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The NYU Cities Collaborative and Institute for Public Knowledge’s Race, Capital and the City continues Friday, November 12 at 11 AM with Benjamin Holtzmann’s discussion on The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism.
The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism
The Long Crisis explores the origins and implications of one of the most significant developments across the globe over the last fifty years: the diminished faith in government as capable of solving public problems. Conventional accounts of the shift toward market and private sector governing solutions have focused on the rising influence of conservatives, libertarians, and the business sector. The Long Crisis, however, locates the origins of this transformation in the efforts of city-dwellers to preserve liberal commitments of the postwar period. New York faced an economic crisis beginning in the late 1960s that disrupted long-standing assumptions about the services city government could provide. In response, New Yorkers—organized within block associations, nonprofits, and professional organizations—embraced an ethos of private volunteerism and, eventually, of partnership with private business in order to save their communities from neglect. Local liberal and Democratic officials came over time to see such alliances not as stopgap measures, but as legitimate and ultimately permanent features of modern governance. The ascent of market-based policies was driven less by a political assault of pro-market ideologues than by ordinary New Yorkers experimenting with novel ways to maintain robust public services in the face of the city’s budget woes. Local people and officials, The Long Crisis argues, built neoliberalism from the ground up. These shifts toward the market would both exacerbate old racial and economic inequalities and produce new ones that continue to shape metropolitan areas today.
About the Speakers
Benjamin Holtzman is an Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College at CUNY. His research interests include the intersection of political and social history in the United States, with particular focus on politics, capitalism, race and class, cities, and social movements. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His first book, The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism, is out now from Oxford University Press. It uses the sweeping transformation of post-1960s New York City to trace how market-oriented policies have come to proliferate across American life over the past five decades. His research has appeared in Modern American History, the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Urban History, and several edited collections. He is currently working on hi second book, “Smash the Klan: Fighting the White Power Movement in the Late Twentieth Century.”
Our Race, Capital and the City series continues this fall. Click here for additional information on the series.
