Reframing Neoliberalism as a Cognitive Regime : An Order of Alienated Consciousness

This volume provides a new exploration of the complex phenomenon of neoliberalism from a unique perspective, casting it as our contemporary “collective consciousness” and arguing for its interpretation not as a political ideology, but as a multifaceted cognitive system. It maps out the formation processes and structural buildup of these systems by elaborating first on a certain model of individual cognition, then scaling it up to the societal level.This collective cognitive model then provides the foundation for in-depth analysis of “cognitive regimes,” which are understood as the different examples of culturally defined and externally structured collective consciousnesses.Several attributes and their different dynamics are explored and organized into a general framework, such that a new and comprehensive understanding of the subject can be extracted.It offers valuable analysis of what this “cognitivist” approach to neoliberalism can provide for re-imagining our future in a world struggling with ecologic, economic, demographic, and climatic degradation, and what lessons can be learned for an era overshadowed by a potential climatic collapse. Academics interested in the expansion of the “critique of neoliberalism” discourse to the socio-cognitive field, looking for some novelties in the well-established academic literature around this subject, would greatly benefit from this text.With its clear and concise format, it is also of interest to motivated readers from outside academia.