Neoliberals got a lot of things right. Like Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, they understood that 'markets are not natural but are products of the political construction of institutions'. Decolonisation, not the Second World War or Cold War's clash of ideologies, was the lasting political transformation of the twentieth century. As early as the 1920s, neoliberals recognised international organisations as vital political arenas, understanding that they could be adapted and remodelled to promote their own visions of global order after empire. They were consummate public intellectuals, who understood the argumentative power of image and metaphor, sought alliances with powerful interest groups, and got their hands dirty building lasting institutions. They shared in what is now a commonplace critique of economics as 'science', claiming that a 'sublime' global market was resistant to the hubris of human prediction. In Quinn Slobodian's rich, suggestive and deeply researched book, neoliberalism is recast as 'ordoglobalism': a ruthless, anxious and wonderfully strange philosophy of global governance, darkly preoccupied by national democracy's capacity to endanger private property.
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