Quinn Slobodian — Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

135 published claims from this book.

• 1950s development consensus focused on output growth without prescribing method.
• 1960s conservative economists cultivated an aura of impartial oracular authority.
• A binding free-trade ITO was the first fully articulated postwar neoliberal utopia.
• A former Nazi-era banker led the postwar push for international investor protection
• Abs’s property-rights advocacy extended his wartime economic-constitution views rather than repenting them
• American segregationism was explicitly linked to defense of European colonialism
• An acquittal in a politically charged murder trial triggered the 1927 Vienna uprising.
• Austrian and British elites of the 1930s shared a postwar-world-building vocation.
• Austrian liberal economists aligned their discipline with the humanities and the arts
• Austrian liberal economists conceived economics as an aesthetic, spirit-based humanities discipline.
• Austrian liberals of the 1920s sought to translate economic theory into policy guidance
• Austrian officials invoked the world economy to roll back welfare gains
• Capital controls were embedded in the Bretton Woods IMF framework
• Capital rights were repackaged as individual rights from 1945 onward
• Chile’s Chicago Boys network predated Pinochet grounded in pre-coup institutions.
• Competition is a discovery process requiring minimal rules, not an endpoint or structure.
• Computers and elite economists both claimed to produce knowledge beyond politics.
• Computers were presented as impartially authoritative economic oracles at the 1964 World’s Fair.
• Core neoliberal intellectuals actively opposed universal suffrage in Southern Africa.
• Critics saw the convention as erecting property rights over the human right to eat
• Cybernetics framed global economy as price-driven feedback among guided agents
• Direct individual access to the European Court of Justice bypassed national sovereignty.
• Domestic courts, not international ones, would enforce world economic law beyond national borders.
• Early neoliberals prefigured Polanyi by demanding the economy be re-embedded in society.
• Early neoliberals sought to radically shrink national sovereignty in service of free trade.
• Economic nationalism results from special interests empowered by popular democracy, not poor leadership.
• Empire’s end forced small states into relying on open world markets and domestic austerity.
• Eurafrique rhetoric masked the total absence of African participation in its negotiation.
• Eurafrique’s paternalist framing revived the Berlin Conference’s civilizing mission rhetoric.
• European Community law gave market actors a supranational forum beyond their own state.
• European Community law served as the model for scaling a supranational trade constitution globally
• Freiburg-trained Hayekian lawyers staffed GATT’s legal reform position after Tumlir.
• Friedman equated universal suffrage in Rhodesia with minority-rule black government
• Friedman opposed sanctions because ideal markets ignore race and nationality
• GATT legal experts scaled Hayek’s cognitive hierarchy to world economic order
• GATT officials physically erased the ILO’s labor imagery when taking over its Geneva building.
• GATT’s world economy centered on prices and rules, not labor and toil.
• Geneva School neoliberalism was ordoliberalism scaled up to the world
• Geneva School neoliberals co-opted human rights language to defend market freedoms
• Global South nations pursued protection and liberalization simultaneously rather than one ideology
• H. G. Wells fictionalized the League of Nations as a future scientific world government
• Haberler asserted business cycles internationalize across national economies
• Haberler framed GATT as a watchdog protecting non-European outsiders
• Hayek and Mises favored global governance, not unfettered free markets
• Hayek attacked rights language only when tied to centralized economic planning.
• Hayek described the global market as transcendent and beyond representation
• Hayek distinguished trained-reactive engineers from system-building engineers
• Hayek feared UN selectivity more than apartheid itself
• Hayek grounded negative rights in utilitarian market efficiency, not natural law.
• Hayek proposed constitutions to anchor economic freedoms against legislatures
• Hayekian economists occupied the most influential reform positions at GATT.
• Hayekian theory lacked a theory of constitutional founding; Schmitt supplied the moment of decision.
• Interwar Vienna’s labor-capital standoff shaped the birth of neoliberalism
• Kennedy’s foreign aid extended New Deal state methods globally.
• Leading neoliberals defended restricting political freedom to preserve economic freedom
• Mestmäcker fused Hayek with Böhm to scale the economic constitution to the EEC level
• Mises blamed tariffs and war, not capitalism, for interrupting world prosperity
• Mises framed the socialist calculation debate at world, not national, scale
• Mises sanctioned suspending democracy when it failed to secure stability.
• Mises treated nations as malleable populations to be rearranged by migration
• Mises’ 1921 program already coupled free trade with wage compression
• Mises’s private Chamber created an alternative to the university for training economists
• Modern capitalism created two overlapping worlds of territorial states and dispersed private property.
• Neoliberal activists lobbied the US government against anti-apartheid sanctions.
• Neoliberal activists within business organizations helped defeat the postwar ITO treaty.
• Neoliberal economists saw wage cuts as necessary for small states to compete globally.
• Neoliberal Geneva experts adopted Hayek’s cybernetic systems view of world order
• Neoliberal globalism meant insulating markets from democracy, not abolishing states
• Neoliberal governance seeks managed borders, not borderless openness
• Neoliberal investor-rights proposals mocked in the 1950s became the 21st-century norm.
• Neoliberal reformers framed Global South exemptions as undermining the rule of law.
• Neoliberal thinkers explicitly prioritized fighting inflation over reducing social friction.
• Neoliberal thinkers repeatedly countenanced dictators as the lesser evil
• Neoliberalism captured the anti-boredom critique that defeated the organised left, replacing it with anxiety.
• Neoliberalism emerged from practical business advocacy, not abstract theory
• Neoliberalism emerged partly as a critique of national sovereignty and democratic budgeting.
• Neoliberalism is best understood as statecraft building market enforcers, not market-making
• Neoliberalism pivoted from the economy to the framework encasing it
• Neoliberalism sought institutions balancing the world economy against political sovereignty
• Neoliberalism sought to encase markets in extra-economic rules, not unleash them
• Neoliberalism wants a doubled world insulated from redistributive demands.
• Neoliberalism was both a class-power project and a coherent ideology.
• Neoliberalism’s core project was protecting world markets from democratization
• Neoliberalism’s core value is protecting the whole world economy, not individual freedom
• Neoliberalism’s doctrine was shaped from its start by business patrons
• Neoliberalism’s dominant emotion was anxiety, not confident hubris
• Neoliberals abandoned economic measurement for institutional design after the 1930s
• Neoliberals coined and repurposed consumer sovereignty to rival national sovereignty
• Neoliberals idealized the British free-trade empire as a postnational frame
• Neoliberals pushed floating exchange rates and open capital flows that disciplined welfare spending.
• Neoliberals reframed Schmitt’s critique as a positive blueprint for world order.
• Neoliberals rejected European integration because the League’s voluntary model had already failed
• Neoliberals rejected planning yet immediately designed world-scale institutional blueprints.
• Neoliberals saw the EEC as continental protectionism, not true integration
• Neoliberals sought enforceable capital flight rights that outstripped human rights protections.
• Neoliberals wrote their own inverted history of the twentieth century
• NIEO opponents reframed Global South demands as an assault on liberal trading principles.
• Ordoliberal ‘economic constitution’ meant a normative vision, not a founding legal document.
• Ordoliberals saw the economic constitution as imposed by deliberate political will from above
• Petersmann rejected rights claims only when they favored the Global South
• Petrodollar recycling pressured the Global South to accept uniform rules.
• Postwar suffrage, planning confidence, and national treaties empowered politics against economy
• Preferential trade deals for the Global South replaced universal free trade
• Prior scholarship on neoliberalism neglected the question of scale
• Race and segregation preoccupied American audiences even in economic policy contexts
• Richard Riedl compiled the era’s most comprehensive tariff index
• Röpke came to see empire as an unfinished task rather than a closed era
• Röpke justified market discipline by the entrepreneur’s shared risk with others
• Röpke saw foreign aid as exporting collectivist policy globally.
• Röpke wanted national sovereignty reduced but not transferred to global government.
• Schmitt saw the economy as a non-state sphere permeating all political borders.
• Securing negative rights globally required proactive enforcement, not passivity
• Some neoliberals explicitly embraced empire as a model for global economic order.
• Spontaneous social order arises from uncoordinated individual choices without conscious design
• The apartheid government eagerly circulated Röpke’s writings as propaganda
• The Austrian liberal economists grew up amid Vienna’s Secession art movement
• The ECJ was conceived as guardian of a treaty binding states against democratic interference.
• The EEC exception to GATT rules unleashed wider protectionism
• The Eurafrica model, not universalist free trade, shaped 1960s trade policy
• The Geneva School mobilized against the NIEO as a threat to decolonize international law.
• The Great Depression drove economists from theory toward empirical data
• The Great Depression’s financial storms convinced intellectuals that humanity was one indivisible economy
• The Haberler method presaged the Mont Pèlerin Society structure
• The investor-rights code envisioned an international arbitration court bypassing national courts
• The Ringstrasse and Haussmann’s boulevards were built to police uprisings
• The term neoliberalism was coined at the 1938 colloquium on a cartelist’s suggestion
• The Treaty of Rome became a supranational constitution enforcing market rules beyond democratic reach
• The United States privileged French-German agreement over its own decolonization ideals.
• The unknowability of the world economy drove neoliberal federalist reform
• Tumlir applied Hayek’s stratified-order idea to multi-scalar economic law design.
• Tumlir transposed German ordoliberal constitutionalism to the international scale.
• West German negotiators carved duty-free banana access out of the Common Market tariffs.
• Western powers’ own nationalizations undermined their case against Global South expropriations
• World War I dissolved the public-private boundary that protected capitalist property
• WTO design deliberately scaled European constitutionalism into a global trade constitution