Reviewed by: Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian Or Rosenboim Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. By Quinn Slobodian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 381. Cloth. $35.00. ISBN 978-0674979529. In recent years, the intellectual foundation of neoliberalism has attracted the attention of historians and economists. Scholars like Angus Burgin and Dotan Leshem have looked to the past to define the meaning of neoliberalism and outline its future trajectories. Quinn Slobodian has made a significant contribution to this growing body of scholarship with his remarkable study of neoliberalism in the twentieth century, Globalists. Slobodian's main thesis in the book is that neoliberalism sought to adapt the liberal market-based global vision to the reality of the modern states-system in the postimperial world. The book's dramatis personae are a group of economists centered on what Slobodian calls the "Geneva School," which included Friedrich Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Heilperin, Lionel Robbins, Gottfried Haberler, and Frieder Roessler. Thus, Slobodian argues that scholars who seek to understand the rise and the meaning of neoliberalism should shift their gaze away from the English-speaking intellectual sphere to the German-speaking one. In this narrative, the Swiss city by the lake becomes a hub of intellectual, political, and economic exchanges between mostly Central European economists—many of them refugees—concerned with the future of liberty after empire. The appropriation of their ideas by American economists in Chicago or by international organizations like the World Trade [End Page 385] Organization came at a later stage. The origins of the neoliberal global worldview were anchored in Europe, and in particular in the political and economic legacy of the Habsburg Empire and fin-de-siècle Vienna. The book's meticulously researched narrative unfolds over seven chapters, each dedicated to a different aspect of the globalists' vision of renewed economic liberalism: from tariffs to federations, from constitutions to new international organizations, the globalists explored a wide range of means to adapt the state to their liberal idea of absolute property rights, wholly integrated world economy, and individual liberty. Writing in the shadow of totalitarianism and fascism, these neoliberals advocated setting constraints to both democracy and nationalism, but they did not wish to abolish the state. But their critique of the ideology of nationalism did not translate into a call to abolish all states or to establish a supranational political system (although some, like Hayek, were at one time federalists). Instead, they sought a structural adjustment that could embed the postimperial world order within an integrated, liberal international institutional design. For them, "order was not a steady state, but an adjustment, an often painful process of learning" (262). The market could not function on its own; the globalists' role was to fine tune its mechanisms and ensure its smooth operation on a global scale. Thus, Slobodian argues that neoliberalism "is less a theory of the market or of economics than of law and the state" (268). The main contribution of this original and compelling study is outlining a new context for assessing and understanding neoliberalism in which the state plays a major role. Politics and the law are now seen to be much more significant in constructing the neoliberal worldview than previously assumed. Slobodian shows how the protagonists of globalist neoliberalism envisioned a range of legal, institutional, and political tools to ensure the integration of the world economy and the preservation of the unequal global power relations after the decline of the European empires. The book is framed as a contextual intellectual history of the economists who constituted the Geneva School, but the contextualization is inevitably partial. Most obviously, the reader lacks a clear view of the political and intellectual opposition to the neoliberal vision. Who was Hayek arguing against? What were the alternative visions and plans of a global order available after 1945? If the core of neoliberalism is to be found in Central Europe, it would be valuable to situate the proposals of the globalist neoliberals within the horizon of European postwar politics. In this sense, for example, the wartime federalist vision of Hayek and Robbins...
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May 13, 2020
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