World War I is considered by many as the original catastrophe of the short twentieth century, and as Quinn Slobodian shows in his book Globalists, this was particularly true for a group of thinkers commonly referred to as neoliberals, albeit for very particular reasons. To them, a liberal world had come to an end in 1914. It was a world that was made up mostly of nation-states but dominated by empires, a world where British war vessels enforced the Pax Britannica, which, together with the gold standard, secured favorable conditions for world trade, the volume of which would only be reached again with the onset of contemporary globalization.

Slobodian’s core thesis is that this global scale, which figured prominently in the liberal world that vanished in the fires of World War I, remained the imaginary of the particular group of scholars among the neoliberals whom he refers to as the Geneva School, the “globalists” of the book’s title. What the Genevans—among whom the author includes better-known names such as Friedrich August Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, but also lesser-known ones (in the Anglo-American world) such as Wilhelm Röpke, Michael Heilperin, and Gottfried Haberler—saw at the end of the “Great War” was a world increasingly divided among nation-states, whose democratically empowered populations were inclined towards socialism and/or “economic nationalism,” be it in the form of governmental planning or trade barriers.

This situation got even worse with the two other great ruptures that Slobodian lists as triggering the endeavors of the Geneva School to deal with the fallout: First, the Great Depression not only gave “free markets” a bad name all over the world but also effectively ended the meager attempts at restoring at least parts of the liberal world of the nineteenth century during the interwar period, namely, the gold standard. The second rupture only comes much later in the 1970s when another wave of newly independent countries demands a better deal in world trade promoting the so-called new international economic order (NIEO), thus challenging the regime of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As Slobodian shows masterfully, the Geneva School responded to each of these ruptures with designs and (theoretical) attempts, not necessarily at restoring some status quo ante (this is why they are neoliberals and not retroliberals, after all) but, rather, at ensuring that whatever the political order may be, global trade remains unimpeded. In the language and terms from Roman law taken up by Röpke and others neoliberals, the world of dominium, that is, of private property, trade, and finances, had to be secured from the infringement or disorderly effects of the world of imperium, that is, of countries, nations, and people. More concretely, this meant that the rights of capital must not be violated by (decolonized) democracies; that is, these democracies had to be encased to protect the world economy.

Tracing the efforts of the Geneva School to respond to each of these ruptures, Slobodian’s narrative describes how the 1920s witnessed attempts to model and visualize the world economy in order to document (suggestively) the ills of protectionism and “tariff walls”—a term coined back then—only to realize that the attempt to model global trade but also, more fundamentally, the economy in general were scientifically as well as politically futile—as the Great Depression would prove. From the shortcomings of this “world of numbers“ (p. 55) they drew the conclusion that the solution to balancing imperium and dominium were supranational federations, as imagined in the works of Lionel Robbins, Hayek, or Röpke: If the supranational level of such federations only had the power “to say no,” as Hayek once put it, thus ensuring the free flow of trade and people between jurisdictions and leaving to the latter only the prerogative on cultural issues to placate nationalist sentiments, such a common market would not only realize a desirable division of labor but also act as a disciplinary mechanism on individual jurisdictions, which would no longer be able to exercise any significant powers over economic actors and their cross-border interactions.

As Slobodian shows, when the end of World War II did not produce such a federation but rather the United Nations, built on very different principles, the Genevans turned to focusing on the right to own and move capital freely as another way of coming to terms with the difficult relation between imperium and dominium. Such thinkers as Mont Pèlerin Society member Michael Heilperin emphasized the need to safeguard the rights of capital owners against expropriations, but also capital controls. Essentially, he argued, leaving a country and taking your capital with you was just as much a human right as being able to stay, like one of the millions of refugees stranded in one country or another after World War II. This “world of rights“ (p. 121) would take on a unique form in postwar Europe, where the Treaty of Rome signed in 1957 would constitute a common market, the framework of which would be an “economic constitution,”‘ as Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, and other German ordoliberals put it. In this framework, the “four freedoms” of capital, labor, finance, and services had “direct effect,” meaning that anyone (including legal persons) could bring a case to national and European courts if they thought that these rights were violated, be it through tariffs or recalcitrant trade unions.

Still, as Slobodian shows, the Geneva School remained split on whether the European Community was really a model for the reliberalization of world trade or, rather, a gigantic economic fortress erected to keep unwanted competitors off the market and, thus, just another version of economic nationalism writ large. This concern was not unrelated to the preferential treatment of the overseas dominions of the former imperial powers, such as France. With this, Slobodian turns to the globalists’ views on the developing and predominantly nonwhite world, highlighting that in these matters, they turned out to be liberals of a peculiar, or, possibly, a very common type, in their assumptions, for example, regarding the civilizational level of sub-Saharan populations or the exacerbated ills of majoritarian democracy, all of which could only lead to the self-destructive rule of economic nationalism and the imperilment of the rules of dominium.

In the final chapter, Slobodian focuses on the prehistory of the World Trade Organization and how Hayekians pushed for a free-trade regime that would incorporate his insights on the complexity of the (world) market as a gigantic information processor that does require a framework but must be left unperturbed by direct intervention, thus countering the trend in development economics of relying on macroeconomic modeling put in the service of the aforementioned NIEO championed by developing countries and certain UN agencies.

The strengths of Slobodian’s book are almost too numerous to list. Globalists is extremely well researched and exceptionally well written: It is erudite but remains accessible even in tackling the sometimes arcane issues of world trade. The composition of the narrative is admirable, with each chapter addressing a different “world” that the globalists were imagining and for which they were fighting. Most importantly, though, are certainly the highly original findings that the narrative conveys to the reader. Not only is neoliberalism far from a stateless market fundamentalism, as many in the field still suggest; it conceives of the state as an important factor in securing dominium, notwithstanding that it is also the prime threat to it. However, what makes Slobodian’s narrative unique is the shift to structures of domination beyond the nation-state in the context of highly racialized empires, the significance of which the scholarship on the history of neoliberalism has not appreciated sufficiently. His introduction of a “Geneva School” within neoliberal thought is bound to inspire efforts to deepen our understanding of this particular strand of thought, and their views not just on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development world but on the Global South as well.

Slobodian may overstate his case ever so slightly here and there, given that most neoliberals, including Hayek, were still predominantly focused on the national scale, but these are issues that will hopefully be addressed and discussed in future research that takes this fascinating and rich narrative as a point of departure. Both (intellectual) historians as well as political theorists will find this book highly stimulating, and while its main narrative ends with the establishment of the WTO in the mid-1990s, it is ripe with implications for today’s world of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a European Union where the “ordoglobalist” perspective, as Slobodian calls it, has created a regime of austerity in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, and an entrepreneur turned American president engaging in what the Genevans undoubtedly would have castigated as “economic nationalism” and an attack by the world of imperium on the world of dominium.