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Author Quinn Slobodian (ACLS Burkhardt/WIGH Fellow; Wellesley College) will meet with a panel of critics to discuss his new book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018)
Panelists:
Katrina Forrester , Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies, Harvard University
Priya Lal, Associate Professor of History, Boston College
Jamie Martin, Assistant Professor of History and School of Foreign Service, Georgetown
SUMMARY (from Harvard University Press):
Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.
Slobodian begins in Austria in the 1920s. Empires were dissolving and nationalism, socialism, and democratic self-determination threatened the stability of the global capitalist system. In response, Austrian intellectuals called for a new way of organizing the world. But they and their successors in academia and government, from such famous economists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to influential but lesser-known figures such as Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin, did not propose a regime of laissez-faire. Rather they used states and global institutions—the League of Nations, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade Organization, and international investment law—to insulate the markets against sovereign states, political change, and turbulent democratic demands for greater equality and social justice.