves as a community in time, and the way history, as a body of meanings, is shaped in a culture of reference that is governed by a set of norms that come from the world of economics. It claims that, as a technology of power, as a set of cultural practices, and as a form of governance of history, neoliberalism inaugurates particular forms of experiences of history that need to be explored in greater detail, such as the privatization of history, the story of a history that is primarily focused on the emergence of the subject in the narrative of a history of societies, as well as a history that constitutes a body of meanings that come from the strategies of economics in order to give meanings to history. It is contiguous to the theory of history that is offered in discourses on power in the humanities as well as the theory of history in sociology, suggesting that the hegemony of power that is exercised by neoliberalism is not only in the way in which societies in the present are governed, managed, and ordered, but also in the way in which history is shaped in a culture that is governed by a set of meanings that come from economics. Finally, this article underlines the need to develop a history of history that rebuilds a history of collectivity and a history of culture that is not managed in a set of meanings that come from economics as a critique of the uses of history in the contemporary era.