Discipline and Promise: Economic Ideas and Politics of Expectations in Latin America

Stephan Gruber

Neoliberalism in Peru became hegemonic through the ability to weave populist imagined futures of entrepreneurship of the poor alongside the discipline of technocratic de-politization of economics. Based on this argumentation from the doctoral dissertation on which this project is based, the aim is to develop a book proposal and expand the analysis to other Latin American countries in a comparative perspective. Combining intellectual history, political economy, and sociology of knowledge, it studies the diverse imaginaries in conflict – such as neoliberalism, developmentalism, and the socialism of dependency theory – but also shows the overlaps and hybridity that were historically produced. Furthermore, the project looks at how the peripheral condition of Latin American capitalism, as well as the heightened expectations for development, conditioned the role that imagined futures played in the region and the influences of this processes beyond. Using a qualitative approach with extensive multi-sited archival work and interviews, it analyses different but related institutional and policy realms where these imaginaries played out, such as macroeconomic policies, legal property frameworks, and finance.