PostSoviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics

The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and mediumsized industrial cities spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shakencasualties, in the eyes of many observers, of marketoriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In PostSoviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state.Drawing on Michel Foucaults lectures from the late 1970s, PostSoviet Social uses the Russian case to examine neoliberalism as a central form of political rationality in contemporary societies. The books basic findingthat neoliberal reforms provide a justification for redistribution and social welfare, and may work to preserve the norms and forms of social modernitylays the groundwork for a critical revision of conventional understandings of these topics.