The hegemonic discourse of our time — its origins from Chicago to Colombo, its mechanics of accumulation, and its quiet rewiring of the self.
Neoliberalism is the dominant economic worldview of the past fifty years, and the one that has shaped almost every government, university, hospital, and corporation in Sri Lanka since 1977. Its central claim is that human well-being is best advanced by maximising entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework of private property, individual liberty, free markets, and free trade (Harvey, 2007).
What makes neoliberalism particularly powerful is that it doesn't only describe how the economy should work — it has become hegemonic, meaning it shapes how we think, talk, evaluate ourselves, and judge others. The vocabulary of efficiency, performance, market value, individual responsibility, and choice has soaked into common sense.
Chiapello identifies three useful ways to see neoliberalism:
The current historical stage of capitalism — financialised, globalised, post-welfarist. The successor to Keynesian managed capitalism.
A way of governing populations through market mechanisms rather than direct command. Citizens are governed by being made into entrepreneurs of themselves.
A "strong discourse" (Bourdieu, 1998) that has shaped how we describe the world to the point of becoming common sense.
All three are right at the same time. Most exam answers move between them.
Reconstruction after the war was built on the opposite of what neoliberalism advocates today. Governments focused on full employment, economic growth, and citizen welfare. Keynesian economics — which had emerged in response to the unregulated markets of the Great Depression in 1929 — became the consensus: state regulation of wages, public provision of healthcare and education, an active state in markets. Society would be run democratically, with the economic system as the servant of the democratic project.
The neoliberal turn was a counter-movement, originating with the Chicago economist Milton Friedman in his 1951 essay "Neoliberalism and Its Prospects." For two decades it was a fringe academic position. Then:
Under Augusto Pinochet's military government, "Chicago Boys"-trained economists implemented the neoliberal program — privatisation, deregulation, dismantling of welfare. Imposed by coup, not vote.
"There is no alternative." Coal miners broken, public housing sold off, council services privatised, unions defanged.
Tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of finance and labour markets, attacks on welfare and labour organising.
A "very complex process of uneven geographic development of neoliberalism in the world" (Harvey). Each country gets a version shaped by local politics — but the broad logic is the same.
Note the slippage in that sentence. It begins with "human well-being" — which is plural, social, distributed. By the end it has become "entrepreneurial freedoms within free trade" — which is individual, market-mediated, financial. The argument is that one delivers the other. The historical record is at best mixed.
The neoliberal state has a precise (and limited) job description:
State intervention in markets is kept at bare minimum. Public health, education, transport, housing, utilities — these become candidates for privatisation, because the state should not be doing them.
In practice, of course, the state intervenes heavily — but in favour of capital. "Neoliberalism is hegemonic as a mode of discourse and has pervasive effects on ways of thought and political economic practices to the point where it has become incorporated into the commonsense way we interpret, live in, and understand the world" (Harvey, 2007, p. 23).
The system gains legitimacy by appealing to "individual liberty and freedom" — values most people are willing to defend without inspecting what they cost in practice. The "rules of the game" are then advocated globally by the WTO, IMF, and World Bank.
Sri Lanka's economic history is a case study in the back-and-forth between state-led development and the neoliberal turn.
Continuation of 1930s economic policies — reliance on export of commercial crops (tea, rubber, coconut), high investment in agriculture and welfare.
Under SWRD Bandaranaike — state ownership of public utilities, policies for industrialisation, social welfare. The Sinhala-only act. A break from the colonial economic structure.
Under Sirimavo Bandaranaike. State-led industrialisation behind tariff walls.
Under Dudley Senanayake. A first opening — soon reversed.
Sirimavo Bandaranaike again. The era of full state-led development. Bread queues, sugar rationing, foreign-exchange controls.
JR Jayawardene. The pivot to neoliberalism in Sri Lanka. Trade liberalisation. The Free Trade Zone at Katunayake. End of price controls.
"Peopleisation" (Premadasa); structural-adjustment-driven privatisation under Chandrika Kumaratunga, supported by the World Bank.
Finance Minister Ronnie de Mel's 1978 Budget speech is the rhetorical opening of the neoliberal era. Quoting the UNP manifesto: "If I may be permitted, Mr. Speaker, to quote from our Party Manifesto, we are committed to establish: 'A Free and Just Society in our land'. The foundation, the sine qua non, for a free and just society, is a free and just economy."
The same speech acknowledges the lenders: "The exchange rate reform and the trade liberalisation programme is being supported by substantial assistance and support made available to us by the International Monetary Fund, other international financial institutions and friendly Governments."
By 1995 (G.L. Peiris's Budget speech), the framing was defensive: "We are also being accused unfairly of playing up to the World Bank and the IMF and thereby imposing hardships on the people. […] We are fully-fledged members of these organisations. Whenever they assist countries, like any other prudent financial organisation, they wish to satisfy themselves as to how the borrowing country can repay."
Harvey's central analytical contribution. Where Marx described "primitive accumulation" as the initial dispossession that founded capitalism (enclosure of common lands, colonial extraction), Harvey shows that this dispossession is continuous under neoliberalism, not a historical one-off.
Neoliberal accumulation works by:
In Sri Lanka, accumulation by dispossession looks like: state-owned enterprises sold below market value to politically-connected buyers; agricultural land converted to "investment zones"; pension assets used to bail out failing banks; tax burdens shifted from corporations to consumption (VAT).
Oxfam's January 2026 report, Resisting the Rule of the Rich, launched at Davos, makes the dispossession argument empirical:
"Pollutocrat Day" (January 10, 2026): the day on which the richest 1% had emitted, in just ten days, more carbon than the bottom 50% would emit all year.
The argument is that extreme wealth has become oligarchic — corrupting politics and media, entrenching itself, foreclosing the possibility of democratic correction.
Neoliberalism produces a coherent set of "common-sense" responses that would have looked absurd to a 1965 reader. Five examples:
Each of these would have been read as failures or scandals fifty years ago. Today, they are the operating norm. That is what hegemony looks like.
The mechanics of how the neoliberal project actually transfers wealth upward:
State-owned enterprises, public services, public lands transferred to private ownership — often below market value. The Sri Lankan 1990s under World Bank structural adjustment is a textbook case.
Deregulation of the financial system. Capital can move freely; speculative instruments multiply; debt becomes a primary source of profit. The 2008 crisis sat here.
Crises (economic, ecological, health) are used as opportunities to push through neoliberal reforms that would not have passed under normal politics. "Disaster capitalism."
Through privatisation, tax breaks for corporations, and direct subsidies to favoured industries. The state remains active — but in support of capital.
Uddin and Hopper (2003) reviewed post-privatisation outcomes in Bangladesh and found the World Bank's "focus on profitability to the neglect of employment conditions, including trade-union and individual rights; social returns; and financial transparency and accountability to external constituents." Development aims, they argue, should extend beyond commercial criteria to issues such as poverty alleviation, narrowing income inequalities, and the quality of work experience.
What does "hegemonic" mean in practice? That it is the dominant way of thinking and talking about the world and our relationships to it. Two simple examples:
These are not opinions you hold — they are the way the language works now. Reversing them feels strange, almost unintelligible. That is hegemony.
Neoliberalism does not only describe markets. It describes you. Three related concepts you should be able to name:
You should see yourself as a commodity that should be constantly improved — to increase your value, so that you can accumulate more capital. Your education, network, fitness, mental health are all "investments in yourself."
You invest in yourself in the hope of future gains. You fixate on yourself rather than on the collective. Side hustles, personal brands, LinkedIn optimisation — these are venture labour.
You strive to make yourself more "marketable" through an endless cycle of training and re-training, while competing with everyone else doing the same. The MBA itself is partly an instance of this logic.
None of this is new behaviour — humans have always invested in skills and reputation. What is new is the totalising scope: every part of life is reread as career-relevant, and the language of finance leaks into the language of friendship, romance, parenting, grief.
Bal & Dóci (2018) identify three ideological moves that neoliberalism makes inside organisations.
The framing: you have the freedom to choose your employer, to negotiate for yourself, to manage your career development. The freedom of contract replaces the security of permanent employment.
The framing: success is the result of will-power, hard work, and an enterprising mind — not of inherited social, cultural, or economic capital. This legitimises existing inequality: people are where they are because they deserve to be there.
The framing: the fittest will survive — those best able to adapt to environmental change. Those who cannot will be "forced into suboptimal work conditions — temporary work, job insecurity, low pay, few opportunities for development." This is presented not as a failure of the system, but as the natural law of selection.
The ideology produces specific practices that have reshaped employment worldwide (Bal & Dóci, 2018):
Crowley and Hodson (2014) document the consequences for job quality in advanced economies:
Harvey himself ends on a guarded note of resistance — that the more visible the failure of the neoliberal project, the more it lays the ground for its opposition.
Neoliberalism is one of the most heavily-tested topics, often combined with the Sri Lankan crisis or with consumerism. The recurring pivot is "is neoliberalism the cause of crisis, or the solution to crisis?"