What is neoliberalism?
I was writing another OP (watch this space) and I found myself writing a definition of neoliberalism. That made the post too big so I decided to offload it to another discussion, since it's quite interesting in itself anyway.
When I talk about neoliberalism, sometimes I mean the ideology of contemporary capitalism, and sometimes I mean the economic form itself. I dont think conflating the two is much of a problem. Neoliberalism is a development of capitalism and a justificatory intellectual movement in support of that development. In both senses, it is a partial revival of nineteenth-century free market liberalism, a reaction to the compromised capitalism of the middle decades of the twentieth century, when Keynesianism was popular. Neoliberals support globalization, deregulation and privatization, believing that the role of the private sector ought to be expanded beyond the limits traditionally adhered to in the decades following the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Incidentally, neoliberals are different from libertarians (and maybe classical liberals too) in that they tend not to be free market fundamentalists, believing as they do in a strong interventionist state in the service of markets. I think this is what makes it the mainstream ideology of capitalism today.
On top of that, sometimes I use the term to indicate certain sociological or purely economic aspects of contemporary capitalist society: precarity, social atomization, consumer culture, and financialization. Other terms that you often see are postmodern capitalism or "late capitalism".
I guess I may as well define capitalism too:
A capitalist society is one in which most useful things are commodities sold in markets by or on behalf of those who privately own the technology, raw materials, buildings, money, land, and the best part of each worker's day, required to produce them. There are two crucial things about these economic activities that together allow us to refer to a society as capitalist: (1) they are dominant, i.e., they reach into most areas of society and thus structure our ways of life; and (2) they result in or maintain social stratification, where we have a class of owners and executives on one side, and a class of relatively propertyless people who must sell their labour power on the other (though obviously the line between them is blurry).
What have I missed? Am I using "neoliberalism" too loosely? Is it important to carefully distinguish between the political philosophy of neoliberalism (see the SEP), the economic facts, and the sociological and cultural aspects?
And if you want to criticize my definition of capitalism, go ahead if you must.
When I talk about neoliberalism, sometimes I mean the ideology of contemporary capitalism, and sometimes I mean the economic form itself. I dont think conflating the two is much of a problem. Neoliberalism is a development of capitalism and a justificatory intellectual movement in support of that development. In both senses, it is a partial revival of nineteenth-century free market liberalism, a reaction to the compromised capitalism of the middle decades of the twentieth century, when Keynesianism was popular. Neoliberals support globalization, deregulation and privatization, believing that the role of the private sector ought to be expanded beyond the limits traditionally adhered to in the decades following the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Incidentally, neoliberals are different from libertarians (and maybe classical liberals too) in that they tend not to be free market fundamentalists, believing as they do in a strong interventionist state in the service of markets. I think this is what makes it the mainstream ideology of capitalism today.
On top of that, sometimes I use the term to indicate certain sociological or purely economic aspects of contemporary capitalist society: precarity, social atomization, consumer culture, and financialization. Other terms that you often see are postmodern capitalism or "late capitalism".
I guess I may as well define capitalism too:
A capitalist society is one in which most useful things are commodities sold in markets by or on behalf of those who privately own the technology, raw materials, buildings, money, land, and the best part of each worker's day, required to produce them. There are two crucial things about these economic activities that together allow us to refer to a society as capitalist: (1) they are dominant, i.e., they reach into most areas of society and thus structure our ways of life; and (2) they result in or maintain social stratification, where we have a class of owners and executives on one side, and a class of relatively propertyless people who must sell their labour power on the other (though obviously the line between them is blurry).
What have I missed? Am I using "neoliberalism" too loosely? Is it important to carefully distinguish between the political philosophy of neoliberalism (see the SEP), the economic facts, and the sociological and cultural aspects?
And if you want to criticize my definition of capitalism, go ahead if you must.
Comments (66)
Quoting Jamal
If you don't mind, I would like to include in your characteristics of neoliberalism, taxation. I think this is another important fact of "late capitalism" or nostalgic 1980's and 1990's capitalists.
According to neoliberals, the interventionism of State through taxation should be the less possible. They stand for the fact that reducing income or firm's taxes will create more employment and then the economy will progress. So, the unemployment ratio depends on enterprises, not the state itself. If the firms assume a lot of tax pressure, it will be difficult to make money.
Neoliberals are against taxation (or at least big proportions of) because they see them as confiscation. The current governor of Madrid is a big neoliberal and she has made what a good neoliberal will always do: reducing the taxes and spending cuts. She even once said: "Erasing the wealth tax is one the best decisions made. There are not social classes here in Madrid, and that tax is irrelevant"
Only a good neoliberal would refuse the existence of social classes in a big city like Madrid.
This is cool, but the word is used differently in Europe vs the US. For Americans, the word is more controversial, sometimes declared meaningless, used in a derogatory fashion, or taken up as a badge of honor in spite of its negative connotations.
Reagan was a fan of Hayek and was impressed by the idea that collectivism is a path to slavery. This attitude was inextricable from his hostility to the USSR, which was viewed as an arch enemy seeking to destroy the Good. Hayek said that in principle, he believed that dictatorship was warranted in order to turn countries away from collectivism. This attitude of being willing to subvert democracy in order to save freedom is not just a typical development of capitalism. As you pointed out, it's a reaction to the far reaching progress made by leftists throughout the world as a result of the Great Depression.
The emphasis on globalization has been one of the most effective neoliberal strategies for undermining the power of labor. That gives a sense of ongoing internal conflict represented by the word (for Americans, anyway). The word might have a more benign meaning elsewhere.
True! This is another interesting point in the debate
Maybe the difference is in who uses the term? In the US, if it's used at all, it's usually by leftists. I thought the use was more mainstream in Europe.
You're straight up not believing there's a difference. I don't know. That's just what the sources I read said. I'll see if I can dig one up if you want it.
"At some point during Bryan Singers genre-redefining 1995 thriller, The Usual Suspects, the elusive villain Keyser Söze shares some of his wisdom with the audience: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesnt exist. Something similar might be said about neoliberalism even if attributing infernal implications to it might seem a little far-fetched.
"The term is as ambiguous as it is contested. While some consider it to be synonymous with the unleashed forces of turbo-capitalism (Bourdieu 1998; Chomsky 1999), others think of it as a moderate version of classical liberalisms blunt imperative of laissez-faire. And while some note a decade-long march of victory of neoliberal policy regimes worldwide (see Harvey 2005), others disparage it as a figment of its critics fevered imagination that does not even existlet alone rule the worldand the term ought to be sent into semantic retirement. The latter perspective contends that neoliberalism is not only vacuous but has also become so politically charged that it serves as little more than a polemical tool for theoretical and political smear campaigns waged with denunciatory intentions. And to be sure, this is correct insofar as there are hardly any self-proclaimed neoliberals to be found.
"Since it was (re)introduced to academic and political discourse in the early 1990s, only its critics have used the term (see Boas and Gans-Morse 2009). At present there is a growing reluctance even on their side to make use of it because it disqualifies any speaker as a potential ideologue with anticapitalist biases. If you call someone neoliberal, it suggests that you are unwilling to engage in reasoned argument and would rather resort to polemical name-calling. So even if neoliberalism ruled the world, it would be a neoliberalism without any neoliberals, and even its academic critics dare not speak its namea truly devilish trick. I first show that neoliberalism is far more than a chimera made up by its critics. Neoliberal thought developed as a response to the crisis of liberalism in the 1930s, and there is a common denominator to this body of thought, albeit a thin one. It is not a common set of doctrines but what I call the neoliberal problematic, which concerns the preconditions of functioning markets. This problematic characterizes the work of a number of thinkers who can be referred to as neoliberals in the proper sense of the term, such as the German ordoliberals Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke, and Alexander Rüstow, but also Friedrich August Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan.1 They provide me with the reservoir of ideas that I scrutinize in part 1, the central part of the book."
The Political Theory of Neoliberalism by Biebricher
Is it common for European academics to claim that the word is meaningless? If so, it's the same.
Oh. I guess it does mean the same thing, then.
To me the theory of neoliberalisms global ascendancy is overblown. I have trouble believing Reaganomics and Thatcherism extended beyond Reagan and Thatcher. The author of the so-called "Washington Consensus", for example, which is often panned as a neoliberal manifesto, consciously excluded neoliberal ideology like capital account liberalization, monetarism, supply-side economics, or a minimal state.
The background of neoliberalism's supposed rise, I think, is important. It comes at a time when we were witnessing the spectacular collapse of socialist countries on the world stage, the spectacular failure of Keynesian economics, while Thatcher and Reagan were seemingly pulling their countries out of the ruins of statist ideology.
This presented a problem for disaffected socialists after the collapse of the Soviet Union, both ideologically and politically. They could no longer deny that central planning was a failure, and that their popularity was waning. This led critics of the "neoliberalism" of Reagan and Thatcher, and newly disaffected socialists and social democrats like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerd Schröder, to re-brand as free market progressives. They tried to push it as a global movement. It's odd; though they were explicitly critical of the supply-side economics of Reagan and Thatcher, they are somehow considered in the same pantheon as Reagan and Thatcher, with neoliberalism flowing through them.
Personally, I take a different approach. I would call their agenda and the period since Thatcher and Reagan (and perhaps Bush Sr.) "neosocialism", because it better represents the spirit of its architects and reflects their turn away from the Old Left socialism into what Bill Clinton called the New Democrats, or what Blair called New Labour. This political triangulation flows right into "compassionate conservatism" of Bush Jr. and David Cameron. Tony Blair stood in front of the International Socialist Congress in 97 and pleaded for a "modernized social democracy", and this modernized social democracy prevails.
I think you had it right, except you can favor capitalism without being a neoliberal. You could favor embedded liberalism, for instance.
I think it's the 20th Century war against leftism that defines it.
Of course, I would never actually use the phrase Neosocialism or neoliberalism, unless it was a term of abuse.
Philosophically, Michel Foucaults idea of Biopolitics and Left Governmentality are worth checking out. Some say he was flirting with neoliberalism in those lectures.
LIke any good leftist I blame Nixon. ;) Not really, Carter did it too. And I agree that it's in reaction to Keynesian economics. My reading is always eclectic so I might have missed some event prior in USian history, but the Lockheed bailouts:
[quote=wikipedia]
Drowning in debt, in 1971 Lockheed (then the largest US defense contractor) asked the US government for a loan guarantee, to avoid insolvency. Lockheed argued that a government bailout was necessary due to the company's value for U.S. national security.[22] On May 13, 1971, the Richard Nixon administration sent a bill titled "The Emergency Loan Guarantee Act" to Congress requesting a $250 million loan guarantee for Lockheed and its L-1011 Tristar airbus program.[23]
[/quote]
really do look similar to many of what I'd term neoliberal interventions on behalf of the market. I know what you mean there, which is what really distinguishes neoliberalism from classical liberalism and the limited state types and is a reason to call it something different.
Yep, exactly what I was getting at.
Are you talking about entities deemed to big to fail?
One thing I wonder about including are international actions. I am uncertain that neoliberalism is international in the same way that, say, capitalism is international: Whereas capital has a way of connecting nations together into a higher order system, I'm not sure neoliberalism is quite like that -- it seems more like an ideology and its enactment, and less like a transnational system.
This being relevant because I'm not sure if one should include the various interventions in Latin and South America on the part of the US as an example, or if that's just the nature of the beast at the international level and neoliberalism is something which can only take place within a capitalist economy.
But in general, government assistance to private entities is not in line with neoliberal ideas. That happened in 2009, but there was absolutely no political theory in play wrt the bail outs. That was done to keep the economy from crashing due to a credit freeze.
The fact that the financial sector of NYC is so important to the US economy that they have to be bailed out is the result of Neoliberalism. The bail out itself was just survival mode.
Quoting Moliere
Neoliberalism is more global than national. That enhances the freedom of a capitalist from local concerns like taxation, unionization, etc.
Quoting Moliere
Chile was the first test case for the imposition of neoliberal ideas. Neoliberalism will tend to make an economy run hot, so when this happened to Chile, this was touted as success.
You should check out Harvey's book about it. I stayed outraged for about a week straight after I read it. Ahrrr!
But it happens a lot. 2009 was not unique. And it seems to be needed when those ideas are implemented.
Quoting frank
So that'd be a reason to include it. But was the USian government assistance of Pinochet a result of neoliberalism? Or was it the result of one nation doing what nations do -- enforcing claims on resources, while picking on an ideological enemy? Or was that the result of Henry Kissinger just being himself?
In making neoliberalism more clear it seems like it's more of a prevailing ideology? So that'd indicate that these sorts of interventions are not the result of neoliberalism -- as a way of clarifying when it's appropriate to attribute something to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism came as an ideology which was later enforced by the government.
Quoting frank
Yeah that's definitely the sort of thing I like to read. :D I should.
But something is different from the times of Keynes. I agree the term is somewhat ambiguous, but there's a real phenomena there too.
I guess I don't know what you're referring to then.
Quoting Moliere
Correct.
We have well demonstrated examples of such corporations such as Amazon or Microsoft. The latter getting leveraged out by governments such as the UK who found their acquisition of activision blizzard uncompetitive (recently) and rightly so. Their end goal is of course total monopoly which theyve enjoyed restricting consumer choice.
These large entities have to be kept in check, the natural course is of course to let them acquire until the consumer realises theyre essentially screwed for choice and alternative and most importantly price.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65407005
Their bitching is understandable, they want to own every aspect of the market, developers of videogames etc
Exactly. When I talk of neoliberalism, Im referring to the policies enacted since the late 70s. Its a label for those policy changes, hence the neoliberal era.
So yeah: globalization, deregulation, privatization, tax cuts, destruction of unions, etc. We could go through the list: Carter deregulating the railroads and trucking, Reagan and the airtraffic controllers, SEC rule changes on buybacks in 82, fair doctrines act repeal, Clinton and NAFTA, telecommunications act, etc etc.
Thats neoliberalism to me. Often the justification for it all was flimsy and varied usually something about free markets, trickle down economics, Friedman doctrine, capital flight, the Laffer curve, and other nonsense but thats somewhere different, the justificatory aspect you mentioned.
Incidentally, Naomi Oreskes has just released an interesting book about this latter part which is worth reading. Its called The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.
Yes indeed. Worth emphasizing again and again.
Like the grey or black market? They arise not because of state intervention, but in spite of it. Markets are considered spontaneous just as much as they are considered planned.
Without state intervention the stateless nature of corporations means the state gets no revenue through taxation of such entities as they could easily offshore to some tiny island with a population of 10 people whilst profiiteering of a country whose population is 500 million.
Correct. Free markets first appeared toward the end of the Bronze Age, probably as a result of the declining power of states.
Europe's rise from the Dark Ages started with free markets that ministered to trade with the Middle East. Powerful European states came later.
pointed out some of the events I was thinking of. There's a list on wikipedia, but some of those I wouldn't include because they're obviously of the global sort like the IMF, where I'm attempting to put together something like a ideology enforced by states. Or, perhaps a better way to put it, this is the story when you zoom in to the national level, where the ideology is instantiated.
Some trade in cryptocurrency, gold, or other contraband, Im sure. Either way, government is not a necessary component to any space or system where goods and services are exchanged.
Free markets first appeared during the Bronze Age. They appeared in the outskirts of state domains.
The notion that you can't have a market without state support is just wrong.
Correct. Islam thrived in Central Asia partly because it served as merchant law. There were no significant governments to speak of.
I want to restrict the domain of discourse for "market", with respect to neoliberalism, to capitalism. So capitalist markets are what we are talking about, rather than some general theory of economy.
The government's main purpose according to Neoliberalism is to protect the freedom of the markets, with nuclear weapons if necessary.
It seems more an ideology concerned with how to pull a people from of the successive failures of the centrally-planned and mercantilist past, the ruins in which we are still living.
Of course. Neoliberalism is not opposed to the existence of states.
Though I'm acknowledging this more general notion of economy, where people did in fact trade goods and services and used currency outside of the rise of capitalism. But that is a sort of trans-historical mega-theory of economy that isn't really related to neoliberalism.
Sounds like a Ship of Theseus problem. If states slowly disappeared, maybe due to global warming, but the global coffee market survived so that Frank could enjoy a nice cuppa Joe while contemplating the demise of civilization, would it be the same market sans states?
Probably off topic?
Many definitions have been given, having to do with privatization and letting the market run things etc., etc.
What it is, is a way to "encase" the Market (Slobodian's word) such that those at the top play by the rules they establish and let others play the game.
But it very much needs a nanny state to help out, otherwise it collapses, as it did in 2008 and again during the pandemic.
Per Slobodian:
"If we place too much emphasis on the category of market fundamentalism, we will fail to notice that the real focus of neoliberal proposals is not on the market per se but on redesigning states, laws, and other institutions to protect the market."
Yep, great quote. He's right, as far as I can see.
Heck even people belonging to the Hayek institute (I'm forgetting the name) say that his summary of Neoliberalism, in Globalists, is quite faithful to the original members.
Ill just quote the few paragraphs that distill his neoliberalism.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1982/09/05/a-neo-liberals-manifesto/21cf41ca-e60e-404e-9a66-124592c9f70d/
He also favours the draft and makes an argument for it in the same article. His affinity is with the Democrat politicians whom he names. He rejects Reaganism.
I wonder why I never hear of this version of neoliberalism, both the nominal and actual kind, but am told of the kind of neoliberalism of Nixon and Milton Friedman, both of whom abolished the draft.
I think you have it right. As a historical moment with a lot of theorists it's always going to be a bit of a fuzzy term.
The only part I might watch it trying to condense this explanation is "strong interventionist state." This makes me think of European social democrats or Bernie Sanders. But the politicians generally cited as representing neoliberalism are Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, it's more the ideology of the 80s-90s US Republican party or Christian Democrats in Europe.
I've always thought "market economy," as opposed to a control economy (controlled by the state or a nobility with special legal status) was less loaded with competing definitions than capitalism, but it's still a fuzzy term.
Strangely, "neoliberal" in the vernacular has morphed into being a sort of stand in for "center left." It's sort of an insult in the sense that none of the new targets for the label embrace the term; Joe Biden doesn't want to be a neoliberal, while neoliberal theorists did embrace the term. So, you can see right wing talking heads complaining about "neoliberals," while also arguing for neoliberal policy in the same segment.
Sort of a weird turn that I think resulted from "liberal" coming to be synonymous in the political vernacular with "left wing," and further left Democrats using the term to slam their more right wing Democratic rivals (not saying this was a wholly unjustified comparison, but it's not a term center Dems have been eager to use to describe themselves; they don't want to be Reagan.)
I think so. I was reading a biography of Hayek at the same time I read Globalists. I started on The Road to Serfdom when my interest fizzled.
Hayek believed the Nazis were the outcome of failed leftism. Wendy Brown says his social plan has given rise to a new wave of fascism. Apparently whether it's right or left that fails, the result is Nazis. :worry:
Yeah, all the evils of the world are the lefts fault.
Von Mises on the other hand was gushing with Joy as the Austrian state smashed union workers.
Fine people these guys...
True. And neo-liberalism has been a huge subject of debate here in Australia for decades. We originally called it economic rationalism in the first years of Thatcher and Reagan and here, where our pseudo-Labor government, privatised, deregulated and sold off as much as it dared. Later Britain's New Labour borrowed some of their moves.
Interestingly, I recall conservatives being against selling off assets and privatisation back in the late 1980's and early 1990's. We even had conservative intellectuals writing popular books against the phenomenon of 'rationalism' as it was then known. This is before old conservatism faded and remerged as a market-driven right-wing.
Obama's bailing out of the banks after the 2008 crisis was a conspicuous neo-liberal move. Cornel West described Obama as a 'black mascot of Wall Street.' The point, I guess, is that liberalism seems inescapable.
A later Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, an academic and intellectual, even wrote a high profile essay on the subject of neo-liberalism in 2009.
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/february/1319602475/kevin-rudd/global-financial-crisis#mtr
"Reductio ad Hitlerum" is my favorite philosophy joke phrase.
Yes, because black markets and Bronze Age trade really factors into the modern world. You should apologize for having assumed you were dealing with adults.
I dont think the differences are as significant as youre making out. The fact is that deregulation, privatization, and globalization continued apace, no matter the rhetoric. Reagan and Thatcher laid the groundwork for an abnegation of political control over the economy, the establishment of a system in which voters are not able to decide on the basic structure of society, capitalism being mostly left to do its thing except when things go wrong.
As others in this discussion have pointed out, echoing Quinn Slobodian and the SEP article I linked to in the OP, neoliberalism is okay with an interventionist state, if its interventionist in the right way. This doesnt make it non-neoliberal unless you take neoliberal to be something like right-libertarianism, which it never was.
To me the term neosocialism doesnt really work unless youre just negatively fetishizing government, in the popular fashion of the American right; socialism is about common ownership and control, and we dont have anything like that.
Ill say a bit more. Although you frame the history differently from the way I do, I think youve identified what Im most interested in, namely progressive neoliberalism, which can be said to have started with Clinton and Blair. Where you see them as a break from neoliberalism, or from Reagan and Thatcher, I see them as a continuation economicallydespite the differences you mentionbut a break in terms of social attitudes. In other words, they represented the formation of the left wing of neoliberalism, of which identity politics and wokeness are the latest developments on its left wing. (To clarify in case anyone takes this too weakly: I mean that identity politics and wokeness are the politics of the progressive wing of the ruling class of neoliberal capitalism.)
And this might have something to do with postmodernism, as you allude to here:
Quoting NOS4A2
Im trying to pull stuff together. Currently Im not sure how postmodernism fits, though its a common observation that neoliberalism and postmodernism fit together pretty well.
It's something that might be justified under neoliberalism but it isn't uniquely neoliberal. Keynesianism would justify the same move. I think virtually all modern economic theorists would say you bail out the banks at that point; it's a 1929 type moment. The differences in economic theory apply more to "what do you do after bailing out the banks to prevent doing it again."
Obama wasn't even elected when the main bailout program, TARP, was passed on October 3, 2008 and wouldn't be President for several more months. He has other legislative options after that, but they had to pass Congress. He couldn't veto the bailout and I doubt he could have gotten a bill passed to kick the brace holding up the economy out of place at the exact moment unemployment was skyrocketing and contagion was hitting markets around the globe.
...one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering.
[i]What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with immunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.
Worst of all, Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs (who, just by the way, overwhelmingly supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign) as they simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned powerless Americans for far more trivial transgressions. As Harvard law professor Larry Lessig put it two weeks ago when expressing anger over the DOJ's persecution of Aaron Swartz: "we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House." (Indeed, as "The Untouchables" put it: while no senior Wall Street executives have been prosecuted, "many small mortgage brokers, loan appraisers and even home buyers" have been).[/i]
There's a lot of journalism about Obama's ' business as ususal' neo-liberal presidency along these lines.
Though I would use different terms, and stress the difference, I think thats a good assessment.
In the case of Clinton, his adopting of deregulation and small government was largely political triangulation rather than principle, meaning he used the rhetoric to syphon votes from his opponents as an act of opportunism. His finishing touch was to put a human face on the economy, I guess by continually biting his own lip.
But its interesting to watch the transition from the ideas of the 80s into the ideas of the 90s, as it was explained by the most powerful people on the earth at the time: Bill Clinton and a Tony Blair. If you ever have the time to waste, watch their Third Way conference in the below c-span video and you can witness the shift in real time between what you might call right and left-wing neoliberalism. It seems to me it was more a matter of being associated with the Old Left, than anything to do with liberal principle.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?122788-1/progressive-governance-21st-century
I probably wouldnt connect neoliberalism to post-modernism, but only because many on the conservative side of the bench think liberalism is a 1-to-1 ratio with modernity, like in the philosophy of Alexander Dugin. He holds some ultra conservative, ethnocentric, and anti-liberal ideas, seeing the collapse of liberalism as the perfect breeding ground for a resurgent new right. Since he conflates modernism itself with liberalism, Dugin is explicitly post-modern and illiberal. He is a vociferous critic of neoliberalism and globalism because the individualism of it all dissolves his favorite collective, the ethnos.
If the rise of the European Right is an indication, what comes after neoliberalism will be anti-liberal, while all that neo-stuff remains intact.