What is Neoliberalism?

 

Quinn Slobodian (2020) has written a recent book Globalists: The End of Empire and the birth of Neoliberalism. I'm in the process of reading it and the book has changed my perspective on Neoliberalism. In 2018, I had been working on developing a "Neoliberalism Index" but I just couldn't capture the concept with a reasonable number of indicators. So, I decided it was really a hierarchical-concept that was best expressed by a number of indexes (see the hierarchy diagram above). But my concept of Neoliberalism was based purely in the American (Reagan) and British (Thatcher) popular political version. Slobodian opened my eyes to the wider intellectual history that dates back to WWI, the Great Depression and WWII. Let me report how I see Neoliberalsim now and how I think it might be destroyed by the two Trump Administrations which have just come to power again in the US.

First, let's recall how Germany destroyed the Liberal International Order by it's pursuit of World Domination during WWI. The World System and how it was to be reconstructed after WWI was a primary concern of the European Neoliberals. Tracing these concerns helps us understand what WWI was actually about and the role that the World System played in it and continues to play in Geopolitical Alignment.

I have constructed indexes for each of the Neoliberal components: Austerity, Globalization, Financialization, Debt, Hardship, IMF_Pressure and the Ecological Footprint. You can see some of these indexes at work in Shefner et. al. (2015). In future posts I will bring these indexes up to date for other countries in the World-System. My main questions are whether the Neoliberal World Order will be over after the Trump Administrations and what that might mean for the future.

In the meantime, I would recommend reading Globalists: The End of Empire and the birth of Neoliberalism.