How did we ever come to accept the inhumane excesses of capitalism?

What was neoliberalism? In its most recent iteration, we think of the market seeping into every minute corner of human existence. We think of privatisation, off-shoring and the parcelling out of services to the highest bidder. Neoliberalism takes the proud liberal individual – in pursuit of his or her happiness, rather keen on freedom – and shreds them through a mean-spirited calculator to come up with some sort of shrunken market midget, an efficient risk-evaluating robot.

Yet even though the market is supposed to be the arbiter of everything, repeated state intervention appears to be necessary to sustain this otherwise perfect economic vision. (The banks that were ‘too big to fail’ in the wake of the economic crisis of 2007/8 is an obvious example.) As William Davies puts it in The Limits of Neoliberalism, what needs to be explained is ‘how the economic critique of the state can be employed precisely so as to legitimate, empower and expand the state’. Thus our utilities are owned not by competent billionaires but by other nations (Germany and France in particular), faulty machines are believed over honest Post Office employees and the working class are subject to the destruction of everything they value so the state can flog off every last asset.

We might conclude, then, as the Museum of Neoliberalism does, that neoliberalism is not a neutral economic vision designed to make the whole world shiny and convenient, but a political decision, or rather, a whole series of them. As curators Darren Cullen and Gavin Grindon put it in their introduction to the exhibition, neoliberalism is ‘an obscure and extreme ideological cult of the 1970s… which rose to power and now continues to shape all of our lives in dramatic and often terrible ways’.