Abstract
As offshoots of and reactions to neoliberalism continue to dominate our political imaginary, the scholarly critique of neoliberal thought remains urgent and timely. This article engages with two recent intellectual histories of neoliberalism, Thomas Biebricher’s The Political Theory of Neoliberalism and Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists, both of which serve to re-centre debates surrounding the composition and career of neoliberal thinking. Dealing, respectively, with the most basic theoretical architecture of neoliberalism and neoliberals’ response to the end of Empire, both studies make key contributions to our critical appraisal of the neoliberal present. It will be argued, however, that these books are best read together, as each goes some way towards addressing the other’s analytical limits.
As an object of scholarly scrutiny, neoliberalism has attracted an astounding amount of attention over the last two decades or so. The resulting body of literature has tended to coagulate around a handful of thematic nodes or analytical trends: the exact composition of the entrepreneurial subject remains a hotly contested topic (Feher, 2018; Scharff, 2016), for instance, whilst political-theological critiques of neoliberal theory are multiplying steadily (Cornelissen, 2017; Kotsko, 2018) and elsewhere in the scholarly arena the very usefulness of the concept of neoliberalism is being questioned (Birch, 2017; Venugopal, 2015). Occasionally, however, a study comes along that disrupts these trends and breaks new scholarly ground.
Both Thomas Biebricher’s The Political Theory of Neoliberalism and Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists are just that: pioneering works that re-centre the critical study of neoliberalism. However, whilst both books take the history of neoliberal thought as their object, they achieve this feat in remarkably dissimilar ways. Indeed, although they are animated by a similar aim – to understand our neoliberal present through an analysis of its intellectual genealogy – these books pull in slightly different directions. This is largely the result of a different conception of ideas and, accordingly, of the work of intellectual history. Where, as I will discuss in more detail below, Biebricher sees neoliberal thought as an ideational resource that policy-makers and legislators may tap into when they are in search of guiding principles, for Slobodian the relation between neoliberalism and policy is altogether more ambiguous. As he makes clear, the line between theory and practice is always a porous one, and neoliberal thought adjusts itself to shifts in policy as much as policy draws upon neoliberal thought. Here, theory and practice are mutually constitutive, the one conditioning the other and vice versa.
As they depart from distinct historiographical principles, it is unsurprising that The Political Theory of Neoliberalism and Globalists end up highlighting different aspects of neoliberal thinking. Biebricher is centrally concerned with the structure and composition of neoliberal political theory. He draws up a cartography of neoliberal positions on several key theoretical problems, taking care to trace argumentative strategies and conceptual nuances. Slobodian, by contrast, is more attentive to neoliberalism’s travels, the twists and turns of neoliberal thought as it flowed from one context to the other and was adjusted, over time, to new and evolving circumstances. He patiently reconstructs the institutional and personal channels through which neoliberal ideas circulated, carefully situating them in their historical contexts. In Biebricher’s hands, neoliberal thought appears as a complex and layered structure that can be dissected by analytical means; in Slobodian’s, neoliberalism feels like it is alive, a species of thought that adapts itself to its institutional and ideological climate and whose patterns of migration may be reconstructed.
Although I will further reflect on its implications as I go along, it is worth highlighting at this point that the – in my opinion – most significant upshot of this divergence in historiographical approaches is that Biebricher and Slobodian are led to take different positions on what constitutes neoliberalism’s central problematic. In emphasising the theoretical composition of neoliberal ideas, the former takes neoliberalism to revolve around a problematic that is, at root, ontological in nature: what conditions must be given for markets to thrive? The latter, on the other hand, sees neoliberal thought as a theoretical response to a series of historical challenges, foremost amongst which is the end of empire and the emergence of decolonisation movements. This, as I will argue in the remainder of this piece, accounts both for the limits of each study and for the remarkable synergy between them. Let me start by discussing each book in turn.
Biebricher’s The Political Theory of Neoliberalism does what it says on the tin: it offers a systematic, rigorous account of neoliberal political thought. The bulk of the book is dedicated to the range of positions that may be found amongst leading neoliberal theorists on four key themes, namely the State, democracy, science and politics. By patiently documenting neoliberals’ diverse approaches to these themes Biebricher shows that neoliberalism, as an intellectual formation, has always been internally heterogeneous and that there was no shortage of contestation between its leading lights. The exemplary chapter on neoliberal conceptions of science, for example, demonstrates that neoliberalism’s most prominent thinkers disagreed passionately over the vexing problem of the role and reach of the social sciences, arguing that Walter Eucken’s and Alexander Rüstow’s ‘thinking about science is completely opposite to [Milton] Friedman’s’ (p. 114).
Whilst the chapter on science stands out in part because it offers the first comprehensive account of neoliberal approaches to scientific method, some of the book’s other chapters offer crucial correctives to the extant literature. The chapter on democracy, for instance, shows how valuable Biebricher’s attention to detail can be. Whereas critics of neoliberal de-democratisation have tended to emphasise the anti-democratic elements of neoliberal doctrine (e.g. Bonefeld, 2017), his analysis takes care to highlight the moments at which neoliberals show their profound ambivalence about the value of democracy. As Biebricher notes, ‘the neoliberal assessment of the relative merits [of democratic politics] are [sic] more nuanced than one might expect and hardly do we find the straightforward call for markets to replace democratic decision making’ (p. 100). This is a crucial point to make, since it shows that from the first, the neoliberal project was aimed at reforming and reconstructing – rather than obliterating – the democratic imaginary. By casting neoliberalism as a serious school of thought that sought to contest the dominant model of democracy, Biebricher on the one hand avoids casting its architects as cartoonishly evil conspirators out to gut Western democracy and on the other shows that an immanent critique of neoliberal theory is likely to be more effective than moralistic condemnation of its anti-democratic record.
This brings me to the second key motif of The Political Theory of Neoliberalism: the relation between theory and practice. As a historian of political thought, Biebricher may be expected to be interested above all else in the development of neoliberal ideas themselves. As the second (albeit shorter) part of the book demonstrates, however, his focus is not on theory alone. Inquiring into the influence exerted by neoliberal thought on the composition of the European Union, this part maps the multiple afterlives of the ideas discussed in the preceding part, taking care to note that when put into practice even the most carefully crafted theories may take on a life of their own. The two chapters comprising it deal with European politics of austerity and the ‘ordoliberalization of Europe’ (p. 200) respectively, but the broader concern underpinning them is with the influence of ideas. As noted above, Biebricher works with a specific historiographical conception of the relation between ideas and policy. For him, ideas are always formative of political practice to a greater or lesser extent, but especially in times of crisis do theoretical frames become important sources of inspiration for policy-makers and institutions. In his words: ideas matter even more than usual under certain conditions that can be described as fundamental uncertainty. Under such conditions, which the European crisis produced in its several iterations, actors are not even sure what their interests are and must consequently rely—more or less consciously—on ideas and heuristics to chart their course of action. (p. 159)
When it comes to re-centring the broader literature on neoliberalism, Biebricher’s most valuable contribution lies, in my opinion, in the book’s first chapter. Entitled ‘What is Neoliberalism?’, this chapter takes care to offer a definition of the book’s subject matter that combines two strengths: it is specific enough to allow for rigorous historical analysis and it is broad enough to encompass all those phenomena one would wish to label ‘neoliberal’. Biebricher opens the chapter by acknowledging that the term ‘neoliberalism’ is, as he puts it, ‘inconvenient’ (p. 11) since its meaning has suffered a fair amount of semantic inflation in recent decades. This should not stop us from using it, however, lest we render ourselves blind to its real-world implications. Attempting to avoid the pitfalls already mentioned, he proposes to focus on what he calls ‘the neoliberal problematic’ (p. 25), that is to say, a series of problems shared by all neoliberal thinkers and actors regardless of their specific context. To quote Biebricher at some length: The common denominator of neoliberalism cannot be expressed positively in the form of a number of doctrines or theses. What all neoliberals share is the problem of how to identify the factors indispensable to the maintenance of functioning markets, since the option of simply leaving them to themselves is no longer on the table. Obviously, this still leaves room for a range of different responses or ways of framing solutions to the neoliberal problematic as well as changes over time. What exactly it is that ensures the functioning of markets is a matter of continued dispute between different neoliberal thinkers and varieties of neoliberal thought. (p. 26)
In short, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism offers a much-needed corrective of the existing scholarship on neoliberalism. This does not mean it is without its flaws, however. Although Biebricher’s methodical analysis of the content of neoliberal doctrine is unparalleled, his understanding of the context of its emergence leaves a few things to be desired. In particular, he argues that neoliberalism was born in the wake of the Great Depression as an explicit rejoinder to several competing political philosophies. Although this ‘field of adversity’ (p. 18), as he calls it (borrowing from Foucault), was diverse, two political formations stand out: ‘neoliberalism’s prime antagonists are certainly Communism and National Socialism/Fascism, which the neoliberals view as nothing more than different manifestations of the same basic collectivism-cum-totalitarianism’ (p. 20). Whilst it is correct to say that early neoliberalism defined itself in opposition to a diverse range of collectivist philosophies, the claim that in particular fascism was one of its prime constitutive others is not entirely correct. For one thing, it overlooks the fact that in the post-war era, after the defeat of Nazism, neoliberals by and large stopped viewing fascism as a potential threat to the liberal or capitalist paradigm. Stronger yet, many of them came to endorse fascist dictatorships actively, openly singing the praises of fascist and crypto-fascist leaders such as Francisco Franco and António Salazar (e.g. Hayek, 1960; Shenfield, 1980). 1 The lesson to be learned from the Chilean experience, as well as numerous comparable ones, is that rather than being unilaterally opposed to fascism, neoliberalism can, under the right conditions, make common cause with fascist political reason. For another thing, Biebricher’s exclusive focus on communism and fascism as neoliberals’ adversaries elides a third – and in the long run arguably more significant – opponent: post-war decolonisation movements. Particularly in the context of the Cold War, decolonial projects appeared to the fledgling neoliberal movement as a grave threat to the ‘West’ and its interests.
The elision of neoliberals’ vocal opposition to decolonisation is more than a historical error on Biebricher’s part: it also hamstrings his understanding of neoliberal political theory. Especially in his discussions of ‘neoliberal authoritarianism’ – that is, those political formations in which neoliberalism and authoritarian rule join forces – his underappreciation of the colonial signature of neoliberal theory is problematic. Although it is strictly speaking true that, as Biebricher writes, ‘Hayek defended the notion of a liberal authoritarianism as preferable over an unlimited democracy’ (p. 145), it is of singular importance to note that Hayek’s defence of authoritarianism was conditional, applying only to what he tended to call ‘the new nations’ (Hayek, 1960), which was a euphemism for post-colonial societies. More generally speaking, many neoliberals, including FA Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow (all of whom are key to Biebricher’s book), firmly believed that ‘Western’ cultural values were amongst the conditions necessary for the proper functioning of markets. This prompted a generation of neoliberal theorists to draw up an inventory of those cultural customs and traditions, such as the Indian caste system or African tribal customs, that stymied economic development in former colonial regions and that would therefore have to be discouraged or even actively prevented – by dictatorial or authoritarian means if necessary. A crucial part of the neoliberal programme, in other words, was a carefully crafted post-colonial governmentality that came to be a central feature of neoliberal globalisation. For a book that discusses the key components of the political theory of neoliberalism, the elision of this thematic constitutes something of an oversight.
It is here that Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism makes its most pressing intervention. Indeed, as its subtitle suggests, this book places neoliberalism’s colonial context front and centre, arguing that ‘[d]ecolonization […] was central to the emergence of the neoliberal model of world governance’ (p. 5). The core claim made in this impressive study is that neoliberalism emerged principally in response to the end of Empire: the end of the Habsburg Empire, to be exact. As Slobodian argues, this historical watershed required a reconceptualisation of global order as nation-states, rather than transnational empires, became the defining unit of global political-economic thought and struggle. Faced after the First World War with the end of the Habsburg Empire, neoliberalism’s founding fathers (who were largely based in and around Vienna) were thus confronted with the need to rethink the state, the market and the social order all at once, so that their dream of a well-functioning, integrated and global free market could be realised. Neoliberalism was the result. At root a political-cum-intellectual project to insulate the global market from external pressures, neoliberalism set itself the task of designing a supranational institutional system that could embed markets and protect private property rights in the post-imperial world.
Slobodian’s narrative unfolds over the course of seven chapters, each of which tackles a different stage of the evolution of neoliberal thinking about world order. In particular, he hones in on the members of what he terms the ‘Geneva School’ (p. 7), which includes a portion of the usual suspects, such as Ludwig von Mises, FA Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke and Lionel Robbins, as well as several figures who have largely remained unknown to critics of neoliberalism, such as Michael Heilperin, Gottfried Haberler, Jan Tumlir and Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann. By focusing not just on the familiar canon but on this group of neoliberals who were united in part by their geographical proximity (Vienna and Geneva being key) and in part by their shared philosophical concern (the problem of world order), Globalists is able to paint a compelling picture of one longstanding and absolutely central concern of neoliberal thought.
Crucial to Slobodian’s genealogy of the Geneva School is the conceptual distinction between imperium and dominium, drawn from Carl Schmitt’s post-war writings. Imperium names the world of territorial, bordered states; dominium is the world of property and capital. Schmitt’s thesis is that from the 19th century onwards, these two worlds came to overlap, resulting in a ‘doubled world’ (p. 10) where the global economy coexisted – albeit in perpetual tension – with the global community of nation-states. Although he uses it throughout the book to great analytical effect, Slobodian did not conjure this distinction out of thin air: neoliberals themselves were inspired by Schmitt’s writings (a topic that, itself, has drawn a lot of scholarly attention, e.g. Bonefeld, 2017; Kiely, 2017) and adopted his division between imperium and dominium gleefully. The result was a comprehensive neoliberal globalist doctrine that advocated supranational institutions strong enough to protect private property as well as nation-states equipped to secure the cultural and legal preconditions for national markets. As Slobodian writes in one of the book’s most insightful passages: Geneva School neoliberals offered a blueprint for globalism based on institutions of multitiered governance that are insulated from democratic decision making and charged with maintaining the balance between the political world of imperium and the economic world of dominium. Dominium is not a space of laissez-faire or noninterventionism but is instead an object of constant maintenance, litigation, design, and care. […] Geneva School neoliberals prescribed neither an obliteration of politics by economics nor the dissolution of states into a global marketplace but a carefully structured and regulated settlement between the two. (p. 12)
Equipped with the novel genealogical focus on Geneva neoliberalism and with the conceptual distinction between imperium and dominium, Slobodian is in a position to construct a powerful narrative about the trajectory of neoliberal thought about world order. As he shows, however, neoliberalism was never about the articulation of a pure or comprehensive doctrine. Rather, it was primarily a problem-driven movement that was highly adept at adjusting itself to prevailing circumstances. Whilst in the interwar period, for instance, the Geneva School dedicated itself to theorising ‘strong supra-national federations’ (p. 92), hoping that a federal system might successfully safeguard property rights, it became wary of such models when it observed, in the post-war period, that neither the European Economic Community (EEC) nor the United Nations (UN) was likely to become the paragon of liberal internationalism that it had placed its hope in.
More broadly speaking, one of the many strengths of Slobodian’s approach is that he is less reliant than is Biebricher on an analytical distinction between ideas and their application. As Slobodian’s genealogy demonstrates, the influence of neoliberalism was not restricted to its offering a store of ideas, an ideational resource, for policy-makers and legislators to draw on in times of upheaval. Rather, neoliberals were often directly involved in legislation or institutional design: in the immediate post-war era, as the exemplary fourth chapter shows, the Geneva School played a key role not only in burying proposals for an International Trade Organization (ITO), which was intended to form a crucial part of the Bretton Woods systems, but also in drafting alternative legislation for international investment law, written with the express purpose of keeping decolonised nations in the Global South in check. Later in the century, as the sixth and seventh chapters document, Geneva School neoliberals were instrumental first in shoring up the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which in the eyes of several of them was a potent tool in warding off what they saw as the EEC’s agricultural protectionism, and then in transforming the GATT into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. Here, the point is not so much that neoliberal ideas proved influential because they had become heuristics amongst policy-makers but rather that several key architects of such hugely significant institutions as GATT and WTO were themselves prominent members of the neoliberal movement, throwing any sharp distinction between thought and practice into relief.
One feature of Slobodian’s work that deserves special mention is that it includes a chapter devoted to how some members of the Geneva School conceptualised race. This is a crucial intervention because critical scholarship on neoliberalism has overwhelmingly ignored its intersections with race and racism (see Issar, 2019). As Chapter 5 of Globalists shows, neoliberal thought was no stranger to racialised differentiation. Focusing on South African apartheid in particular, Slobodian shows how the neoliberal approach to market-building played out in a racially segregated context. For one thing, this case study makes it plain that neoliberalism is no stranger to racism of the most vitriolic sort: Wilhelm Röpke (d. 1966), for instance, spent the final years of his life defending apartheid, writing in 1963 that: the nonwhites of South Africa were ‘at a stage of development which excludes true, spiritual and political integration with the highly civilized Whites, and are at present in such numbers that they threaten to overwhelm the latter who are present upholders of the political, cultural and economic order’. (Röpke as cited in Slobodian 2018, pp. 152–153)
What sets Globalists apart from the majority of intellectual histories of neoliberalism is its astounding attention to detail. Favouring patient, granular analysis of archival material, personal communications and policy documents over the interpretation of several high-profile mainstays of the neoliberal canon, Slobodian manages to unearth arguments, thinkers and lines of influence that have thus far been overlooked. This makes the book an invaluable resource to a variety of disciplines, and it will no doubt rapidly become a staple of neoliberalism studies. That said, this particular strength may also be one of the book’s most significant limits. Indeed, one implication of Slobodian’s method is that he is less well positioned than is Biebricher to penetrate the ontological substrate upon which neoliberalism is based. Thus, whilst he offers a thoughtful analysis of the Geneva School’s shifting position on federalism, Slobodian does not comment on the more fundamental account of societal order that underlies this debate. Similarly, although his discussion of neoliberals’ attitudes towards race is as perceptive as it is innovative, he does not inquire into the more subtle ways in which neoliberal conceptions of culture or enterprise are racialised on a constitutive, ontological level.
I raise these points not to criticise Globalists: indeed, if it had spoken to these issues it would have been a different book altogether. Rather, I do so to argue that as a study of some of neoliberalism’s more subterranean and shadowy networks and influences, it is best read alongside studies that address the composition of neoliberal ideology on a more general register. Indeed, when made to speak to each other, Biebricher’s The Political Theory of Neoliberalism and Slobodian’s Globalists make for a powerful critical history of neoliberalism. Where Biebricher expounds the theoretical foundations of neoliberals’ antipathy towards democracy, Slobodian neatly charts its career from the apartheid context to late 20th-century efforts at international legislation. Where Slobodian documents the Geneva School’s many adventures in active policy-making and institutional design, Biebricher contextualises such adventures by explaining that neoliberals saw scientists as having a special duty to improve political reason. Where Biebricher establishes that at heart, neoliberalism is always concerned with the necessary preconditions of markets, Slobodian makes visible what this doctrine implies when it is brought to bear on groups that have been racialised as other or that have been subjected to colonial domination.
To conclude, both of the books under review here make a substantial contribution to the history of neoliberal thought, correcting it in some ways and opening new avenues for scholarly inquiry in others. Bearing in mind neoliberalism’s capacity to adapt itself continuously and to mutate into novel political formations, and faced today with neoliberalism’s continued hold on our political-economic imaginary, studies like these are the best that history writing has to offer: timely and rigorous analysis of the past that helps us better understand who and what we are in the present.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.