This paper seeks to shed light on how an ideology achieves hegemony, how this hegemony is maintained, and what happens when the claims of an ideology are contradicted by reality.  I will use neoliberalism in the Philippines as a case study.

Neoliberalism is a perspective that champions the market as the prime regulator of economic activity and seeks to limit the intervention of the state in economic life to a minimum.  Neoliberalism in recent times has become identified with economics, given its hegemony as a paradigm within the discipline, that is, its excluding other perspectives as legitimate ways of doing economics.  Since economics is regarded in many quarters as a hard science, much like physics—being, for instance, the only social science for which there is a Nobel Prize—neoliberalism has had a tremendous and pervasive influence not only in academic circles but in policy circles as well.  While the University of Chicago became the font of academic wisdom, in technocratic circles the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were seen as the key institutions that translated this theory into policy, to a set of practical prescriptions that were applicable to all economies.