Mass Intellectuality of the Neoliberal State

Reviews / Votes

"This book is a required reading for understanding the current crisis of the Chilean neoliberal state. Most studies so far highlight the role played by the massification of higher education in the anti-neoliberal protests conducted by the student movement. Fleet's main contribution is to identify the key role played by a totally unexpected actor: a large mass of highly educated public servants, who are the product of the explosive expansion of education and for decades have also contested the neoliberal state from within."- Patricio Silva , Professor of Modern Latin American History, Leiden University, The Netherlands
"This highly original and readable study is going to re-invigorate debates on state theory and enliven current discourses on cognitive capitalism and the knowledge economy. The author's insightful investigation of the Chilean university student and secondary school student movements is eye-opening and vitally relevant to the current struggles in Chile and all of Latin America today."- Stefano Harney , Honorary Professor, Institute of Gender, Race , Sexuality and Social Justice, University of British Columbia, Canada
"Nicolas Fleet shows how a mass intelligentsia grew out of a segregated education system in the world's only truly neoliberal state. His masterly account of the bureaucracy, of education and of the clientelistic party system, offers a highly original explanation of the explosions of youth protest that opened the way to an unprecedented national consensus for the refoundation of the state in a Constitutional Assembly."
- David Lehmann , Emeritus Reader in Social Science and former Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, UK