Introducing his recently-published book, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Slobodian follows three generations of self-described neoliberals from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire in the 1920s to the establishment of the WTO in the 1990s, recounting a century of efforts to defend the world economy against democratic demands for equality and social justice. Across the decades, the question, for globally engaged economic actors, remained the same: how to tame democracy, defang the nation, and realize what F. A. Hayek called “double government” at the scale of the world. This talk explains how neoliberalism was born not out of nostalgia for laissez faire but as a forward-looking critique of national sovereignty and the rise of mass democracy.
Gesa Mackenthun