Neoliberalism’s dominant emotion was anxiety, not confident hubris

Evidence

Despite their apparent victory, however, Geneva School neoliberals throughout the twentieth ­century ­were haunted by a vision of a world disintegrating. Sometimes accused of having a smug confidence in the resilience of capitalism, they instead ­were troubled by the possibility that the global conditions that sustain a cap­i­tal­ist world economy ­were fundamentally ­under threat. The dominant emotion felt by the neoliberals at the heart of my narrative was not hubris but anxiety. They expended all of their efforts in attempting to design fixes to stabilize what they saw as a precarious arrangement. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 81

Categorization

• QUESTION: This reframing of the affective register of neoliberalism from triumph to anxiety is worth investigating further — is it corroborated in other historiography?
• XREF: Connects to accounts of neoliberal fragility and crisis-management as constitutive, e.g. contemporary discourse on ‘polycrisis’. — connects to: Neoliberalism’s early adherents faced deep uncertainty about their prospects — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 149; Neoliberals rejected the deistic self-regulating market as naive optimism. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 332; Early neoliberal development thought prescribed conservative reform and was not yet confident. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1292 (+2 more)