It is difficult to consider the state of the world in 2018 and not feel a sense of vertigo. Humanity has greater capacity for production than it has ever had before, and simultaneously, the ability to destroy the world many times over. The products we rely on—whether for food, fuel, communication—are woven together in supply chains that have the complexity of medieval tapestries. Some people can make unimaginable fortunes in microseconds, while others still scratch a living out of the dry ground. Eight men, it is calculated, hold as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet: 3.6 billion people. A global system underlies this vastly unequal distribution of wealth and power. But what to call this system? What is its name?



It is not enough to call it capitalism, since capitalism has been around for hundreds of years and transforms itself with great dexterity. The term “late capitalism” acknowledges that, but it presumes something about the future that we cannot know. What can be identified is a shift, usually dated to the 1970s, when rich countries moved away from a regulated economy of mass production and mass consumption, organized within nation states. David Harvey, writing in 1990, saw it being replaced with “post-Fordism”: an economy built on just-in-time production, the internationalization of capital, the deregulation of industry, insecure labor, and the entrepreneurial self. In the years since, these trends have only accelerated due to improvements in, and the spread of, information technologies. But few call this “post-Fordism” any longer. They mostly call it “neoliberalism.”

GLOBALISTS: THE END OF EMPIRE AND THE BIRTH OF NEOLIBERALISM by Quinn Slobodian Harvard University Press, 400 pp., $35.00

Even to say this word is to invite controversy. Jonathan Chait has expressed a common point of view when he has argued that neoliberalism is little more than a slur used by writers on the left to label varieties of liberalism they dislike. For the left, neoliberalism often connotes a form of liberal politics that has embraced market-based solutions to social problems: the exchanges of the Affordable Care Act, for instance, rather than a single-payer, universal program like Medicare. Chait argues that leftists use the word to “bracket the center-left together with the right” and so present socialism as the only real alternative. But the term has its critics on the left, too: Political economist Bill Dunn finds it too insular, rarely adopted by the people it is said to describe. The historian Daniel Rodgers, meanwhile, argues that neoliberal means too many different things, and therefore not enough.

And yet, the world today works in a distinctive and relatively new way, and those workings need a name. Its critics are right that neoliberalism has multiple meanings and can be used in a way that is more pejorative than precise. But it also has an intellectual genealogy with real bearing on our time, making a careful reconstruction of its history essential to understanding our global economy. Quinn Slobodian provides exactly that in Globalists, showing how neoliberal ideas grew from particular historical circumstances to global influence, while also correcting certain misconceptions about neoliberalism’s meaning and goals.

Neoliberal ideas emerged from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early twentieth century. While the empire had been growing quickly into an industrial power, it lagged behind Germany, France, and Britain. Then World War I disrupted the economy and broke the imperial system. With the end of the war, Austria became a democratic republic, and socialist candidates won repeated victories in its cosmopolitan capital, Vienna. From 1918 to 1934, “Red” Vienna became a model city for democratic socialism, with social housing and expanded schooling for children and adults, all protected by a militant labor movement. The city inspired one resident, Karl Polanyi, to a lifelong defense of social democracy. Red Vienna, he wrote, caused “a moral and intellectual rise in the condition of a highly developed industrial working class,” which “achieved a level never reached before by the masses of the people in any industrial society.”