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Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. By Quinn Slobodian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 400 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $35.00. ISBN: 978-0-674-97952-9.
Though it undoubtedly provides cold comfort, it is true that crises have, if nothing else, repeatedly proven themselves good to think with and about. The multiple, layered, and interwoven crises of our current age—from the economic to the political, the cultural, and the climatic—have precipitated a veritable academic industry dedicated to dissecting (if not vivisecting) the assumptions, conditions, and institutions that led us to where we are. Even so, I suspect that Quinn Slobodian's Globalists will remain one of the most insightful and deftly crafted works to come out of this tumultuous moment. Indeed, it is one of the single best accounts available of the economic ideas and ideals behind our most recent and still ongoing experience with market totemism.
It is a deeply personal work, intimately presented as an activist's reckoning with his failure to join the siege of Seattle, the epochal 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) that, in numerous ways, marked a turning point in late twentieth-century globalization. As Slobodian acknowledges, the book is an “apology for not being there and an attempt to rediscover in words what the concept was that they went there to fight” (p. 362). To this end, he has written a penetrating intellectual and institutional history of the movement identified as “neoliberalism” going back to the end of World War I. And what a movement it was. However, rather than engaging with the vast and varied cultures of market fetishism that characterized the age—from Ayn Rand through Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson to Margaret Thatcher—the book is devoted to expounding the developing goals and assumptions of a particularly coherent and sophisticated variety of twentieth-century neoliberalism. Slobodian focuses on what he dubs the Geneva School: a “genus of neoliberal thought that stretches from the seminar rooms of fin-de-siècle Vienna to the halls of the WTO in fin-de-millennium Geneva” (p. 8). This includes—by affinity and association—the likes of Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Heilperin, Friedrich von Hayek, Lionel Robbins, Jan Tumlir, Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, and, of course, Gottfried Haberler, whose 1958 “Haberler Report” would prove foundational for both the...