Education, the Public Sphere, and Neoliberalism: Libraries’ Contexts

Abstract

The period covered by the publication of Library Quarterly (LQ) has been one characterized by the arc of three defining contexts. First, libraries have been inextricably tied to educational institutions in the modern era. Second, libraries developed within democratic societies and took on aspects of the public sphere (as did classrooms), even while public spheres were being transformed in the macro sense. Third, these two contextual conditions predominated for half of our period but led to a fundamental conservative rethinking of civil society institutions like schools and libraries: neoliberalism as a loose set of economic and market principles projected into schools, universities, and libraries, resulting in economic and political inequalities and an undermining of democratic and civil society institutions. These three contexts do not explain everything about libraries during LQ’s run of publication, but they situate a great deal of that history.

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