Following the previous global financial crisis, as predictions of the end of neoliberalism were confounded, certain critics used the metaphor of the zombie to describe the undead existence of an ideology that refused to be consigned to the grave. Zombie neoliberalism was an exhausted project, perversely persistent yet lacking vitality. What succeeded the crisis, however, was not the dispatching of this staggering corpse, but the ascendancy of an authoritarian, misogynistic, and (sometimes) white supremacist Right whose relation to neoliberalism appeared obscure. Figures like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India. and Donald Trump in the United States undermined traditional dichotomies and scrambled once-hegemonic orthodoxies. Yes, these figures borrowed from the familiar neoliberal playbook, cutting corporate taxes, attacking welfare systems, and abandoning their countries’ poorest citizens. But they also spoke in the name of “the people,” railed against globalism and elites, and appealed to traditional family values and racial and religious hierarchies while licensing state, corporate, and popular violence against racial and religious minorities and Indigenous peoples.

To understand these new dynamics, Mutant Neoliberalism proposes the metaphor of the “mutant” for the neoliberalism of our times. Unlike the living dead, mutants are new life forms, the results of genetic evolutions that enable an organism to adapt to new circumstances. “Within the “‘species’ of neoliberalism,” Callison and Manfredi explain in their excellent introduction, “new variants are emerging that are distinct but nevertheless members of the same cast” (p. 3). What the metaphor of the mutant captures, and what the endless funeral orations for neoliberalism since 2007 miss, is that neoliberalism may be transforming in ways that disrupt existing analytic frameworks while remaining as vital as ever.

Numerous mutants punctuate the pages of this illuminating collection: neoliberal Euro-skeptics find common cause with far-right critics of austerity in avowing sovereignty, even as they break with them sharply over economic policy (Dieter Plewhe and Quinn Slobodian, and Melinda Cooper). Chicago School populists challenge “big government” and big business (Sören Brandes). Strange amalgams of public and private destabilize accounts of neoliberalism as the privatization of public resources (Megan Moodie and Lisa Rofel), whereas discourses of innovation are revealed as major barriers to the creation of real novelty (Christopher Newfield). And even the rational man of economics reappears as a subject of performative masculinity (Leslie Salzinger), who is constructed in opposition to the “primitive irrationality” of “savages” and socialists (Julia Elyachar).

The volume examines how these mutations unmoor our traditional distinctions between Left and Right and challenge traditional interpretive paradigms. Brandes’s chapter shows that Milton Friedman used his role as a media intellectual to cultivate a neoliberal populism that broke with early neoliberal elitism and appealed directly to “ordinary, hard-working American people,” supposedly most at home in the market, not the polis (p. 71). Not only is there no necessary antagonism between neoliberalism and populism, Brandes suggests, but also today’s right-wing popularism may be a reinvigoration of neoliberalism, rather than a reaction to it (p. 80).

Similarly, Plewhe and Slobodian’s stand-out chapter offers an original account of neoliberal Euro-skepticism, challenging the misleading dichotomy that pits globalist neoliberalism against atavistic populist nationalism. Tracing the increasingly anti-European stance of organized neoliberals since the 1990s, these authors illuminate the transnational and neoliberal roots of sections of the European Right, including those that pushed hard for Brexit. Insisting that “right-wing populism cannot be viewed only as a nationalist category,” they show that the new European Right both relies on transnational networks and pushes for further economic globalization (p. 91).

In stark contrast, Cooper focuses on anti-austerity on the European Far Right, which she contends must be understood as offering a genuine fiscal alternative to the neoliberal agenda. Cooper situates this “national social” strand of the new Far Right against the background of the antiliberal economic policies of National Socialism, arguing that intervening in the current conjuncture is essential, “not least because we have been here before” (p. 118). But have we? The elision between international Jewry and globalizing financial capital that underpinned both Nazi fiscal policy and the Final Solution is not easily mapped on to the anti-immigrant politics of today’s Far Right. The latter cannot be understood without an analysis of the specificity of anti-Muslim racism and the configuration of migrants as drains on national welfare systems who threaten demographic “replacement,” not loci of nefarious financial power. Today’s exclusionist arguments on the Far Right bear little resemblance to the mid-century equation of European Jews with finance capital, as rootless, abstract, and non (re)-productive, that formed the counterpoint to the Nazi economic policies that Cooper so deftly analyzes. No doubt Cooper is correct that, today, the stakes could not be higher. But this is not because our present offers a redux of mid-twentieth-century Europe. Rather, today’s reactionary formations emerge in the context of decades of neoliberal restructuring, and even when they reject neoliberal “globalism,” they have often imbibed its competitive and speculative logic.

Brown, Feher, and Balibar all zone in on these novel features of our present: for Brown, contemporary populism has absorbed the neoliberal animosity to both the social and the political and manifests as a nihilistic moral system built on “rancor, reproach, negation, and even revenge” (p. 54). For Feher, the new Right is best conceived within the speculative logic of a financialized capitalism that has turned us all into portfolio managers investing in our own material and human capital. Consistent with this logic, rather than in reaction to it, Feher depicts the new Right as motivated by the desire to “dispose of the discredited” (notably migrants) and revalorize “native” capital, thereby bringing about a mutation in standard right-wing discourses.

For Étienne Balibar, we are witnessing the rise of “absolute capitalism,” which replaces the national sovereignty and political antagonism of “historical capitalism” with the quasi-sovereignty of global financial markets and generalized extreme violence. “Neoliberalism,” Balibar suggests, is extreme capitalism’s subjective face. Subjectivity is also central to Salzinger’s contribution, which draws on ethnographic work among traders in New York and Mexico City to illuminate how the myth of an asocial, self-interested homo economicus is performed, albeit in a hypermasculinized guise. For Balibar, however, extreme capitalism unmakes subjectivities and undoes the possessive individualism of Lockean liberalism.

Extreme capitalism, Balibar insists, is an extremely unstable complex. As an imaginary restoration of classical liberalism in the wake of socialism, it is a postsocialist formation that destroys the commons even while “it must keep alive (even if starving) what it destroys continuously” (p. 287). For Newfield, too, capitalism is increasingly reliant on a mass intellectuality that neoliberal “innovation” disrupts and erodes. Here, it is socialism that appears as the zombie that stalks our neoliberal present.

For Elyacher, neoliberalism emerged in the course of the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s, as figures like Ludwig von Mises and Hayek battled against a socialism they depicted as primitive irrationalism. For Rofel and Moodie, scholars of neoliberalism have tended to underestimate “the legacies of socialism and the Cold War,” assuming that the latter is over and the former buried. But both China and India, they argue, reveal unstable amalgams of neoliberalism and socialism, while socialism’s legacy still animates popular conceptions of a good life. The editors endorse Stuart Hall’s contention that challenging neoliberal “populism” requires a “socialism which is without guarantees” (p. 26).

Taken together, the chapters ask us to consider whether socialism can also mutate in ways that enable it to thrive again, on the Left rather than the Right, or whether the materials of the “political rupture” with neoliberalism that the book’s subtitle heralds must come from within the beast itself, by taking up its own vocabulary and premises in altered form.