Universal higher education and contradictions of the neoliberal state

Abstract: The presentation offers a dialectical interpretation of Chile’s recent cycle of social and political transformation that led to a crisis of the neoliberal state. The massification of higher education—from elite to universal access—played a key role in this process, reshaping the social basis of state power and penetrating the state apparatus with new forms of political-professional subjectivity.

What I have termed as mass intellectuality of the neoliberal state (Fleet, 2021) represents the emergence of a new professional class formed through the commodification of higher education. Such transformation generalised expectations of meaningful and self-realising work, which were mobilized in 2011 by a student movement that demanded the constitution of higher education as an arena of social rights. Their critique of the neoliberal order yielded to a central social movement throughout the last decade, articulating various social demands towards an alternative project for the state. 

I explore three contradictions of the neoliberal state stemming from this process: first, the expansion of the protest base to a generalised social movement (2019), culminating in a failed constitutional reform (2022) as an attempt to reframe the state upon a grammar of social rights; second, the crisis within higher education itself, marked by the state’s inability to implement public and free education beyond the commodity form, and; third, the massification of intellectual labour within the state apparatus, constituting the relationship between universities, professions and the state as strategic space of political struggle and potential post-neoliberal transformation.

Nicolas Fleet is a sociologist trained at the University of Chile, with a Master of Science in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. His research topics are political and state sociology, sociology of professions, higher education and sociological theory. He has been a full professor in the Department of Sociology at the Alberto Hurtado University since March 2022. In 2021 he published the book Mass Intellectuality of the Neoliberal State with Palgrave Macmillan. 

Please join us for the seminar and a Q&A and informal discussion with Nicolas after the talk.

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