The Dictionary of Human Geography

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and Johnson, 2005), nobody seems to question

itshegemony: as Gramsci might have put it,

there has been a Hayekian ‘passive revolution’

from above as (Silver and Arrighi, 2003).

We have witnessed what the Left’s great pessim-

ist Perry Anderson (2000c) has dubbed a ‘neo-

liberal grand slam’, withneo-liberalismruling

undivided across the globe as the

most successful ideology in world history

(Anderson, 2002c). This ‘fluent vision’ of the

Right has no equivalent on the Left: Anderson

cedes that embedded liberalism(let alone some-

thing called socialism) is now as remote as

‘Arian bishops’, resistances are like ‘chafe

in the wind’ and the Left can only ‘shelter

under the skies of infinite justice’. Of course,

with the vertiginous collapse of Wall Street and

a raft of financial institutions in late 2008, fol-

lowed by the massive bailouts initiated by vari-

ous governments in Europe and America,

Anderson’s grand slam now looks very different.

The very process by which neo-liberal mar-

ket hegemony was established – and against

which forms ofresistanceare to be assessed –

remains a story for which at present we have

no full genealogy. The cast of characters may

be lined up – from the school of Austrian

economics to the Reagan–Thatcher–Kohl

troika – but this explains very little. Neo-

liberalism can be seen as aclassreaction to

thecrisisof the 1970s. The global multilat-

erals and the Treasury–Wall Street certainly

imposed brutal forms of economic discipline –

structural adjustment– to eradicate forever

any residue of collectivism in the Third World.

But beyond these general descriptions we are

left with paradoxes and questions, of which I

will list just a few. Why did the LSE and

Chicago – the centres of Fabianism and a

certain sort of American liberalism – become

the forcing houses of neo-liberalism? Hayek,

after all, was not associated with the Econom-

ics Department; it was the arrival of Ronald

Coase at Chicago that marked a neo-liberal

turning point. How did the World Bank – a

bastion of postwar development economics

and a certain sort of statism – become the voice

oflaissez faire? Harry Johnson (who held

Chairs at the LSE and Chicago) certainly fig-

ures in the process, but how can we explain

economic liberalism’s capture of key sectors of

the Bank (often by second-rate economists)

against a backdrop of robust Keynesianism?

How did the ideas of economists such as Peter

Bauer and Deepak Lal gain traction? Criticism

of Keynes dovetailed with the anti-statism lev-

elled by many on the Left during the 1970s.

In other words, tracing the ways in which

government failures came to outweigh market

failures in development thinking demands a

complex picture of discursive contestations

and political practices. Indeed, by the mid- to

late 1970s many of neo-liberalism’s intell-

ectual architects (Milton Friedmann among

them) claimed that nobody took their ideas

seriously – Hayek believed thatThe road to

serfdomhad ruined his career and marginal-

ized his entire project. It was the inflation of

the 1970s, said Friedmann, that revealed the

cracks within the Keynesian edifice. The point

is that the ‘neo-liberal grand slam’ was pre-

ceded by decades of mediocrity, pessimism

and contestation, and that the class forces

around and through which embedded lib-

eralism had been built necessarily shaped

the manner and forms in which the counter-

revolution could proceed (if at all). How to

think about the power of themarket now

turns on how one sees this long march through

institutions. The catastrophic collapse of the

US investment banks and the discrediting of

the various regulatory and financial rating

agencies – with the prospect of a 1930s-style

world depression in the offing – suggests that

the neo-liberal project has come crashing to a

halt. As theNew York Timesput it in early

2009, ‘we are all Keynesians now’. mw

Suggested reading

Elyachar (2005); Prasad (2006); Scabas (2007).

Markov process (or Markov chain) A type

ofstochastic processin which the probabil-

ity of being in a particular state at timetis

wholly dependent upon the state(s) at some

preceding time(s). It is named after the

Russian mathematician who first defined the

process. The simplest form, known as a first-

order Markov process, is where the depend-

ence is entirely on just the immediately pre-

ceding state. This process can be represented

by a transition probability matrix in which the

rows and columns represent the different

states and the cells represent the probabilities

of movement between states. For example,

migration movements between three regions

A, B and C could be modelled as follows:

State at time t þ 1

ABC

State at timet A 0.80 0.15 0.05

B 0.08 0.90 0.02

C 0.10 0.05 0.85

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_M Final Proof page 443 1.4.2009 3:19pm

MARKOV PROCESS (OR MARKOV CHAIN)