Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism [Paperback]

George Louis Beer Prize Winner
Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist
A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year

A groundbreaking contribution&Intellectual history at its best.
Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs

Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again by the relentless change and social injustice that accompanied it.

Slobodians lucidly written intellectual history traces the ideas of a group of Western thinkers who sought to create, against a backdrop of anarchy, globally applicable economic rules. Their attempt, it turns out, succeeded all too well.
Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg Opinion

Fascinating, innovative&Slobodian has underlined the profound conservatism of the first generation of neoliberals and their fundamental hostility to democracy.
Adam Tooze, Dissent

The definitive history of neoliberalism as a political project.
Boston Review

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 neoliberalisms meaning and goals.[Globalists] puts to rest the idea that neoliberal lacks a clear refer