No factories, no problems: the logic of neo‐liberalism in Egypt

In: Review of African political economy, Band 26, Heft 82

Open Access

Abstract

Neo‐liberalism is a success of the political imagination. Its achievement is a double one. It makes the window of political debate uncommonly narrow and at the same time promises from this window a prospect without limits. On the one hand it frames public discussion within the elliptic language of neo‐classical economics. The condition of the nation and its collective well being are pictured only in terms of how it is adjusted in gross to the discipline of monetary and fiscal balance sheets. On the other, neglecting the actual concerns of any concrete local or collective community, it encourages the most exuberant dreams of private accumulation — and a chaotic reallocation of collective resources.