Original Research Article Critique of Anthropology 2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–16 © The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221120171 journals.sagepub.com/home/coa Resilience, infrastructure and the anti-social contract in neoliberal Britain Benjamin OL Bowles  SOAS – University of London, UK Abstract ‘Resilience’, a quintessentially neoliberal concept, has never been a politically neutral discourse, its intellectual roots situated in the work of Friedrich Hayek and the birth of neoliberal economics. Nevertheless, resilience in infrastructure is often cast as a technocratic, apolitical consideration. This article argues that this is not the case. Using data collected during fieldwork with the UK Government Cabinet Office during a consultation on how to make infrastructure ‘resilient by design’, resilience discourse is shown to be a tool with which government departments, regulators and companies make communities increasingly responsible for the provision and maintenance of their own infrastructure while justifying service failures as inevitable. This is an under-explored discursive battleground in the neoliberal reframing of the social contract as anti-social; concerning the profit-driven logics of corporate entities as balanced by the rights of individual consumers, and no longer about the relationship between ‘the state’ and a collective civil society. Keywords infrastructure, neoliberalism, privatisation, resilience, social contract, United Kingdom Introduction The Environment Agency (EA) middle-manager looked uncomfortable when I first mentioned resilience in our interview. My work on how to make infrastructure ‘resilient by design’ had led me to Jim, 1 a bearded Yorkshireman in his thirties, who worked for the EA building persuasive business cases for the agency to spend money on flood defences Corresponding author: Benjamin OL Bowles, SOAS – University of London, Room 569, 10 Thornhaugh St, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0XG, UK. Email: bb37@soas.ac.uk