Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
The Globalists pulls back the curtain on a powerful, often invisible movement—one that sought not to dismantle the nation-state, but to encase it in a legal and economic armor that would protect markets from the turbulence of democracy. Through the rise of neoliberal thought in the 20th century, it tells the provocative story of economists and visionaries who believed freedom was best safeguarded not by parliaments, but by institutions beyond the reach of the people. Can true democracy survive when sovereignty is traded for stability, and when markets are placed beyond the will of the majority? With piercing clarity and unsettling relevance, this book traces the quiet construction of a global order designed not for chaos—but for control. It is the intellectual history of a world remade behind closed doors.
- Originally Published: March 2018
- Publisher: Harvard University Press
- Published: March 16, 2018
- Genre: Neoliberalism
- Pages: 400
- Book Type: Hardcopy
- ISBN: 978-0674979529
- Access: Members
Description
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
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