Neoliberalism’s core value is protecting the whole world economy, not individual freedom
Evidence
The narrative offered here is a fairly contained story, presented largely through biography, about three generations of thinkers, from the Mises Circle in 1920s Vienna to the international economic lawyers of Geneva who helped theorize the WTO in the 1980s. Its focus is on the specific notion of a double government form designed to encase the respective fields of dominium and imperium. It finds the intellectual origins of neoliberal globalism in the reordering of the world that came at the end of empire and finds the historical roots of paradigms of international economic law and neoliberal constitutionalism more often covered by political scientists and sociologists than historians. Looking at the century from Geneva (rather than Chicago, Washington, or London), we see a strand of thought that held that, in order to survive, the world economy needed laws that limited the autonomy of nations. We see a version of neoliberalism where the core value is not the freedom of the individual but the interdependence of the whole. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 98
Categorization
- DEFINE: Frames the book’s distinctive definition of Geneva-school neoliberalism as world-interdependence protection rather than the usual individualism reading.
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated interest in how the globalist project encases markets against democratic sovereignty, and to other accounts (Harvey, Mirowski) that center Chicago and individual liberty. — connects to: Neoliberalism’s core project was protecting world markets from democratization — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 34; Neoliberal ‘economic rights’ protect capital’s market freedom, not welfare entitlements. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 430; Neoliberal freedom is recoded as negative liberty to protect market supremacy — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2130 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Neoliberal human rights primarily preserve the market order rather than protect individuals
#corroborates(0.92) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 45 - Neoliberal freedom is recoded as negative liberty to protect market supremacy
#corroborates(0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2130 - Neoliberal ‘economic rights’ protect capital’s market freedom, not welfare entitlements.
#corroborates(0.88) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 430 - Neoliberal ‘freedom’ is internally redefined to mean market autonomy, not political liberty
#corroborates(0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 166 - Neoliberalism denies any harmable self, dissolving all positive freedom
#corroborates(0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 308 - Neoliberalism’s social theory is fundamentally epistemological, recoding freedom as instrumental to independent orders
#qualifies(0.75)