Neoliberalism sought to encase markets in extra-economic rules, not unleash them

Evidence

I argue that the encasement of the market in a spirit of militant globalism is a better way of describing the international dimensions of the neoliberal proj­ect than the Polanyian terms of disembedding the economy according to a doctrine of market fundamentalism. Polanyi’s ideas provide an elegant parable whereby the cap­i­tal­ist world economy progressively eliminates barriers to its own functioning, to the point that it destroys its own capacity for self-­reproduction. In this narrative, the market is omnivorous, relentlessly transforming land, ­labor, and money into commodities, ­until the basis for social life has been destroyed. Capitalism, according to this analy­sis, needs an opposition to save it from itself. By confronting and absorbing challenges, from workers’ insurance to the welfare state, capitalism secures the social conditions that allow it to persist. As the following chapters show, an essential aspect of the proj­ect of neoliberalism was determining how to preempt the opposition by building an extra-­economic framework that would secure the continued existence of capitalism. Rather than a self-­ regulating market and an economy that eats every­thing, what the neoliberals envisaged and fought for was an ongoing settlement between imperium and dominium while pushing policies to deepen the power of competition to shape and direct ­human life. The normative neoliberal world is not a borderless market without states but a doubled world kept safe from mass demands for social justice and redistributive equality by the guardians of the economic constitution. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 70

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the book’s core revision of ‘encasement’ versus Polanyi’s ‘disembedding’ as the frame for understanding the neoliberal project.
• XREF: Directly reframes my existing mental model of Polanyi’s double movement and market fundamentalism; also echoes the rubric’s framing that this is a causal thesis book. — connects to: Neoliberalism is best understood as statecraft building market enforcers, not market-making — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 54; Neoliberals pursued an engineered order rather than expecting free markets to emerge naturally — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1907; Neoliberalism advanced a political, not merely economic, case for the competitive market — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 34 (+7 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The doubled-world/im-perium-and-dominium formulation against the borderless-market caricature is a paradigm-level reframe worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals pursued an engineered order rather than expecting free markets to emerge naturally #corroborates (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1907
• Hayekian neoliberalism requires active rule-design to insulate markets from politics #expands (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 360
• Neoliberalism advanced a political, not merely economic, case for the competitive market #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 34
• Neoliberalism’s distinctiveness was not homo economicus but a demand for moral foundations for markets. #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 19
• Neoliberals wanted international rules to discipline states, not just markets #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 266
• Neoliberalism reversed the state’s protective role toward shielding markets #expands (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 745