Kevin Vallier on Caleb Wellum’s Energizing Neoliberalism

Caleb Wellum’s Energizing Neoliberalism offers a new interpretation of how the 1970s energy crises reshaped American political culture. Most historians treat the crisis as a problem of oil shortages or Middle Eastern politics. Wellum sees it differently. He argues that Americans constructed the energy crisis through culture, media, and politics. The crisis was not a “true” crisis but rather a “constructed cultural and discursive” event that accelerated the rise of neoliberalism in the United States (3). This process pushed the country toward free-market solutions and problematic financial speculation.

Wellum develops his argument in five chapters. First, he examines how postwar America became dependent on oil, such as growing dependence on automobiles and suburban sprawl. Then, he examines how different groups understood the crisis and ethical energy use.

Wellum’s most original claim is that the energy crisis changed Americans’ attitudes toward markets and risk. To illustrate, Wellum examines popular movies about cars from the 1970s and the new market for trading oil futures. He argues that these seemingly distinct developments reinforced each other. Americans began to see free markets and financial speculation as natural solutions to their problems. Wellum claims both environmentalists and free-marketeers undermined Keynesian liberal approaches to energy (6-7).

Despite these contributions, the book’s analytical framework has significant problems. First, Wellum’s concept of “neoliberalism” loses focus as the book progresses. The term neoliberalism serves as a catch-all category covering disparate phenomena: market deregulation, energy futures trading, environmental austerity, and what Wellum calls “petro-populism” – a cultural movement that portrayed unrestricted driving as a fundamental American right against government control. Though Wellum carefully shows how 1970s films expressed this resistance to energy conservation, his broader argument about neoliberalism’s connection to such cultural expressions remains unclear. While Wellum defines neoliberalism early on as “a social and political ideology that privileges free markets and individual liberty” and “a totalizing epistemology” (8-9), this clarity fades when he tries to explain broader cultural changes, again like the portrayal of automobiles in American movies. One example arises in Chapter 4, where Wellum speaks of a “neoliberal structure of feeling” (134), or in Chapter 5, where neoliberalism includes “affective facts,” which are emotional responses to market uncertainty. Neoliberal “narratives” about oil futures apply the term “neoliberal” even more broadly (138).

This problem becomes plain when we examine how the book treats neoliberal thinkers. Wellum sometimes references figures like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, but his narrative mostly ignores how these intellectuals influenced energy policy. Most books on neoliberalism focus on a narrative about ideologues and ideological changes. Wellum’s break with this scholarly practice is welcome. The price, however, is that Wellum’s narrative is too far removed from influential neoliberals. It is striking that F. A. Hayek appears only twice in the entire text. After all, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974—during the energy crisis.

The narrative also implicitly assumes that neoliberal frameworks are inadequate, and so it does not engage pro-market arguments on their merits. For instance, Wellum states that oil futures traders and advocates relied on “dutifully ignoring the long history of boom-and-bust volatility in the oil industry” (91). Wellum implies that market advocates deliberately ignored obvious empirical evidence of price volatility. However, it is not accurate to say they ignored this information. If anything, they drew incorrect conclusions from the data. Perhaps market advocates were mistaken, but the claim that they “dutifully ignored” the evidence requires a well-documented argument, which Wellum does not provide.

A final and related issue emerges regarding how ideology connects to specific policy changes. The book offers rich details about cultural shifts and financial innovations. However, it sometimes struggles to demonstrate clear causal links between these developments and concrete policy outcomes. For example, consider again Wellum’s case of “car films” and petro-populism, where the uninhibited use of automobiles was a “sacrosanct right” of the American people, and the use of fossil fuels represents “resistance to state control over energy consumption” (104). Here, Wellum draws a causal connection between films and political philosophy.

I do not doubt that popular culture reflects specific shared ideas that manifest in other areas of American life, such as public policy. Nevertheless, the fact that popular culture and public policy share striking similarities does not enhance our understanding of the broader connection between culture, policy, and ideology. At a minimum, we must examine the role played by intellectuals, which other scholars of neoliberalism have discussed in detail. Wellum could have integrated familiar stories about the connections between intellectuals and public policy with his more original efforts to examine neoliberal influences in popular culture. Similarly, Wellum’s analysis of oil futures markets could have at least cited neoliberals defending these ideas. In general, Wellum’s conceptual framework struggles to connect cultural phenomena with neoliberal ideas—resemblance does not suffice for social scientific explanation.

Energizing Neoliberalism contributes significantly to our understanding of how Americans came to connect energy policy with free-market solutions. However, the book’s shortcomings reflect broader problems in neoliberalism scholarship. Too many scholars readily collapse distinct phenomena—cultural patterns, economic policies, and philosophical commitments—under the neoliberalism banner. These elements deserve more careful analytic separation. Future work on neoliberalism must demonstrate more precisely how ideas, cultural changes, and policy developments shape each other. Mere similarities in form or expression cannot sustain causal claims about neoliberalism’s influence.