Sabotaging ordoliberal communitarianism: for a critical discursive political economy of ‘the local community’ in neoliberal Europe

Author:
Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta Charles University, Prague

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Article Commentary
Copyright:
© Author 2024
Online Publication Date:
16 Aug 2024
Pages:
1–15
Publisher:
Bristol University Press
Volume/Issue:
Early View
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1332/26352257Y2024D000000024
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The commentary aims to provoke a discussion in Critical Political Economy (CPE) about local articulations of neoliberalism, proposing the concept of ordoliberal communitarianism as a theoretical practice to sabotage the hegemonic essentialisation of ‘the local community’ within the context of EU neoliberal constitutionalism. This conceptual proposal is a plea to critical scholars who assume a pre-existing local community to instead enquire from whom, how and why the necessity of appealing to ‘the local community’ emerges to strategically essentialise socio-historically contingent political forms. To support this argument, I first discuss the relationship between ‘the community’ and the global political economy by combining sociology of knowledge, CPE and governmentality studies. This discussion leads to a consideration of ordoliberal communitarianism as produced by and through dominant institutions and translating hegemonic concepts in and through local contexts. As an indicative case emerging from research on the interpellation of local communities in the current Italian competitive strategy, I offer some notes for a history of Italian ordoliberal communitarianism as a transnational socio-historical experience to investigate the formation of local developmental coalitions led by EU governance. The commentary concludes by recalling the role of critical scholars in semantically sabotaging the hegemonic essentialisation of ‘the local community’.

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Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta Charles University, Prague

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gerardo.nicoletta@fsv.cuni.cz

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