Globalists, Quinn Slobodian
Globalists, Quinn Slobodian
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Globalists
The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

Author: Quinn Slobodian

Narrator: Joe Barrett

Unabridged: 11 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/12/2018


Synopsis

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.

About Quinn Slobodian

Quinn Slobodian is associate professor of history at Wellesley College.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Conor

I visited Stanford University for the first time in years this past summer, and saw that the author was giving a talk on this book at some point. I looked it up and it sounded interesting--why not find out more about this neoliberal impulse that benights those who have had power in Western and espec......more

Goodreads review by Otto

Neoliberal is a slippery label that is more often used to obscure reality rather than illuminate it. It is usually the domain of various bogeymen and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. Given the fact that most vocal critics of "neoliberalism" have little interest in treating libertarian thinkers l......more

Goodreads review by W.D.

In 1933 H. G. Wells published a novel, The Shape of Things to Come, that purported to be the dream journal of Dr. Philip Raven, an economist in the employ of the League of Nations who met an “unexpected death” in November 1930. Raven had been dreaming of the future, and his journal projected the......more

Goodreads review by Peter

Speaking as someone who has confronted “anarcho-capitalists” on the other side of the line at counter-fascist demonstrations (including one where these supposed anarchists came out to support ICE), the idea that neoliberalism and empire might have some elective affinities was not a new one to me. Bu......more