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 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and the WTO (p. 200).

As Slobodian rightly emphasizes, his neoliberals did not—pace a commonplace assumption—consider “self-regulating markets as autonomous entities,” nor did they “see democracy and capitalism as synonymous” (p. 2). Indeed, events of the 1930s had taught them that “the self-regulating market was a myth,” and so they agreed with the likes of John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi that markets fundamentally were human creations in need of construction and maintenance (p. 95). “The core of twentieth-century neoliberal theorizing,” Slobodian argues, “involves what they called the meta-economic or extra-economic conditions for safeguarding capitalism at the scale of the entire world” (p. 2). Their goal was less to “liberate markets” or to “set them free,” as popular phraseologies put it, than to “encase them” and “to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy” (pp. 2, 145). As such, neoliberalism proposed a “variety of regulation rather than its radical Other” (p. 3). Politics may have “moved to the past tense” by the 1990s, as Slobodian notes, but the supposedly depoliticizing project of neoliberalism was, he argues forcefully, itself deeply political (p. 1).

As the book's subtitle suggests, Slobodian locates the origins of this neoliberal movement in the “epochal shift of order” that followed the collapse of European empires, and particularly in the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the wake of World War I and the end of the original gold standard (p. 5). There are many ways in which the end of formal empires gave rise to neoliberalism in Slobodian's narrative, including the sudden explosion of self-determining policies following decolonization—and thus the increased risk of a “new state majority” against global imbalances and asymmetries—and, most immediately, the simple fact that the economic systems of many Western countries were predicated on easy access to raw materials from an economic realm that stretched far beyond the political borders of postimperial states (pp. 246–47). A “free” global market was, then, less an alternative than a surrogate for empire, or what the German economist Moritz Bonn called an “invisible economic empire” (p. 97). Slobodian ably harnesses this cardinal incongruity between states and markets in the modern world through the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt's distinction, drawn from Roman Law, between “imperium,” or the rule over people, and “dominium,” the rule over things (pp. 10, 138). One of the most important institutional aims of neoliberalism thus became that of safeguarding the security and, crucially, mobility of property rights regardless of political and territorial jurisdictions. Borrowing a term from Hayek, Slobodian calls the legal protection of alien property rights and capital flows “xenos rights” and notes that “it is a right that inheres in the unitary economic space of dominium rather than the fragmented state space of imperium—yet it requires the political institutions of imperium to ensure it” (pp. 123, 220). From this perspective, we live in a “doubled world” of perpetual tensions between peoples and things, “the economic world and the political world” (pp. 11, 131). Neoliberalism's cardinal preoccupation, in other words, lay in ordering a world of polities that simultaneously were politically independent and economically interdependent in order to assure the triumph of the latter.

The old-fashioned imperial legacy of this influential strand of neoliberalism is evident in the numerous instances, scattered throughout the book, of Geneva School theorists suggesting that the global division of labor between an industrialized Western core and a periphery providing raw materials that first emerged in the early modern period was somehow natural and, in the final instance, right. Bonn, for one, warned against further “industrialization in an already over-industrialized world”; the Mont Pèlerin Society was concerned with the “overindustrialization” of the “Global South” in the 1950s; and Röpke ridiculed what he called “supposedly necessary industrialization” in the decolonized world (pp. 97, 143, 166). Taken together, such statements powerfully suggest the extent to which Slobodian's strand of neoliberalism sought in important ways to perpetuate earlier European imperial visions of global economic order by other means and with other institutions, arguments, and rhetoric. From the perspective of some neoliberals, “Empire” was thus “not an era that had ended but a task to be completed” (p. 181). This core argument also highlights a continuing tension in our own moment in history, as our debates over globalization, justice, and development continue to be haunted by the differential—yet hard to theorize—capacity of distinctive economic activities to produce wealth and welfare around the world. And, as Slobodian rightly reminds us, “the rule of dominium could be even grimmer than that of imperium” (p. 219).

This is not to suggest that Slobodian presents the Geneva School as a unified front—far from it. Indeed, some of the book's most memorable passages explore precisely the movement's fault lines, focusing particularly, in the surprising but crucial fifth chapter, on “the variable of race” (p. 149). Evidently, some neoliberals were card-carrying cosmopolitans. Others pretended to be. Others, yet again, including Röpke and William F. Buckley, explicitly justified existing economic relations in light of the supposed potentials for “civilization” of different races. With a candor that is as refreshing as it is troubling, their unhallowed nexus of racialized hierarchies and global economic order culminated in a quandary: “How could empire end without losing control of the nonwhite world?” (p. 155). The solution that William H. Hutt proposed to the South African finance minister Owen Horwood in 1978 was “to weight each person's vote by the amount of taxes he is called upon to pay.” Such a cartoonishly regressive and undemocratic vote would, the argument went, “amount to total political nondiscrimination and yield to the greater wisdom of the market” (p. 176). This is merely one of numerous cases in which Slobodian emphasizes what he sees as neoliberalism's sustained opposition to democracy—which some conceded might “simply lead by its own logic to socialism”—in the name of the higher and purportedly more important cause of ensuring the free international flow of goods and capital, of safeguarding the world economy against the vagaries of sovereignty and of political will (p. 252).

When considering the history of ideas and ideologies, scholars have long tended to ignore the question of how well they actually have worked in history. From such a perspective, it is hard to ignore the irony that “the golden age of postwar capitalism was actually a dark age” in the eyes of many neoliberals (p. 17). But to note this may already be to court heresy from their perspective. Time and again, as Slobodian shows, neoliberalists championed the “world economy” as something “sublime, beyond representation and quantification”—an “incalculable infinity,” the political economy of which one had to design but never plan (pp. 18, 229). Nobody, the argument went in the wake of the so-called socialist calculation debate, could acquire and process the information necessary for purposeful economic policy, but market interactions themselves could be enshrined for “emergent or spontaneous orders” to unfold (p. 227). In the face of calls for global justice, redistribution, and the equivalent of affirmative action in industrialization, the Geneva School instead offered “one of isonomy—one law for the world economy that did not distinguish between historically poorer and richer populations or countries” (p. 261). The superior outcome of neoliberal theory was assumed because it could, according to its own theory of knowledge, never properly be assessed. This original vision was championed eloquently by Röpke's nephew Hans Willgerodt in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and continues to shape public opinion around the world to this day. Yet, as Slobodian emphasizes, it rests on a foundational paradox: “On the one hand, the world economy had to be defended against the excesses of democracy. On the other hand, the world economy itself was invisible and beyond reason and representation” (p. 267). Ultimately, it all comes down to a matter of faith rather than expertise, with neoliberalism as “a negative theology, contending that the world economy is sublime and ineffable” (p. 269).

Slobodian's careful reconstruction of this influential facet of the neoliberal movement thus shows itself to be a crucial chapter in a still longer history of political economy, for many of the core assumptions, concerns, and consequences of Geneva School neoliberalism expand far beyond it, in both space and time. Indeed, European thinkers and statesmen have been struggling with the incongruity between political and economic spaces, the limits of economic knowledge, and the roles of faith and providence in economic order since long before empires ended. After all, the Marquis d'Argenson, famous for his precocious use of the phrase “laissez-faire,” lambasted the papal banker Girolamo Belloni in 1751 for believing that governments ever could harness the knowledge necessary to purposefully improve a state's economy; physiocracy argued for economic liberalization on the basis of faith in the providential dictates of nature; and political economists like David Hume and Cesare Beccaria, not to mention Keynes, Thorstein Veblen, and Joseph Schumpeter, wrote extensively about the tension between states and markets in a world of interlocked and competing political communities. Though it lies beyond the scope of his volume to explore, Slobodian nonetheless begs the deeper and bigger question of how to delineate and connect the intellectual and institutional histories of these traditions.

The Geneva School he has disinterred represents a particularly coherent series of intellectual filiations, but these “neoliberals” continuously drew on—and engaged with—a related and more varied mosaic of ideas, practices, and cultural norms and assumptions. It is probably safe to say that only a minority of usages of the term “neoliberal” over the past decades had Slobodian's Geneva School as their explicit referent, yet they were clearly influenced, more or less directly, by the works of Hayek and Haberler, not to mention, in more or less subterranean ways, by Adam Smith or even François Quesnay. So how did the Geneva School's specific theories regarding the institutional framework necessary to safeguard free flows of goods and capital translate into the commonsensical and widely shared—for a while, at least—notion that markets are self-regulating to everyone's benefit, or what Slobodian calls “popular commitment to free-trade globalism” (p. 285)? How was Hayek's “faith” proselytized separately from its theoretical grounding, and more broadly, how did the Geneva School align or interact with alternative vectors pushing toward similar goals in the second half of the twentieth century, from the milennial hope that trade might create peace through the harrowing legacy of the Holocaust to the Cold War and, to consider more mainstream economic ideas, the extraordinary impact of Paul Samuelson's factor prize equalization theory? How, in the end, did “neoliberal” conclusions become culturally engrained assumptions in large parts of the world? There have been several moments over the last centuries in which variations of dogmatic laissez-faire have taken hold, inevitably fostering crises and backlashes, and the question of why, and how they are related to each other and to the equally complex histories of various other forms of “liberalism,” seems increasingly pressing. Globalists presents a model of how to do such work and invites further research into neoliberalism's complex and partial relationship with alternate traditions and, before that, with the foundational questions of political economy.

In conclusion, Slobodian's book boldly raises the question of what a globalism palatable to a globally differentiated array of demoi might look like—one not blind to “asymmetries of power” or to the need to “placate populations cleft by vast gaps of inequality”: “a world economy,” as he puts it, “without losers” (pp. 269, 285–86). If supranational institutions, a world state, empire, or, for that matter, an inordinate power acting, in eighteenth-century parlance, as a “friend of mankind,” are out of the question, is utopia really the only zip code available for a peaceful world order based on human rights, democracy, and universally beneficial trade? Or are those ideals, too, a form of empire? Ultimately, what is at stake in Globalists is nothing less than the Kantian struggle for perpetual peace, our perennial quest for human sociability across time and space. But, whatever the deeper histories of our particular moment of crisis might be, there can be no doubt that we remain stymied by the shifting relationships between politics and economics, agency and providence, imperium and dominium that have vexed writers since the very origins of political economy. Slobodian sheds crucial light on this nexus of concerns and, therefore, on some of our most pressing predicaments past, present, and future.