Ce urmează după neoliberalism? Pentru un imaginar politic alternativ [What Follows after Neoliberalism? For an alternative political imaginary], Sorin Gog, Victoria Stoiciu (coord.), Editura Presa Universitară Clujeană, Cluj-Napoca 2024

Abstract

Perhaps the greatest merit of the volume What Follows after Neoliberalism? For an alternative political imaginary edited by Sorin Gog and Victoria Stoiciu is that it embodies the wish and project it predicates - the coagulation of support for progressive politics, reinforced by a body of expertise that challenges the neoliberal consensus. In a space where leftist ideas are ridiculed as retrograde, communist-nostalgic, and questionable, and the anti-communist ideology has flattened the space of alternatives hailing the left as a failed and expired “other” to market values, this volume and its authors signal the need to build a critique of neoliberalism from the cold, close, diligent examination of its contradictions, injustices, and violences. That such volume could still be published in an ever-fragmenting Romanian leftist space is testimony to authors’ intellectual, activist, and transgenerationally minded habitus and commitment to cultivate hope and critical knowledge. Several collective volumes published in Romanian precede it as products of earlier figurations of the left (e.g. Cistelecan and Lazăr 2010, CriticAtac 2011, Poenaru and Rogozanu 2014, Gog et al. 2021).