Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian (review)

Successful revisionism can feel instantly redundant. So comprehensive in its demolition of the older consensus and so cohesive in its introduction of an alternative, the revisionist monograph quickly exhausts its point: the case is won early, and when an author reengages with the former framework to reiterate its errors, they tempt the reader to think of deceased horses.

That is why, although Globalists has been hailed as a revisionist work par excellence, I think the label is neither entirely accurate nor truly fair. Quinn Slobodian has written a book that—to be sure—has a bracingly revisionist introduction, one that demolishes much of the conventional wisdom regarding what neoliberals actually want and how they have pursued their goals.

Rather than hammering on the novelty of his arguments, Slobodian devotes the meat of the book to an enlargement and enrichment of the field covered by the study of neoliberalism. He foregrounds the connectedness of numerous fields of scholarship—on decolonization, human rights, South African apartheid, and the League of Nations, for starters—to neoliberalism’s history, drawing from rich (and often still emerging) wells of scholarship in multiple disciplines.

Slobodian does not explicitly identify who is responsible for the general picture of neoliberalism he is overturning, but reading between the lines, he is less sympathetic to scholars reliant on David Harvey and Michel Foucault. For both theorists, the events taking place within Anglo-American political economy during the 1970s best reveal the nature of neoliberalism. That is inaccurate, Slobodian argues, and the most significant correction he makes may be a simple geographical one. “My narrative presents a vision of neoliberal globalism viewed from Central Europe,” he writes, “because it was Central European neoliberals who most consistently looked at the world as a whole. Both Chicago School and Virginia School thinkers exhibited the peculiarly American quality of ignoring the rest of the world while assuming that American was a working model of it” (9).

Slobodian grounds his mitteleuropäisch neoliberalism much further back in time than the 1970s and even further than the Walter Lippmann Colloquium (held in 1938)—in most accounts the standard birthplace of the movement. Instead, Slobodian compellingly demonstrates the immense political importance and looming emotional presence of the Habsburg Empire over the youth and early careers of many of the key neoliberals: Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, and Gottfried Haberler. What these men saw in the Habsburg Empire was (in Hayek’s words) “a double government, a cultural and an economic government” (quoted on 12). Slobodian uses the metaphor of encasement to express the neoliberals’ ideal arrangement—the economy would still be governed, but economic policy could not be held accountable to popular referenda or electoral fortune. The goal was neither to “unfetter” the market nor to “disembed” it, but to place it beyond the reach of democratic caprice. That ideal, Slobodian argues, was a fruit of neoliberals’ Habsburg heritage.

Another crucial insight is that, after the fall of the Habsburg Empire, these men witnessed the wrenching adjustment of Austria to the fate of a smallish nation without many significant internal resources. Consequently, the surge of protectionist policies and desire for autarky that characterized the interwar period loomed as an existential threat to nations like Austria. Americans could afford to be cavalier about tariffs; even today a sense of self-sufficiency and internal abundance leads many Americans to worry about too much trade with other nations rather than fear that a trade disruption might lead to shortages or crisis. Neoliberals responded to economic nationalism with what Slobodian calls “militant globalism,” which “sought to make political borders mere lines on the map with no effect on the flow of goods and capital” (93).

The neoliberals’ response to the feverish economic nationalism of the interwar period presaged the positions they would take on decolonization after World War II. Slobodian zeros in on Southern Africa—on apartheid South Africa...