This chapter explores neo-liberalism, its forms, its periodization, and its future in the context of the changing dynamics of the capitalist world market. It focuses particularly on American neo-liberalism and foreign economy policy because the US remains the dominant neo-liberal power. It argues that, notwithstanding the loss of American economic hegemony and the growing challenge to its domination across a number of fields, US economic and political power retains disproportionate significance. This is because the new forms of financial domination promoted by the federal government, its associated international economic apparatuses, and transnational financial capital are still ‘ecologically dominant’ in shaping the world economy and global order more generally. The chapter has five parts. It first addresses issues of periodization that bear on the capitalist world market and neo-liberalism, then defines neo-liberalism and distinguishes its four main forms. Subsequently, it proceeds to discuss four forms of economic determination broadly considered, argues that the logic of American neo-liberalism is ecologically dominant in the world market, and concludes with some general remarks on the contradictions and limits of American domination.

Questions of Periodization

To ask what follows neo-liberalism is to pose a problem of periodization. The primary purpose of any periodization is to interpret an otherwise undifferentiated ‘flow’ of historical time by classifying events and/or processes in terms of their internal affinities and external differences in order to identify successive periods of relative invariance and the transitions between them (cf. Elchardus, 1988, p. 48).