Mark Blyth, Brown University:
Heraclitus warned us that ‘no man can stand in the same river twice, for it is not the same river,’ yet the temptation to do so is strong when it comes to the history of ideas. Viewing the liberalism of today as simply a return to earlier ideas is similarly tempting, but wrong. Slobodian’s investigation of how ‘Geneva school’ liberals sought to reinvent global liberalism so that capitalism could be made safe from democracy is a fundamental recasting of what modern liberalism is and from whence it came, forcing all of us who theorize on capitalism to rethink the very object of our study.
Angus Burgin, Johns Hopkins University:
A remarkable study, elegant and lucid. Slobodian’s complete mastery of his subject is evident.
Bruce Caldwell, Duke University:
Well-executed, engaging, and important. This is by far the best book I have read on neoliberalism, ever.
D. N. Nelson:
This powerful headlong dive into the history of neoliberalism necessitates rethinking the ways of perpetuating an idea central to the 20th and 21st centuries…Globalists should be required reading for graduate students and scholars whose interests intersect with 20th-century Europe, economic history, and, most broadly, the history of ideas.
Andy Seal:
Flat-out brilliant.
Charles Mudede:
[The] most important story of the rise of neoliberalism cannot be found in the books and lectures by theorists like David Harvey, Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, or Werner Bonefeld. It is, as far as I can tell, only in Slobodian's Globalists.
Pankaj Mishra:
The term neoliberalism provokes much choleric denial. But Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism decisively establishes it as a coherent project, tracing it back to the political and intellectual synergies of the 1920s.
Patrick Iber:
The world today works in a distinctive and relatively new way, and those workings need a name. Its critics are right that neoliberalism has multiple meanings and can be used in a way that is more pejorative than precise. But it also has an intellectual genealogy with real bearing on our time, making a careful reconstruction of its history essential to understanding our global economy. Quinn Slobodian provides exactly that in Globalists, showing how neoliberal ideas grew from particular historical circumstances to global influence, while also correcting certain misconceptions about neoliberalism’s meaning and goals.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey:
[A] fascinating book… [Slobodian] writes with elegance and clarity.
Henry Farrell:
[A] fantastic intellectual history of neo-liberalism in the international arena… Slobodian’s book is excellent history… It offers a fresh and exciting new vantage point on an important set of global developments, drawing on important and under-utilized archival resources. It also implicitly pushes back at the romanticism of ideas that is core to the standard story of neo-liberalism.
Adam Tooze:
[Globalists] is important because it provides a new frame for the history of this movement. For Slobodian, the earliest and most authentic brand of neoliberalism was from the outset defined by its preoccupation with the question of world economic integration and disintegration…Slobodian gives us not only a new history of neoliberalism but a far more diverse image of global policy debates after 1945…It is a measure of the success of this fascinating, innovative history that it forces the question: after Slobodian’s reinterpretation, where does the critique of neoliberalism stand? First and foremost, Slobodian has underlined the profound conservatism of the first generation of neoliberals and their fundamental hostility to democracy.
Tyler Cowen:
Imagine a novel and interesting coverage of the post-war Austrian School, here relabeled the ‘Geneva School,’ a well-done partial history of the WTO and EU, and a book where the central characters are not only Mises and Hayek, but also Alexander Rüstow, Wilhelm Röpke, and Michael Heilperin.
J. W. Mason:
[Globalists] puts to rest the idea that ‘neoliberal’ lacks a clear referent. As Slobodian meticulously documents, the term has been used since the 1920s by a distinct group of thinkers and policymakers who are unified both by a shared political vision and a web of personal and professional links… Slobodian definitively establishes the existence of neoliberalism as a coherent intellectual project—one that, at the very least, has been well represented in the circles of power… One of Slobodian’s great insights is that the neoliberal program was not simply a move in the distributional fight, but rather about establishing a social order in which distribution was not a political question at all. For money and markets to be the central organizing principle of society, they have to appear natural—beyond the reach of politics… Slobodian has written the definitive history of neoliberalism as a political project.
