Neoliberalism in law and society

Abstract Neoliberalism, once an economic doctrine responding to the failures of liberalism, has become a widely used concept in sociolegal scholarship. Law and society scholars often invoke it to explain sociolegal and punitive phenomena such as mass incarceration, inequality, and state transformation. But the concept’s analytic power is undermined when scholars conflate neoliberalism as a sociohistorical process with neoliberalism as a universal cause. Drawing on an intellectual history of neoliberalism’s evolving meanings, I identify two problems – ubiquity and a lack of counterfactual imagination – that limit its theoretical utility in sociolegal research. I argue that neoliberalism should be theorized as a contingent, sociohistorical process; only then can it function as a theory with meaningful consequents.