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Neoliberalism in New York City from Below

In Fear City, Kim Phillips-Fein offers a terrific analysis of New York City’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s and its aftermath. It is hard to write a response to a book that is so beautifully written and convincing in its argument. I am tempted to simply sing a chorus of yeses. But I will instead point to a few areas where my interpretation of New York City’s fiscal crisis leans in a slightly different direction. This is more a matter of emphasis or “accent,” as Phillips-Fein’s work is extremely nuanced and already addresses well the issues below. As a chronicler of the fiscal crisis itself, Phillips-Fein is unrivaled. The best scholarship about New York City’s fiscal crisis was largely written in late 1970s and 1980s by social scientists and journalists. For a reader today, these inside-baseball accounts of obscure politicians, confusing acronyms, and bureaucratic maneuverings can be a bit of a slog. Phillips-Fein, in contrast, is a brilliant wordsmith who masterfully weaves complex detail about bond markets, annual budgets, and municipal politics into a gripping and accessible narrative. It is hard to put the book down. But Phillips-Fein’s book should not be mistaken for merely a synthesis of these early works. Instead she draws on new archival research and scores of interviews to offer a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the political and cultural impact of the fiscal crisis. The 1970s, she shows, is a watershed moment in which the city transformed itself from a vibrant working-class “island of social democracy” to a highly stratified and privatized postindustrial city. A new austerity regime of bankers and corporate executives dismantled New York City’s public sector, gutted its social safety net and debilitated its powerful labor unions. But her book is not simply a declension narrative about the demise of urban liberalism. Just as her first book was groundbreaking in analyzing “conservatism,” Phillips-Fein is among the first historians to examine the emergence of the “neoliberal” city. Although the word is popular with social scientists, most historians are wary of the term neoliberalism, which they find too sweeping and mechanistic to interpret