inequalities were understood to be produced by
the workings of specific structures – notably
capitalism – whose key, defining relations were
conceptualized as fundamentally unequal and
exploitative (capital–labour being the prime
instance), and to be regulated by the state, specifi-
cally by particular forms of welfare regime.^9
In the context of the UK it was the regulatory
matrix that provided the critical theoretical and
empirical content for much of social geography.
Hence the focus on the state: on housing, health
and education (collective consumption); on
(un)employment; and on the social divisions and
inequities which state policies both attempted to
counter and in turn generated and/or reinforced.
The rise of the new right through the 1980s,
specifically via privatization, the development of
markets in housing, health, transport and increas-
ingly in education, combined with the ‘hollowing
out’ of the state – neoliberalism in other words –
changed all this, in profound ways. One of the
most far-reaching of these in terms of its effects
was in the language of ‘the social’. In its most
extreme form this attempted to dispense with
the connections between individual and society,
with – to paraphrase an infamous sound bite –
society being recast as no more than individuals
(and families, of the nuclear, heterosexual sort).
More generally though, these transformations
saw the reconfiguration of the individual–society
relation through the market, and consequent
changes in patterns of talk, with increasing refer-
ence to customer/client, choice, opportunity and
so on. This meant, in turn, that thinking and talk-
ing in terms of inequalities became tantamount to
unthinkable and unspeakable, certainly within
the project of an emerging New Labour in the
mid 1990s. Lack of choice and/or opportunity
maybe, but to highlight the inequities produced
through the market would have been to cut to the
heart of the neoliberalism project – to risk
reasserting an Old Labourism in the brave new
world of New Labour.
For social geographers working in the political
economy tradition, these changes have proved
hard to negotiate, involving as they do not just
radical transformations in the provisioning of
traditional areas of inquiry (housing, health, educa-
tionand so on), but fundamental political change
too as New Labour’s commitment to neoliberal-
ism has become increasingly apparent. To this
we need to add the challenge posed by the rise to
prominence of poststructuralist thinking within
the academy generally and social and cultural
geography more particularly. The key question
for many has become how (or indeed whether)
to intervene in all this, both academically and
politically.For some social geographers working in these
areas the response has become increasingly
transparent: to reassert the primacy of (an unre-
constructed) class analysis and political economy.
In general terms this course depends on draw-
ing clear lines of opposition between the
latter and relatively crude understandings of
poststructuralist thinking, which – equally
problematically – are often elided with ‘the
cultural turn’. More specifically though, reasser-
tion has prompted moves to expose the effects of
market provision, pointing to how these connect
with the development of two-tier markets in
health and education (based on ability to pay)
and – rather more implicitly – to their different
effects on their respective consumers (see, for
example, Mohan, 1995; 2000). Aside from its
revisionism, the importance of this tactic for my
purposes here lies in what it has to say, or rather
doesn’t, about inequality. Inequality, if it is men-
tioned at all, is typically couched in empirical
terms, as an effect of distribution, as the outcome
of differences in service delivery and/or provi-
sion which maps into particular social categories
(typically subsets of the elderly, women, ethnic
minorities). That these differences have largely
predictable geographies (inner city versus subur-
ban; rural versus urban; north versus south
(-east)) almost goes without saying. What has gone
here though is the connection to older theoretical
understandings of inequality and its regulation.
In part, I think, this is inevitable – at least if one
remains theoretically within the parameters of
conventional radical political economy. Indeed,
the transformations that have been wrought in
service delivery/provision have meant that,
increasingly, the core relation for so much of this
work is defined by the market and enacted
through exchange. Private health care and educa-
tion provide perhaps the most fully developed
instances of this, but so pervasive is the market
relation that the social relations of exchange (in
particular the emphasis – both discursively and
in practice – on the customer/client) permeate
even those areas currently outwith fully devel-
oped commodity relations (state education and
parts of the NHS). Notwithstanding the differ-
ences experienced by consumers, to see such
relations as exploitative – and hence couch them in
terms of inequalities as classically understood –
would be misplaced. Yet what this has meant is
that inequality has receded from view even in the
analyses of those whom one might most expect
to make reference to it.
For other social geographers though, the
response to changing times has been rather more
equivocal. Indeed, for many working in social
geography the emphasis has switched more to48 RETHINKING THE SOCIAL3029-ch01.qxd 03-10-02 10:25 AM Page 48