The era that began with the election of the Thatcher and Reagan governments has been dominated
by contemporary forms of neoliberalism-based market fundamentalism globalization as world
economic integration and the ideology of free trade and an attack on big government and social
welfare. This book is a historical and theoretical investigation of contemporary neoliberalism
in relation to education policy and its rollback of the Keynesian welfare state. It argues that
education is the basis of an open society and is a social welfare right in the merging
knowledge economy. Drawing on the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault's work on governmentality
understood as a form of radical political economy the book explores and critiques
neoliberalism as the ruling ideological consensus. It also questions whether and to what extent
its influence will continue in the face of the destabilization of markets that followed the
financial crisis and the global recession that began in 2007 in the advanced liberal economies
of the United States and the European Union.
