Noticing Neoliberalism

This chapter specifies the fundamental concepts of neoliberalism, and tracks their baleful effects on people with intellectual disabilities. These include over-estimation of their abilities which relieves social care agencies from any responsibility for imagining what an acceptable or meaningful adult life without work could be. Instead, individuals with intellectual disability are left to imagine and ‘choose’ it for themselves. People often struggle to recognise neoliberal ideas and the anomalies they generate, which occasionally leads them to misunderstand research findings, in itself a demonstration of the power of neoliberal ideology.