George Louis Beer Prize Winner Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year
“A groundbreaking contribution…Intellectual history at its best.” ―Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs
Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again by the relentless change and social injustice that accompanied it.
“Slobodian’s lucidly written intellectual history traces the ideas of a group of Western thinkers who sought to create, against a backdrop of anarchy, globally applicable economic rules. Their attempt, it turns out, succeeded all too well.” ―Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg Opinion
“Fascinating, innovative…Slobodian has underlined the profound conservatism of the first generation of neoliberals and their fundamental hostility to democracy.” ―Adam Tooze, Dissent
“The definitive history of neoliberalism as a political project.” ―Boston Review

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

Business & Money

Slobodian, Quinn

Economics

Harvard University Press

Chosen by Pankaj Mishra as one of the Best Books of the Summer
Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.
Slobodian begins in Austria in the 1920s. Empires were dissolving and nationalism, socialism, and democratic self-determination threatened the stability of the global capitalist system. In response, Austrian intellectuals called for a new way of organizing the world. But they and their successors in academia and government, from such famous economists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to influential but lesser-known figures such as Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin, did not propose a regime of laissez-faire. Rather they used states and global institutions―the League of Nations, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade Organization, and international investment law―to insulate the markets against sovereign states, political change, and turbulent democratic demands for greater equality and social justice.
Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand project of protecting capitalism on a global scale. It was a project, Slobodian shows, that changed the world, but that was also undermined time and again by the inequality, relentless change, and social injustice that accompanied it.

Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Radical Perspectives)

It is often asserted that West German New Leftists "discovered the Third World" in the pivotal decade of the 1960s. Quinn Slobodian upsets that storyline by beginning with individuals from the Third World themselves: students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who arrived on West German campuses in large numbers in the early 1960s. They were the first to mobilize German youth in protest against acts of state violence and injustice perpetrated beyond Europe and North America. The activism of the foreign students served as a model for West German students, catalyzing social movements and influencing modes of opposition to the Vietnam War. In turn, the West Germans offered the international students solidarity and safe spaces for their dissident engagements. This collaboration helped the West German students to develop a more nuanced, empathetic understanding of the Third World, not just as a site of suffering, poverty, and violence, but also as the home of politicized individuals with the capacity and will to speak in their own names.

History

Europe

Duke University Press Books

It is often asserted that West German New Leftists "discovered the Third World" in the pivotal decade of the 1960s. Quinn Slobodian upsets that storyline by beginning with individuals from the Third World themselves: students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who arrived on West German campuses in large numbers in the early 1960s. They were the first to mobilize German youth in protest against acts of state violence and injustice perpetrated beyond Europe and North America. The activism of the foreign students served as a model for West German students, catalyzing social movements and influencing modes of opposition to the Vietnam War. In turn, the West Germans offered the international students solidarity and safe spaces for their dissident engagements. This collaboration helped the West German students to develop a more nuanced, empathetic understanding of the Third World, not just as a site of suffering, poverty, and violence, but also as the home of politicized individuals with the capacity and will to speak in their own names.

Crack-Up Capitalism

In a revelatory dispatch from the frontier of capitalist extremism, an acclaimed historian of ideas shows how free marketeers are realizing their ultimate goal: an end to nation-states and the constraints of democracy. Look at a map of the world and you'll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Crack-Up Capitalism follows the most notorious radical libertarians--from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel--around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism. Historian Quinn Slobodian leads us from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world's oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy. A masterful work of economic and intellectual history, Crack-Up Capitalism offers both a new way of looking at the world and a new vision of coming threats. Full of rich details and provocative analysis, Crack-Up Capitalism offers an alarming view of a possible future.

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

Metropolitan Books

A Fortune best nonfiction book of 2023 In a revelatory dispatch from the frontier of capitalist extremism, an acclaimed historian of ideas shows how free marketeers are realizing their ultimate goal: an end to nation-states and the constraints of democracy. Look at a map of the world and you'll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Crack-Up Capitalism follows the most notorious radical libertarians--from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel--around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism. Historian Quinn Slobodian leads us from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world's oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy. A masterful work of economic and intellectual history, Crack-Up Capitalism offers both a new way of looking at the world and a new vision of coming threats. Full of rich details and provocative analysis, Crack-Up Capitalism offers an alarming view of a possible future.

METROPOLITAN

Review\n“This landmark study confronts a key barrier to ‘global knowledge’ and scholarship, particularly in this age of ‘decolonizing’ knowledge. This outstanding collection is the response of how to overcome such obstacles, a model others would do well to follow. Slobodian and Plehwe have gathered a group of excellent scholars expert in the histories of economic ideas and philosophies of a wide variety of societies in global East and South―including China, India, Iceland, Montenegro, Brazil, Guatemala, Russia―to consider the global and local knowledge networks that helped make neoliberalism a dominant global ideology for ‘market civilizations’. The story of a smooth process of knowledge movement from Western ‘core’ to eastern and southern ‘peripheries’ is not only challenged via local histories and ideas, it is complexified to form a more accurate assessment of how ideas become the bases of profound transformations. The book successfully establishes that there are simultaneous, separate, and interconnected, local and global conversations, layers upon layers of thinking, understanding, and practice, independent, semiautonomous, and dependent in a bewildering complexity. A study of ‘global knowledge’ at its best, and a model for emulation. A brilliant must-read collection.”―Inderjeet Parmar, University of London\n“Over 150 years ago Francis Galton made a bet that diffusion of practices from a common point to other sites is far more likely to succeed than multiple sites spontaneously finding similar solutions to common problems. The student of neoliberalism is a subconscious Galtonian, viewing neoliberal thought as a western core diffusing to a global periphery that ‘sucks it up’ with various national edits to the script. Not so, say Plehwe and Slobodian. To truly understand neoliberalism’s global reach we have to break with Galton and appreciate how indigenous varieties emerge and thrive autochthonously. Doing so explains its persistence since ‘it’ is never one thing.”―Mark Blyth, Brown University\n“Market Civilizations shines a bright light on how neoliberalism has ‘traveled’ beyond the neoliberal heartlands. In a series of illuminating essays, a stellar group of contributors provide highly detailed, nicely nuanced analyses of how neoliberalism ‘went local’ in unexpected ways in unusual places. And in so doing, they offer groundbreaking insights into the ins-and-outs as well as the ups-and-downs of neoliberal ideas, adaptations, and applications in a wide range of lesser-known cases around the world.”―Vivien A. Schmidt, Boston University\n“Market Civilizations leaves us with an intellectually vibrant understanding of neoliberalism as a diffuse and diverse school of thought, with various proponents across the world harboring numerous reasons for complementing an evolving liberal international order and their own distinct means and understandings on what it means to nurture ‘market civilizations,’ or rather, what it means to shape societies by the ‘logic of capital.’”―Maribel Morey, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences\n"Critics of neoliberalism have long treated it as a homogeneous and homogenizing force, radially spreading out from the capitalist metropoles of the Global North and spearheaded by Western intellectuals and institutions. Slobodian and Plehwe have assembled a kaleidoscope of studies which explode this view, revealing the plural origins and forms of neoliberal thought and practice. Ranging from efforts to neutralize Black resistance in apartheid South Africa to 'ultraliberal' online movements in contemporary Brazil, from Turkey's experiments in Islamic neoliberalism to their Hindu nationalist counterparts in India, Market Civilizations is an indispensable ideological map at a time when the mutations and fragmentations of neoliberalism are too often mistaken for its demise."―Alberto Toscano, Goldsmiths, University of London\nA deep investigation of neoliberalism's proselytizers in Eastern Eur

Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South (Near Future Series)

von Schnitzler, Antina

Rupprecht, Tobias

Hofmann, Reto

Balasubramanian, Aditya

Weber, Isabella M.

Walker, Jeremy

Klausen, Jimmy Casas

Fischer, Karin

Plehwe, Dieter

Nartok, Esra Elif

Chamon, Paulo

Jonjic, Mila

Pantelic, Nenad

Mjøset, Lars

Zone Books

Globalisten: Das Ende der Imperien und die Geburt des Neoliberalismus

Suhrkamp Verlag AG

Globalistas

Capitán Swing Libros

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Books by Slobodian, Quinn