So hello, everyone.
Welcome to another of the
Roads Center for International
Economics and Finance speaker
series of this semester.
It's my great pleasure to
welcome Quinn Slobodian, who's
an Associate Professor
of History at Wellesley
just up the road, who has
written this wonderful book,
Globalist--
The End of Empire and the
Birth of Neoliberalism.
A couple of notes for me
by way of introduction
if you haven't had a chance
to read the book yet, some odd
notes.
Number one, there's
only two academic books
I've ever listened
to on audio book.
This is the second one.
And the first one was, believe
it or not, Thomas Piketty.
Now Thomas Piketty
takes 26 hours.
And it's actually
kind of necessary
to do Thomas Piketty's novel
book because it's so dense.
And what happens with
Piketty is everybody starts
at chapter five
because that's when
it starts on an equality start.
And you actually don't
read chapter two, which
is the core of the entire book.
So it was worth it to
actually rediscover that.
With this one, you have a really
good person actually doing
the reading, number one.
And it's actually almost
better as an audio book
because it comes alive as
intellectual biography,
that this is about
real people who
had real lives, and real
desires, and real battles,
and real afflictions of the mind
and of the body, and a project.
And it really comes alive.
So I recommend it
as like really, it's
a great book to read.
It's actually even a slightly
better book to listen to.
Second thing is in
terms of setting up.
The word neoliberalism
has become, according
to a speaker who
will be here soon,
and many others, Dani Rodrik,
a kind of empty signifier.
It says everything, and it
says nothing at the same time.
And we could probably debate
that endlessly as well as
the meaning of what
it is, et cetera.
I think one of the real
contributions of this book
is to actually just expand
what that means but give
it content at the same time.
There's a kind of
1945 zero hour thing
that happens in a
lot of the Academy
whereby whatever there was then
blown up, destroyed, and lost,
was then reconfigured.
And there are lineages.
And those lineages where if
you're on the Keynesian side,
it comes basically down,
trickling down this hill.
And if you were on the sort
of the liberal side, then
it comes down this hill.
And it usually-- the hill
is called [INAUDIBLE]..
And it just flows from there.
And what the book shows is what
an incredibly partial vision
that is.
That in fact, if you want
to understand liberalism
as a whole and in
all of its voices,
you really have to
grapple with the end
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
which you wonderfully called
post-Habsburg stress disorder,
right, and the imaginary
of that and what
was lost, and then
of course the trauma of
the inter-war period.
And what becomes
fascinating is the people
that we know as Mont Pelerin
and the Lippmann Colloquium that
led to that, in fact, had these
wonderful, varied careers long
before they ever became the
people that we think we know
and also had protege that
then went off and did things,
whose names we know but we
would never associate with them.
And he ties it all together
in this wonderful book.
So it's a great pleasure
to have you here.
And it was an even greater
pleasure to read the book.
Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Yeah, I haven't listened
to the book myself.
The only thing I know
about it is the guy
who read it also read The
Bonfire of the Vanities, which
was to me perfect.
OK, so I'm just going to go
ahead and give about a 15
minute, 20 minute talk,
and then Mark and I
are going to have
a conversation.
And then you get [INAUDIBLE].
And yeah, and then we'll
all bring it all together.
If I had to give this
book an origin point,
it would be almost 20 years
ago in the 1999 protests
against the World Trade
Organization in Seattle.
For people who don't
know much about
it, a famous
coalition of, quote,
"teamsters and turtles"
meeting environmentalists along
with labor unions, students,
anarchists, old hippies,
and assorted others, shut
down the ministerial meeting
of the WTO.
And in some of the
ways I describe
in the end of the book, shook
that organization to its core.
I was a junior in college
in Portland at the time--
a few hours south of Seattle--
and I didn't go.
I remember watching the
protests on our small box TV
with a coat hanger
stuck in the back
with a sinking feeling of oh
no, a world historical event
is taking place.
And I missed it to watch some
Lars von Trier movies on VHS.
My classmates felt activated,
but I myself felt immobilized.
The '90s were kind of a
weird time to come of age.
Middle class North
American white kids
like me were both
profiting entirely
from everything that
went under the decades
buzzword of
globalization but also
had the sense that it was
something ominous and something
almost verging on evil.
The world economy
felt like the nothing
from my favorite childhood
film The Never Ending Story--
an anonymous faceless
force that seemed
to swallow everything
in its path
and extinguished particularity.
Who would defend such a thing?
The term that arose at
that time to describe
the philosophy of people
who were defending it
was neoliberalism.
But what did these
neoliberals want,
I asked myself then
and kept asking myself.
There's a few obvious answers.
The first is to suggest that
the big nothing was actually
the big everything, that it was
lifting the aggregate wealth
and productivity of
humanity as a whole.
The number of people
living on a $1 a day
was dropping from year to year.
And even if inequality was also
growing and ecological problems
were not going anywhere, then
the rising tide anyway globally
speaking was lifting all ships.
The second explanation was
that this globalization
made a small number of
people very, very wealthy.
And it was in the
interests of those people
to promote a self-serving
ideology using
their substantial
means by funding
think tanks,
academic departments,
lobbying congress, and fighting
with the Heritage Foundation
itself calls the war of ideas.
And neoliberalism in
that understanding
would be a simple
restoration of class power
after the odd anomalous interval
of the mid-century welfare
state.
There's truth I think, to
both of these explanations.
But in my book, I
took another approach.
What I found in the
book is that we actually
can't understand the inner
logic of something like the WTO
without considering the whole
history of the 20th century.
What I also discovered
is that some
of the members of the neoliberal
movement itself self-described
from the 1930s onward, including
Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von
Mises, and others actually
didn't use either of the two
explanations I just offered.
They actually didn't say
that economic growth excuses
everything.
One of the weird things
about Hayek in particular
is that he doesn't actually
believe in measuring aggregates
like GDP, i.e, the things that
we need to even say that growth
is happening at all.
What I found is that
neoliberalism is actually
a philosophy less of
economics and more a doctrine
of ordering, of creating
the institutions that
provide for the reproduction
of the totality.
At the core of the
strain I describe
in the book is not the idea
that we can quantify, account,
price, buy, and sell every
last aspect of human existence.
And here it gets quite mystical.
What were they after?
The Austrian German schools of
neoliberals in fact believed
in a kind of invisible world
economy that cannot be captured
in numbers and figures
and always eludes human
comprehension.
After all, if you can see
something, you can plan it.
Because of the very
limits to human knowledge,
we have to default
to ironclad rules
and try not to pursue
something as radical
as social justice,
redistribution,
or collective transformation.
As I write in the
book, one can approach
Hayek's idea of the
system by imagining
a visit to the seashore.
Wading in the shallow water,
you may see a school of minnows
approaching you, traveling
in a rough and shifting orb.
The school is not
regimented into even lines,
but it does cohere
as a basic shape.
As you approach, the orb
dissipates and then reassembles
before moving in
another direction.
Order for Hayek must be as
unplanned and spontaneous
as the movement of a
school of fish in water.
So the goal is not one of
raising the standard of living
per se, let alone the
abstract indicator of growth,
but rather one of
systemic interdependence
that would always entail some
level of economic inequality.
Hayek, in particular, called
social justice a, quote,
"mirage" that we only pursue
because we are literally
hardwired from our
days in Savannah
and haven't quite shaken the
idea that we can share things
out in the tribe.
In a globalized world,
according to Hayek,
we have to give ourselves over
to the forces of the market
or the whole thing
will stop working
and literally most
of us will die.
What way of being in the
world does this then imply?
In an evocative analogy from his
book on psychology from 1952,
Hayek was first
drawn to psychology.
Hayek offers up the metaphor of
the leaf, which, quote, "avoids
being torn to shreds
by a high wind
by taking up a position
of least resistance.
What we call
understanding," he wrote,
"is in the last resort
simply man's capacity
to respond to his environment
with a pattern of actions
that helps him to persist."
The system survives in order
results, in other words,
through the reflexive
efforts of individuals
to reproduce both themselves
and thereby reproducing
the totality as such.
This is quite a
different version
of neoliberal thought than
the one we usually have,
premised on the abstract idea
of individual liberty or freedom
to choose.
Here, one is free to choose
but only with a rather limited
range of options
left after one has
responded to the global
forces of the market.
My argument then in the book
is that neoliberal globalism
can be thought of
on its own terms
as a kind of negative theology.
It contends that
the world economy
is sublime and ineffable with
only a small number of people
having a special insight and
ability to craft institutions
that will, as I put it, in
case the sublime world economy.
To me, this metaphor
of encasement
makes much more sense than the
usual idea of markets being set
free, liberated, or unfettered.
How can it be, after all, that
in an era of proliferating
third party arbitration courts,
international investment
law, trade treaties,
and regulations that we
talk about unfettered markets?
One of the big goals
of my book actually,
is to show neoliberalism as one
form of regulation among others
rather than the bit other of
regulation as such the way it's
sometimes described.
Because despite these
rather abstract metaphors
that I've just
introduced, the book
is actually about a series
of concrete institutions
self-consciously designed
to withstand threats
to the world economy.
The epigraph to the book comes
from German neoliberal Wilhelm
Ropke--
quote, "a nation may beget
its own barbarian invaders."
The story that we see in the
book from the 1920s to the '90s
is that neoliberal's saw this
threat of barbarians coming
both from within and
without and helped
to redesign the state and super
state institutions to defend
against them.
From within, the threat was
most of all from an organized
working class.
Neoliberals saw trade
and labor unions
as monopolies of a special
kind, monopolizing human labor.
If there wasn't a free and
fluid supply of this input,
then the entire
clockwork of the economy
would seize up and smash.
I describe in my first chapter
how Austrian neoliberal Ludwig
von Mises was present
in Vienna in 1927
for a workers uprising in which
after an adverse court ruling,
workers marched on Parliament
and set the Palace of Justice
on fire.
I just want to read a bit
from there to give you
a sense of how the book sounds.
At 8 AM, the electric workers
stopped the street cars,
bringing the
circulation of labor
through the city to a halt
and signaling the call
to a general strike.
Workers marched
to the parliament
on the far side
of the Ringstrasse
from the Chamber
of Commerce where
Mises and Hayek both worked.
The Palace of Justice became
the target of their anger
at the court's verdict.
And part of the crowd
stormed the building
and set it on fire while
others blocked firetrucks,
cut hoses, and opened
up other hydrants
to reduce water pressure,
defiantly impeding
the city's functions.
The authorities felt pushed
to offer a radical solution.
And the police chief
received emergency powers,
suspended the rule of
law, and gave the order
to fire on the demonstrators.
Police killed
protesters with rifles
in the center of the
city and then drove out
to the workers housing estates
in the suburbs and killed more.
After three days, 89 people were
dead and over 1,000 injured.
The workers' movement
was permanently crippled.
The Social Democratic
Party was unable to use
the threat of mass
mobilization effectively again.
And perhaps most
damagingly, the day
had shown that even the
putatively socialist members
of the police would not hesitate
to fire on fellow workers.
The July 15th, 1927 uprising
was the deepest crisis in Vienna
before the Civil War of 1934.
The site of the Palace
of Justice in flames
shook the author and cultural
critic Elias Canetti deeply,
leading him to devote
his life's work
to understanding the
relationship between crowds
and power.
For Mises, the event was not
a trauma but a great relief.
He was in Vienna at the time.
And he wrote to a friend,
quote, "Friday's putsch
has cleansed the atmosphere
like a thunderstorm.
The Social Democratic Party
has used all means of power
and yet lost the game.
The street fight ended in
complete victory of the police.
All troops are loyal
to the government."
As his biographer
described, Mises
was, quote, "surprised
and delighted
by the failure of
the general strike.
It appeared that
he accepted lightly
the means used in its
suppression, which
delivered a deep blow
to many at the time.
The right to kill with
impunity under emergency powers
met with Mises's approval."
I describe in the book how
Mises was part of a three person
economic commission
that proposed a, quote,
"anti-terror law to be used
against striking workers."
The argument there was
that interwar Austria
would be beaten by
foreign competitors
if they granted higher wages.
Is I write, quote,
"the rhetorical weapon
of invoking the world
economy was a bludgeon used
to beat back social policy gains
of worker insurance, severance
pay, and unemployment."
The problem of worker demands
recurs through the book.
But the more-- the newer
contribution is the one
contained in the
subtitle of the book--
The End of Empire and the
Birth of Neoliberalism.
What I explain it
there is in thinking
about the period
of decolonization
is how we can think of the WTO
as the latest in a long series
of institutional fixes
proposed for the problem
of emergent nationalism
and what neoliberal's saw
as the confusion
between sovereignty,
or ruling a country
and ownership,
or owning the
property within it.
I show how the purely
rhetorical demands of the United
Nations by African, Asian,
and Latin American countries
for things like
permanent sovereignty
over national resources.
I either write to nationalized
foreign owned enterprises, who
are actually
existentially frightening
to global businesspeople.
They drafted in neoliberal
intellectuals to do things like
craft agreements that gave
foreign countries in the '70s--
that gave foreign
corporations more rights
than domestic actors--
what I call
[? xeno's ?] rights--
and tried to figure out how to
lock in what they themselves
called the human right
of capital flight
into binding
international codes.
The new international economic
order written and passed
by a coalition of global
south countries in the 1970s
became an especially
grave threat.
And I show how we can see the
reform of the gap into the WTO
by the '90s as
largely a response
to the fear of a
planned and equal planet
that many saw in the NIEO.
The culmination of
all these processes
I described by the
'90s is a world economy
that is less like a
Laissez-faire marketplace
and more like a fortress as ever
more of the world's resources
and ideas are regulated
through transnational legal
instruments.
The book acts as
a kind of a field
guide to these institutions
and in the process
hopefully recasts the 20th
century that produced them.
What I found in other words,
by the end of writing this book
is that the world
economy wasn't a nothing
nor was it a sublime force
beyond our comprehension.
The title of the book's
chapters offer a gallery
of the different ways
of conceiving the world
economy that I follow.
I found that it was a world
of walls, a world of numbers,
a world of federation's,
a world of races,
a world of constitutions, and
finally, a world of signals.
What this result is what
led me to the project
in the first place.
The vision in 1999 of the world
of people without a people.
Perhaps, the lasting
image of globalization
that the book leaves is
that world capitalism
has produced a doubled world--
a world of emporium, or
the world of nation states,
and a world of dominium,
or the world of property.
The best way to understand
neoliberal globalism
as a project is that it sees
its task as the never ending
maintenance of this division.
The neoliberal
inside of the 1930s
was that the market would
not take care of itself,
and that what Wilhelm Roepke
called a market police,
was an ongoing need
in a world where
people whether out
of atavistic drives
or admirable
humanitarian motives
kept trying to make the earth
a more equal and just place.
I wouldn't say the book has
any solution certainly now
less than ever.
But it does its
best at description.
And I'm looking forward to
having a discussion about that.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
So let's have a chat.
Yeah.
All right.
So I've written one or two
things about this subject
when you were a wee boy.
And this is funda-- as I
say in the back of the book,
I've learned that this has
fundamentally changed the way
that I think about this.
So I want to try and walk
people through in a sense what
happened to me.
And we can talk about
aspects of the book, right?
So here's the first
one I'll go with.
Let's start with the present.
We have a-- and we're going
to get through this at the end
as well.
We have a president who
says he's not a globalist.
Yes.
Yet he's not exactly a
socialist by any means.
Mhm.
He actually does want to
affect redistributions.
He wants to actively
get into the economy.
But he's hardly
what you would call
a sort of prototypical,
postwar Keynesian by any means.
Now let's dig deeper on this.
One of the things that
I found most fascinating
about your term globalists--
and let's start with
what happened in Vienna--
the ability to treat labor
as on the one hand simply
a commodity that must be free.
And in the other hand,
a kind, how to put it,
you have no claim
to sovereignty.
You have no claim to
your redistribution.
You have no claim to rights.
You are an object in a
political sense as well.
And you circulate as other
commodities do, right?
That is a kind of critique
that a Trump supporter,
a more sophisticated one, might
give of the, quote, unquote,
"global elite."
There's a real resonance there.
And I'm reminded of when the
Prime Minister [INAUDIBLE]
said to the Tory
Party Conference.
If you're a citizen
of Norway, you're
not a subject anywhere
or whatever [INAUDIBLE]..
If you're a citizen
of the world,
then you're a
citizen [INAUDIBLE]..
Exactly, right.
Exactly.
And they were very much
four of [INAUDIBLE] citizens
of the world.
So we seem to be in a
moment in which that's
come really back into tension.
So talk a little bit
about the origins of that.
Why fetishized the system?
When I think about liberals, I
think about individual liberty.
I think about possible
sovereignty, all the rest
of it, Lockean tradition.
This is miles away from them.
So give us a little
bit on sort of how
this-- how and why this
thing was constructed.
Sure.
I mean, I think that
maybe I can answer it
by returning to that
moment of the '90s
and what we meant by
globalization then, right?
I mean, I think it kind
of had-- that discourse
had two central elements.
One was a kind of aspect
of naturalization, right?
The sense that
what was happening.
That the level of
the global economy
was something that had
a kind of a force to it
that forced the hand of
national states in a way
that it was hopeless to resist.
And so all we could do was
to kind of offload autonomy
to this references to this
thing called a global economy.
And second, it was a
kind of goal and reality
of deep politicization, right?
So the idea that
decisions about trade,
for example, would
be decided in advance
through locked in
clauses and something
like the WTO treaty
or the NAFTA treaty.
The opposition to
that at the time
was largely coming
from the left,
and it described
itself at the time
as a kind of altered
globalization, right?
I think that was
clearly a better way
to think about it than
anti-globalization.
[INAUDIBLE] call wasn't for a
kind of isolation or a sealing
off of politics or economics but
to organize the world economy
in different ways and
specifically to confront those
two points--
to kind of denaturalize it
and to repoliticize the world
economy.
And I think that
is a helpful way
to think about what, in effect,
Trump and his trade team
are doing.
I mean, they are carrying out
a kind of altered globalization
from the right, right?
They are there openly
embracing the politicization
of sphields that
were usually seen
as sacrosanct zones for the
economic decision making,
right?
And they are de naturalizing
the way the global economy works
by saying it is simply a
struggle of political entities,
national entities,
and the economy
is not a kind of bracketed
space beyond that, right?
So I think that just
at a descriptive level,
that's the best way to think
about what they're doing.
And I think that then the
questions that open up
are the ones that
are not being asked,
I think, in this sort
of false opposition
that are kind of open
versus closed, right?
I mean, I think
that when you accept
that there is a kind of altered
globalization happening here,
I think you can still
then ask, but what
aspects of the political
program of neoliberalism
are still central to
this program of the right
even if it is--
or we can conceive
a kind of altered
globalist [INAUDIBLE]??
And then you know, it's
interesting to see actually
the sort of the narrowing
of political imagination
when you see that
even at the supposedly
the furthest ends of
the spectrum here,
the status quo versus
that right insurgency,
it's still really
varieties of capitalism
that we're arguing
about here, right?
I mean, in the end, it isn't
a fundamentally different
political economic system.
It's really a tactical
question about how
do you get better access
to foreign markets.
Is it through
multilateralism, or is it
through more aggressive
unilateralism
or even bilateral means?
So that's the first
part of your question.
The second part of
your question, I think,
is about what did these
neoliberals admire
so much about the
economy, and how
is that different than our
typical idea of liberal beliefs
and individual [INAUDIBLE]?
But also in a global, that
obstruction, the system
that you mentioned, right?
Yeah.
The end is the system.
That's what immediately struck
me is no, the end is liberty.
I've read [INAUDIBLE].
I understand this.
But no, it wasn't
really, was it?
In the case of Hayek, no.
And in the case of
Mises, also no, right?
I mean, if you read
what they're saying,
they have a very kind of
a functionalist attitude
towards the nature of something
like democracy, for example.
What is good about democracy
is that it provides
a mechanism for peaceful
change for the most
part, peaceful regime change.
And it allows some space for the
kind of evolutionary discover
of new ways of perfecting the
production process basically.
When it ceases to
fulfill that function,
then it tips over into the need
for some kind of repression
or the curtailment
of democracy, right?
So democracy certainly
is not a value in itself
for someone like Hayek.
It's a value in so far as it
serves a different function.
And I think that
you can extend that
to his whole attitude towards
the individual and individual
liberty.
Individual liberty
and individual freedom
is a principle that he
embraces and promotes in so far
as it offers a means of
achieving this higher
end, which is a kind
of systemic stability
or a kind of the
coherence of the whole.
I think that the metaphor that
he offers about the leaf to me
really captures that well.
I think it's important to
interject at this point
because it might seem like
I am just this sort of fire
breathing, anti-neoliberal,
anti-Austrian polemicists
that card carrying Hayekians
at the highest level
completely accept
my interpretation.
Like the current president
of the Mont Pelerin
society, who has written
multiple books about Hayek
and sees himself as a Hayekian,
thinks this is a good book
and doesn't complain about
say this in comparison
to the metaphor of the
leaf, my portrayal of Mises
and how we thought about
economic policy in the 1920s.
So in fact, they
like it because I
think it gets closer to where
they're actually coming from.
And in this moment, actually,
this political conjuncture,
that actually gives them a kind
of nobility or purpose, which
is actually greater than simply
fighting for individual liberty
or individual rights, right?
Right.
Because we're back
in a moment where
it seems like what is at stake
is not just can I do this
or can I buy that?
But we'll the system--
Will the system hold?
--as such hold?
Right.
So I mean, just by
pure repetition--
not because I think of any
structural similarities--
but by pure repetition,
we found ourselves
back in the 1930s dilemma at
least discursively, right?
Rhetorically, we've talked
ourselves into that fact.
Yes, and they get
to own the system?
And they get to be the ones who
speak on behalf of the whole
and against the particularity
and the fighting
politicized self-interest
of this or that nation.
And so within this, there's a
kind of dissolution of politics
not just democracy is purely
an electoral means for avoiding
revolution in this reading.
Yes.
So politics just disappears
in the following sense.
So any political scientist
first day of class,
they sit you down
and say, right, he
owes you a [INAUDIBLE]
definition of politics.
Who gets what, when,
where, and why?
It's all about distribution.
Now it's not just the
state redistributing.
It is a question
of the superstition
of power, resources, et cetera.
None of this happens.
When it happens, it's always
seen as the error term.
But at the same time,
that is impossible.
It's the evacuation of
politics because by definition,
the dividing up of the
resources of the world
through any mechanism, whether
it's capitalism, socialism,
whatever, is distribution of it.
So it's one thing to say
we've got the higher purpose.
We're focused on the system.
We are in a long
game here, kids.
This is what we're doing.
But at the end of the
day, who gives a shit?
Because what you care
about is that stuff
that's on the bottom.
Doesn't that lead to
a kind of political
paralysis for that
mode of thought?
Well, I mean, I think
that it's important to see
that it is a mode
of argument that's
pitched directly at elites.
It's for elites
by elites, right?
I mean, I think Andrew Gamble
had the best way of describing
the way that Hayek's
thought worked,
which is he did have this kind
of cafe culture notion of how
to engage with an
intellectual opponent
and potentially persuade them.
So he knew how to
deal with his peers.
Anyone below that, he could
only think about means
of disenfranchising.
Right.
Right?
I mean, that was
really the [INAUDIBLE]..
He put the bulk of his argument
to that sort of imagination
and that sort of elite-to-elite
discussion, which
is I think broadly true for the
kind of Mont Pelerin society
discussions that
happened from the '40s
up into about the '90s.
In the 90s, we do get this
sort of interesting twist
though, right?
I mean, if neoliberal
thought has been primarily
about the elites
against the masses,
constraining the
masses at some level,
I don't think many people
would disagree with that.
In the '90s, you get
especially with the kind
of radical anarcho
capitalist tradition
around Murray Rothbard,
which gets picked up
in Germany and Austria, too.
There's a reversal, where
there's the belief that now you
can somehow use the
masses against the elites.
Because the elites
have in a sense
co-opted and captured the
system so you need their energy.
Because the elites--
[INAUDIBLE]
--become sclerotic.
And in fact, they--
in fact, the elites might
be more socialist minded
than the masses
themselves, right?
So by the '90s,
there's a feeling
that you no longer have
to worry about a kind
of organic revolt of the working
class in the traditional way.
Most people have been
successfully subsumed
into the need to constantly
think about their own credit
score and things like that.
So the elites are the ones
who have the freedom to.
So all the socialists are
in the Ivy League schools.
This sort of inertia.
So that becomes I
think a very important
and kind of portentous
twisted in neoliberal thought.
But up until that
point, it is in fact,
a kind of a project
of depoliticization
of a bracketing of the
political and of a bracketing
of the very problem
of legitimacy
I think on its own terms.
And in that sense, they avoided
distributional questions
at their peril.
I mean, because I think one
has to be attentive to that
without losing the
game [INAUDIBLE]..
Yeah, I mean, to me, one of--
the ones that always popped up
to me as an example was the one
sort of economic institution,
which doesn't either get
criticism, but occasionally
applauded are central bank's.
Monetary stability
set up particularly
in the sort of [INAUDIBLE]
liberal tradition.
And yet when you
raise interest rates,
that's redistributionary.
When you cut them,
that's redistributionary.
By definition, you're
playing redistribution.
But again, there seems
to be a complete myopia
not just to that,
but to the notion
that politics is
what society does.
It's almost an attempt
to abolish politics
by basically encasing us
all within this framework
at the top.
Tell us more about this
notion of encasement.
What is it you're trying
to get it at with that?
Well, I think that I
was just really reacting
to this sort of
reflexive way we have
of describing the era
of global capitalism
since the '90s as a period
of liberated markets,
unfettered markets.
Because when you
learn about the field
of international economic
law, or sort of watch
the way that is changing with
bilateral investment treaties,
international investment,
a lot of landscape,
it just explodes after 1989.
So you actually have
more and more people
who are earning a living,
litigating and enforcing
and bringing cases related
to this very question
of global trade.
And so there's actually
the institutional landscape
is actually becoming more
and more crowded with actors
and players and people who are
stakeholders in kind of how
do you control the
movement of goods
from one part of the
world to the other
as the volume of
that trade grows.
So that just seemed
to me completely
at odds with this
notion of just sort
of the feckless, frictionless
movement of things in a way
that one often sees.
If you try to Google image
search globalization, which
I do with some
frequency, you almost
get the same image, which is
of the earth crisscrossed by--
Yeah, it flows.
It's usually blue.
Yeah.
Seemingly, always this sort
of blue laser like unimpeded,
almost instant--
right, there is this
kind of discourse
of like the instantaneousness
that, of course, is true
when one thinks about certain
communications technologies.
But even there, the world
in which this takes place
is an institutional one.
And thinking about the way
that certain forms of trade
and interaction get locked
in and defended and litigated
through law seems to lead us
more to a notion of encasement
of certain forms of trade rather
than liberation and freedom.
So thinking a little bit
about that, [INAUDIBLE]
I was listening to [INAUDIBLE]
completely lost where
I was going with that one.
Encasement-- where
did I want to go?
[INAUDIBLE] about encasement,
redistribution, to-- ah,
that was it, Habsburg?
Uh-huh.
Right.
So I can put on a hat and
say I'm British if I want to,
or Scottish, or whatever.
So we lost an empire.
We're still trying
to get over it.
Yes.
No one really--
Unsuccessfully.
Unsuccessfully.
Nobody appeased Brexit.
Nobody really mourns the
loss of Habsburg, I thought.
But it turns out
this is actually
a real touchstone
and a real mirror
for what this project is.
Why-- what was so
awesome about Habsburg?
Well, I mean, for
Mises especially,
who had really been socialized
in the Habsburg Empire, I mean,
Hayek and his cohort are
all born around 1900.
So they are all kind
of like teenagers
really when the
empire ends in 1918.
But someone like Mises is
trained to be a civil servant
inside of the Habsburg Empire.
I mean, you went to
university in Vienna
to administer the empire.
And at some level,
he believed in
and bought into
the solution, as he
saw it, that had been arrived at
in Habsburg for doing something
that's actually very
hard, which is how do you
govern a space that
is filled with people
of different languages,
different nationalities,
and their understanding,
even different races
in the kind of Central
European way of thinking that
at the time.
He himself is Jewish,
meaning he was
put in what Ernst Gellner calls
the Hapsburg dilemma, which
is he can't play the game of
nationalism because he loses.
As a Jew, there's no
sort of way of arguing
for a kind of a
place, a territory,
special privileges within
the Habsburg territory.
So he's forced to defend
sort of constitutionally.
He's forced to defend the idea
of some kind of a structure
that can preserve multi
conventionality and multi
nationality.
But the problem is he's also--
and so he's a political
liberal in that sense,
and he's also an
economic liberal.
So he needs to figure
out a way that you
can have a space of people with
diverse ways of understanding
who they are and their
identities, who nonetheless,
will be able to
trade with each other
and act in concert and
in harmony economically.
And he believed in his sort
of retroactive construction
of what the Habsburg
Empire was is
that they had kind of solved one
of the problems of world order.
And they had solved
it through what
he called a kind of a
regime of double government.
And Hayek says the same
thing that we actually
need a political government
and an economic government.
And the political
government can do things
like give people
language schools.
They can have their flags.
They can even have their coins.
The economic
government, however,
will preserve things like
free movement of labor,
free movement of goods,
free movement of investment.
And if you can convince
people sufficiently
that they are self-determining
while also strongly restraining
the autonomy that they have to
be self-determining by having
free movement of capital
and labor and goods,
then you will have
potentially solve
the problem of the
world after empire.
So the whole project
of trying to dream
of a global economic
architecture
is really trying
to scale up what
he saw as the kind of
successful double government
of the Habsburg Empire.
Of course, it didn't bear
that much relationship
to the actual place.
I mean, the Habsburg was
actually very protectionist.
You can't sort of hive
off economic questions
from political and
cultural questions
that the way that he sort of
naively thought that you could.
It simply doesn't work that way.
But this became the
kind of the ideal model
of how things could turn out.
And in many ways,
by the mid 1990s,
I think when you have a global
economic architecture that is
linking us all as one
unity while still allowing
for [INAUDIBLE]--
Habsburgish.
Yeah, the world has been kind of
Habsburgized in a strange way.
And people were talking
about it that way.
Sort of within the
neoliberal tradition,
they were saying what
we see with something
like that WTO is that
national sovereignty is good.
But it does need to exist within
the supranational constraints
of a kind of a higher order.
And in the era of empire, that
would be the higher instance
of the crown, the
empire itself, and now
it's the higher instance of a
supranational organization that
protects the flow of free trade.
So whilst sailing that,
[INAUDIBLE] project,
the same people on the end
of empire wanted federations.
This was the next move.
We're going to have federation.
We're going to build
them out bilaterally.
We're going to kind
of do a little EU
project in a sense is
ultimately what it was.
But go back to one of the
examples you gave earlier,
the clarion call for
Austria to do better
was for everybody in the country
to suffer a 50% wage cut.
How do you square the two?
I mean, in a sense, one is a
very positive version of look
what we've lost, even
if it's not true.
And we can all get
to a better place.
And if we simply
play by these rules
and other's double government,
we'll all be better off.
But honestly, I'm asking
you to take a 50% pick up.
And at the end of the day, it's
simply labor has to adjust.
Austrians have to
have lower wages.
We need the biggest market
we can, and then in a sense,
we'll all be happier.
But that claim isn't even made.
No, no, the happiness--
The happiness--
- The aggregate had this--
--never gets there.
--claim isn't
actually made, right?
Right.
I mean, Mises is very,
very clear about this.
I mentioned that in the
first chapter of the book.
When Austria is being threatened
by competition from Chinese
producers already before
the First World War,
one of the first things
that Mises writes--
he's in a statistics
class with Schumpeter,
which apparently was also
visited by Hilferding--
Mises says--
It's quite a seminar.
It was [INAUDIBLE]
and [? Gruenberg, ?]
Mises says everyone
is saying we need
to protect our goods
against Chinese competition.
But I see it another way.
Maybe we'll have to lower our
wages and our living condition
to the level of the, quote,
[INAUDIBLE] or the Hindu
to be able to compete on the
level playing field, right?
But why would anyone
ever think that would
be possible or desirable
if you were already there?
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Let's go for that.
Because at some level, to access
the endowments of the world
in like a hard Ricardian
way then you do
need a kind of an absolute
international division
of labor.
He pooh poohed Ricardo for not
being Ricardian enough, right?
Right.
Because Ricardo said, well,
capital likes to stay at home.
It's not actually
going across the globe.
And Mises said, oh yes,
it will, and it should.
Right, so there's a kind of a
leveling effect, which is yeah,
I mean, much of what you--
when you read what
they're saying,
you're like how
does a politician
sell this stuff, right?
I mean, that seems to
be totally out of touch
with the creation of a
campaign or a platform.
And--
Even a residualist
notion of democracy.
Well, yeah, I mean, this is
why I found especially looking
at the post first
World War moment,
it's often described as
Wilson versus Lenin, right?
But these are just varieties
of national self-determination.
And then next to
that, you actually
have Mises who says like--
Yeah, [INAUDIBLE].
--self-determination
is totally subordinate
to global economic integration.
And the autonomy that the
space of maneuver for any given
nation is always going to
be in the iron constraints
of global competition.
And that's what this
book gave me was--
that's the bit that I
never knew in a sense.
Like when you start, then it
changes the whole picture.
And so just a couple of
more from me, and we'll
just open up to everybody else.
But I just want to get
these on the table.
The neoliberals of this period,
they were fantastically busy
in terms of employment.
They did all sorts
of different stuff
at quite a higher level,
which is another part
of the story we don't hear.
They were active.
The phrase tariff walls
comes from this period.
And they had maps
that they took around
and they showed people of
the height of the wall.
It was like there was a wall.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, it was a suitcase
sized diorama that--
[INAUDIBLE]
Diorama, right?
And then there
were statisticians.
Then there were business cycle
hawkers for financial news.
Then they got involved
in all that stuff
that we did over here
on business barometers,
in which we still do.
We just do it with more
sophisticated graphs, right,
[INAUDIBLE].
And then basically,
you don't really
go into the calculation debate.
But they kind of seem to get
into trouble around 1935-1976.
It's almost as if economics
is going this was as a whole.
Leftward, yeah.
Leftward.
They were not just
leftward, also
sort of more
formalist, et cetera.
And they just kind of
go, all right, we're
not doing this anymore.
And then that's when the sort
of the moment of discovering
[INAUDIBLE].
It's beyond our
comprehension is all there.
You would think that
would be a dead end.
But that's actually where
almost everybody else
starts their story.
So what is knowing that
back story tell you?
What has it gave us in the story
that we didn't know already?
Well, I mean, I think part
of my hope with the book
was it would kind of
undermine a sloppy conflation
between "economism," quote,
unquote, and neoliberalism
as somehow the same things.
And I mean, someone
like James [? Kwok, ?]
whose book I feel like
I learned a lot from,
he'll still sort of
say that the importer's
of the idea of economism
are Mises and Hayek--
these Austrian immigrants.
But that's an out-and-out
outrageous statement.
And in fact, economics
is a discipline.
I think what you're
describing is exactly right,
which is the moment at
which Hayek was a mainstream
economist was the 1930s,
doing business cycle research,
talking about how you can
hopefully avoid crises.
And then what he sees is
that actually this argument
is being picked up
by Social Democrats
and even worse by labor unions.
And that actually
if you give people
a kind of portrait
of the economy,
and you give them a sense
of how they can control it,
then you tend to kind of
give a very powerful weapon
into the hands of
working class parties
and working class politics.
And so he kind of cuts
from that pretty quickly,
and then he begins to declare
no, any attempt at oversight
is futile.
But PS, also because
to try to look
at only at the
level of the nation
is actually the wrong frame.
That the economy
is a global thing.
So you do your Keynesian
national income accounting.
And that's drawing a kind of
a cordon around the nation
and that's simply
epistemologically wrong
as well as being
politically wrong.
But you can see the stuff.
One of my favorite sources that
I came across in the archives
was right after Mises and Hayek
start the Austrian business
cycle Research Institute.
There is an article about it in
the Viennese workers newspaper.
And it's a short article.
But it says, a new Institute
has been created here in Vienna.
And we can use this
now much better
to organize our
strikes and our labor
stoppages and our slow downs.
And there's literally red ink
on the side of it in the margins
and underlined four times.
And I don't know if that
was Mises or Hayek himself.
But it might as well
have been because it
serves to signal well
they're kind of turn
from what I think is really
the birth of mainstream
economics in a way and towards
legal mysticism, all forms
of sort of
constitutional fetishism
that leads them out on into
a very peculiar territory.
So I think to kind of throw
out all of mainstream economics
under the pretense that
it's all Hayakian is just
a bizarre statement.
And in fact, as we know,
economics as a discipline
has contributed in a direct way
into social democratic projects
and project of redistribution
and building social justice
that the neoliberals actually
actively mobilize against.
So I think breaking
apart that couplet
was for me quite important
not just empirically, but also
kind of politically.
Because I think it's very
unwise to sort of say that you
can't have any connection
to economics as a discipline
because it's tainted somehow
by its connection to these evil
Austrian's.
Yes, so just one
last one just again,
to get it out on the table.
The other big
surprise in the book
was the one identity that
they do admit is race.
And it's a racial hierarchy.
Now this is not true
for all of the people.
In fact, it's really
Ropka and a few others.
But it's a very
pronounced strain.
And many of us know the
story of Chile and Chicago
boys, et cetera.
But the South African connection
is utterly fascinating.
Can you give us just
sort of a quick synopsis,
or a quick flavor as to
what that was all about
and how it nearly split
the neoliberal movement?
Sure.
So this is also
quite relevant to
the present because
basically Mises as a Jew,
as someone who
fled from fascists
wasn't on board obviously
with the kind of race science
that the Nazis were doing.
And not just obviously,
but he openly
stated that this
is pseudoscience.
It's ridiculous the idea
that different races have
different motivations is absurd.
All humans are the same.
He was very much universalist
when it came to humans.
But then he did have moments
where he said, however,
race theory maybe, perhaps, does
hold the key to understanding
human variation and how we
have some civilizations that
flourished and some that died.
Perhaps, one day this
will be something
that will be dug into more.
Sort of like two lines.
That happens.
He doesn't pursue it again.
He never talks about
race as a category.
Hayek, more or less, explicitly
opposes race as a category.
Even in his arguments with
socio biologists in the 1970s,
he was saying this is wrong.
They put too much
weight on genetics.
This is actually culture
that is the space
in the medium of evolution.
Traditions and morality
is not carried by genes.
So that's the hard sort
of Austrian side of it.
The Wilhelm Ropka
however, who is not
probably well-known in this
room or in general in the United
States, but is kind of revered
in Switzerland and in Germany
and in Holland as
one of the fathers
of the post-war
social market economy,
went hard as an
apologist and advocate
for South African apartheid.
And his argument there
was that the races have
different capacities, that
the black man in South Africa
is of a specifically
different type,
and to imagine that he can
operate on the same level
politically as the white
man is a suicide mission.
This is the kind of
language that he's using.
So he basically follows
closely with kind
of the "National Review"
William Buckley position
on white supremacy as attached
to a kind of free market
position in the 1950s and '60s.
There's another character
involved, William Hutt,
who is often held up as the
kind of a hero for libertarians
because he opposed apartheid.
But he was an
anti-apartheid activist.
But what he actually was is
he was against color bars
in the marketplace.
So that's what he opposed
racial discrimination
in the field of occupations
and consumption as well.
But what he believed
at the same time--
and this is in his
most famous book,
The Economics of the
Color Bar-- is that there
should be a weighted franchise.
So you free up and you get rid
of the color bar in the market.
But to avoid exploitation
by a black majority,
you give their vote less
weight, and that is a situation
that he said will probably
continue for a very long time.
At which point, you
will introduce sort of
along the model of
digressive proportionality.
Blacks votes will continue
to be worth less even
as their qualifications grow.
So it's a complicated story.
The reason it's
important to the present
is that there is a strain
of racist libertarianism
that leads into the alt right.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is the
most famous proponent.
And he like Rothbard,
who I mentioned earlier,
go back to these one or two tiny
parenthetical lines from Mises,
and say look, Mises never
denied the reality of race.
He's been with us
the whole time.
He was a race realist
from the get-go, right?
So there is a way that
that idea of humanity
as being fundamentally
composed of people
with group differences
of capacity
is not part of the main
line of the neoliberal story
as I understand it at all.
But recently, in the more
radical stateless anarcho
capitalist strands
of neoliberalism
that unfortunately have
been very influential
in the right populist parties
in places like Austria
and Germany, that has
now come back again,
and it's provided an even
stronger kind of legitimation
for them to oppose things
like welfare state,
open borders in Central Europe.
Cool.
I think we covered some ground.
Let's do some questions.
Do you want to just field
your own from the room?
I'm sure you're
perfectly capable.
Sure.
Yeah, that's fine.
Let's go.
Thanks Quinn for this super
interesting presentation.
I wonder if you can
say a little bit more
about what you think
is neo about liberals?
Because I've gotten a few
things from this presentation.
And I know that they're
sort of competing senses.
So what if you could sort
of organize these for us?
So one thought is that
neoliberals, unlike well, I
guess classical liberals
historically speaking,
don't think of the market
as something natural
but as something that
needs to be instituted.
Oh, am I supposed [INAUDIBLE].
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, that's a good idea.
All right.
Now, you've gathered
your thoughts.
You can ask the
question properly.
Now that you've interrupted
me, I've lost all my thoughts.
No, so one thought is that
the kind of classical liberals
think that the market
is kind of natural,
and you just need to deregulate
it and just sort of-- it's
an opportunity to give people
freedom and [INAUDIBLE]
organize itself.
Whereas I think you suggested--
and I've heard other
people say this--
that the neoliberalism
actually sees
the market as a kind of piece
of political technology,
that it needs to be instituted
and consciously maintained
through use of the state.
That's one axes.
Another you
suggested, especially
with your vivid
recounting of the strike
and the fire, the
Palace of Justice,
is that neoliberalism is born
of the experience of needing
to defeat the left.
It's a way of defending
a market economy,
given a fully developed set of
socialist parties and radical
trading movements and communist
theory that includes the use
of economic theory at
the time [INAUDIBLE]----
It's going into
[INAUDIBLE] and it's fine.
OK, --to defend I guess a market
economy against socialism,
[INAUDIBLE] competing--
I don't know-- feudalism.
It's more of the old regime.
But then this third,
which I get from the title
of your discussion
is that neoliberals
are especially concerned
with understanding capitalism
as a global social and
political order in a way
that I guess classical liberals
aren't, or is that what's new?
Or is it that it has a different
place in their thinking
from classical liberals?
So those are sort of three
things that came out.
I wonder if you could
say which or how--
in what way do all of them make
it neo as opposed to not just
liberal?
Mhm.
Yeah, I mean, at some
level, of course,
I would agree with
all three of those.
I think that the way that
I approach the problem
is to see how solutions to the
problem of saving capitalism
against both its internal
capacity to self-destruct,
and the kind of the most
disintegrative forces that
are trying to destroy it,
what strategies can be formed
to kind of save capitalism
against both itself
and against its enemies.
And what those
enemies are according
to neo liberals is
in the 20th century,
is the problem of
the universalisation
of the principle of
self-determination
and the universalisation of the
principle of one man one vote
democracy becomes the
kind of threat against,
which the institutionally the
market needs to be protected.
So I think it is very much to
your second point, one needs
to understand neoliberal theory
the same as really, I guess,
all political theories
as emerging conjecturally
from things that are seen
as existential threats
to its existence of
its core principles.
And what I tried
to see in the book
is like where are
those principals?
Where are those threats?
And yes, it was the
left at sometimes.
At other times, when you
think about something
like the new international
economic order and the demands
coming from global south
countries led especially by oil
producing countries,
who have realized oh, we
can kind of shut down the
world economy if we like
politicize this one commodity,
the commodity of oil,
then is that a left threat?
I don't know.
I don't know if that is such a
helpful way of describing it.
It's a disruptive
politicizing threat.
So and the same way--
the card carrying
neoliberals that I speak to
are very worried
about Trump, right.
They see him as opening
the door that I described
of kind of politicization
in a way that
could lead to a kind
of systemic breakdown.
So I think that sort of
performing that sleight of hand
whereby depoliticization--
the political work that needs
to go into deep politicization
can sort of present itself
as nonpolitical is really
the central problem and that
the circumstances of not just
economic globalization, but the
generalization of the principle
of democracy and post-imperial
national self-determination
creates just a totally
different landscape for that
than it was for the classical
liberals in the 19th century.
But to be honest, I'm
thinking more and more
that it's helpful to think
about the similarities
between something
like Keynesianism
and neoliberalism
in certain ways.
So Jeff Mann's recent
book on Keynes I think
offers a vision of
Keynes as someone
who wanted the same
thing as the neoliberals.
In other words, he wanted the
maintenance of a free market
order at a global level.
And he saw a certain
kind of institutional fix
that could be carried out
to achieve that just as
the neoliberals have theirs.
It was just about moving the
promises about social welfare
provision in different ways.
But I think both of
them can be helpful.
They subsumed under the
notion of liberalism.
And their fighting
over the label
is probably not that
helpful anymore.
But I appreciate the push on it.
So--
Who's next?
I've got the mic.
[INAUDIBLE]
So you've talked a lot about
how these thinkers are reacting
to the radical left and
disillusioned the Habsburg
Empire and waved
revolution after 1917.
So I just want to
ask about the people
on the other side of the coin
and whether or not they matter.
The people that I'm
more interested in
were the fascists.
You talked about-- Mark pressed
you a little bit on this race
issue.
And I wanted to
ask you what is--
because I regret I've
not read the book yet.
What is that relationship
to fascist movements
within Central Europe
during this period?
Because it seems
like on the one hand,
obviously, the race issue
is deeply troubling to them.
The sort of opportunistic
interference
in the workings
of the free market
to serve the purposes of
re-armament, inflation,
or what have you
are problematic.
But fascism, I personally
truck with a sort
of Marxist view of
fascism as a sort
of response of capitalists
trying to sort of crush
the labor movement
and sort of using
these people as an
instrument, and then being
devoured by them.
The fascists in all
of Germany, Italy,
elsewhere are all seen
as violently opposed
to organized labor.
They do form a very
close relationship
with heavy industry
monopoly capitalism.
So how do these
globalists-- how do they
make sense of what's going on?
Does it even really matter
because they see fascism
as a dying movement?
Because it seems like today
authoritarian nationalism
is perhaps more of a threat
than the radical leftism
is in terms of the liberal
democratic project?
From their point of view, right.
Yeah, I mean, on their
own terms, I mean,
if you read Hayek and
what he writes about then,
he writes as much about
the threat from the right
as from the left.
I mean, just at
the level of what's
happening inside the text.
And both of them have
the same problem.
One of the things that connects
them is according to them,
this notion of
trying to cordon off
the national economy as
something that could even
potentially be
self-sufficient, politicizing
economic relations, which
they see as the right is doing
as much as the left is doing.
Where I think people draw
connections between someone
like Hayek and fascism,
sometimes fairly,
most often unfairly, is
usually the connecting figure
as Carl Schmitt, right?
And I think there,
just as I think
it makes sense in some ways to
kind of connect Hayek to Keynes
and the kind of
belief in what are
the measures
necessary to sustain
the whole and the system
against counter movements.
Similarly, when one
looks at the way
that order liberals
think about the need
to preserve the system
against challenges,
sometimes they directly
refer to Carl Schmitt's idea
of the need for an act of
will or an act of decision
that will come from the elites
and from the politicians
at a level from the top down.
So there is this notion
of the possibility
of an authoritarian
liberalism, which
it combines both the points.
I mean, it sounds a bit too--
it probably sounds
a bit too foggy
to say that Hayek is someone
who could combine aspects
of both Keynes and Schmitt.
But I actually don't think
it's that far fetched.
Because from one,
you get the notion
of systemic interdependence.
And from the other,
you get the notion
of the need for a kind of
elite moments of decision
that cut off other options
for political action
when the system is under threat.
So far as fascism is a
kind of mode of governance
that welcomes this sort of--
speaks in the name
of the people,
but then also welcomes moments
of bracketing democracy
and making decisions in
a decisionistic fashion,
then I think that
neoliberalism in practice
has often looked like that.
But most of the core
principles of fascism
just don't fit well with
neoliberalism as I see it.
I mean, the kind of--
the invocation of
the single people.
The need for a kind of a
constant kind of competition
between fundamentally
different peoples.
There are certain ways
that perhaps neoliberalism
hasn't grafted onto things
in ways that look like that.
But in its kind of
doctrinal form, I mean,
it's something that looks
quite different I think.
Thank you.
This has been a
really engaging talk.
I guess I wanted to kind
of follow up on that,
and maybe hear some
of your thoughts
in terms of this
tension that seems
to exist with the
neoliberals and in particular
with Hayek's kind of concern
for maintaining and preserving
this global system of
integrated markets,
and this concern for kind
of encasing, as you said,
this global system.
And Hayek's more
specific concerns,
so to speak, about the
pretense of knowledge
as he says in his Nobel
speech, or this inability
for elites to actually engage
in specific economic planning.
So maybe if you could just
talk a little bit about how
you see that tension or
resolve that tension in terms
of their approach towards
preserving or setting
the stage for the conditions for
global markets to proliferate?
Sure, yeah.
So I mentioned that
Nobel speech in the book.
And it's not often
noted that it's
in direct response to the
Club of Rome's first limits
to growth report, which
was done at basically
at MIT with
computers, projecting
certain forms of resource
consumption and population
growth over time,
and saying like,
oh my god, we need to
drastically cut down
the amount of the resources
that the world we're using,
or we are going
to run out, right?
And that led to in
the early 1970s,
a real widespread
discussion probably
to a level that hasn't been
repeated again of the need
to kind of intervene directly
and in quite radical ways
to change the way
the policy worked,
to change the way that
everyday consumption worked,
and in other words,
it was a kind
of a high moment of large
scale social engineering.
There's no other
way of putting it.
And for Hayek, this is kind
of the opposite of the way
that he understands how
policy needs to be approached,
right, which is what he
says in that speech, which
is to say because
there is at some level
a kind of complexity
that extends
beyond human
comprehension, we can't
try to know the
whole at such a level
that we can make this or
that policy suggestion
or this or that forecast.
But we need to kind of
default to first principles.
So the legal architecture
of something like the WTO I
always find fascinating.
If you look at all
the journals that
are being written
by the people who
are involved with
creating the WTO,
you won't find any
numbers in them.
You won't find graphs.
You won't find
projections of how
this will affect World Trade.
It's not being actually argued
or built on those premises.
It's being argued on the
premise of legal principles
of reciprocity, of most
favored nation, right,
of these principles that
exist in a kind of space
outside of that of
outputs or testable kind
of hypotheses or
statistics-based arguments.
So that's the Hayekian approach
to global economic governance
as I see it as one
that doesn't speak
in terms of specific outcomes
or specific deliverables
but defaults to a kind of
ironclad principle, which
in the end, runs into of course,
a legitimacy problem and revolt
from the margins.
So the perfect sort of bear
of Hayekian style thinking
in recent years is
Wolfgang Scháuble--
the finance minister of Germany
during the eurozone crisis when
as Yanis Varoufakis
describes, at some point,
he's standing there trying to
explain to Scháuble and other
finance ministers why these
measures are going to have
a catastrophic effect
on the Greek economy.
And they're not even
pretending to listen to him.
They don't even need
to feign persuasion
because what's under
way is not a moment
of intellectual exchange
or the use of kind
of rational argumentation.
It's a firm statement
of principle
along that is
being now exercised
in the kind of a
Schmittien fashion.
So that to me is the corollary
of Hayek's limits of knowledge
is this kind of limits
of resistance, right?
There's a moment at which the
state will not and should not
give or relent
regardless of what people
know that the outcome will be.
Next up.
Thanks very much, Quinn.
You argue in your book against
conventional representations
of neoliberalism as being about
freeing and unfettering markets
and also the related, I
think, conventional idea
of neoliberalism, which
is that its economistic.
And I wonder if
the confusion here
doesn't have to do
with the differences
between neoliberalism as an
intellectual movement in terms
of the Geneva school
and neoliberalism
as an actually existing
political culture
and political economy.
Like, for example, could
some of the confusion here
be explained in the
differences between how
the drafters of the
WTO explain their work
and how Thomas Friedman
defended it at the time
in the New York Times?
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's
a conscious decision that I
make to kind of to use the word
neoliberalism quite discreetly
and sparingly, right.
I mean, not sparingly.
I use it all over the place.
But I use it to
describe specifically
a set of conversations around
a very discrete group of people
connected to the
Mont Pelerin society.
In that sense, I'm
following the work
of Dieter Plehwe
and Bernhard Walpen
and Phil Mirowski saying that
at some level, the only way
we can sort of
salvage this term is
by giving it a specificity of
a particular ideology that's
being developed in a long
series of discussions
that stretch over decades.
So in that sense, I wouldn't
call Thomas Friedman
a neoliberal as much as that
might be shocking to hear,
right?
I think it's more useful for
me anyway to kind of keep
that word for this
set of conversations
that is interconnected.
And there-- I think even
there, you can, however,
draw out serious differences.
There is a big difference
between Chicago school,
the Chicago School of
Friedman and Becker
and Stiegler, which
indeed does bring
in some kind of cost
benefit analyzes, which
does sort of put price
tags on every aspect
of human existence.
There's a big difference between
that microeconomic approach,
especially, and the
kind of questions
of international
order and global order
that I'm talking about when this
category of the Geneva school.
So that-- I mean, that would
partially be my answer.
Yes, it is true that there can
be confusion when neoliberalism
is used quite
generally to describe
kind of global capitalist
culture since the '70s
or since the '90s.
But as long as you kind of
preserve a kind of specificity
to that school of
thought the same way
you would talk
about the same way
you would talk
about Keynesianism,
then I think that one
probably gets further.
That would be my argument.
Next up.
[INAUDIBLE]
Can you talk a little
bit about Bretton Woods
and how it fits
in this narrative?
I'm having a problem placing it.
Sure.
Yeah, so I have a whole chapter.
That's the chapter that's
called The World of Rights.
And it's about the
neoliberal critique
of Bretton Woods at the time.
And as you can probably
imagine, the main thing
that they were
criticizing at the time
was the capital controls
that were being built
into the Bretton Wood's system.
I mean, this would
be a place where
Keynesianism and
neoliberalism as proposals
for organizing the world economy
diverge quite significantly.
The notion that
one could actually
control the inflow
and outflow of capital
that and that that was a
source of the Great Depression
is an argument made
by one side of the--
the other side of the
Keynesian spectrum.
And the neo liberals were
arguing that no, actually,
such flows are--
they are balancing,
and they create harmony
and they produce a greater--
they add greater
stability in the end.
So what they were active doing
in the time of the Bretton
Woods system was
to sort of argue
for the addition of,
as Mark mentioned,
the human right
of capital flight,
the dismantlement
of capital controls
as they're being
built into the IMF
and the addition
of this human right
to take capital out of a
country to the UN Declaration
of Human Rights, something which
actually was taken seriously
by legal experts like
Philip Jessup at the time.
So that was their core
criticism of Bretton Woods.
They also criticized
what they saw
as the kind of scaling up of
the one-man, one-vote model
to a kind of one
country, one vote.
Even though clearly,
there was quota systems
within the Bretton
Woods institutions
as they were created, they saw
it as part of the UN system,
which had a fundamentally
flawed model, which analogized
basically the world to a
democracy in which countries
that had relatively little
economic significance
should have a say that is at
all equivalent to the countries
that had great
economic equivalence.
So that was their
critique of the 1.0
in 1944 Britian Bretton
Woods system with the World
Bank and the IMF.
They actively worked to
undermine the International
Trade Organization,
or the ITO, which
was supposed to be the third
part of the Bretton Woods
system.
They undermined it because
it included too many rights
for global south nations,
including the right
to nationalize foreign
owned property.
That was written
into the ITO as it
was signed in Havana in 1947.
And working with the
International Chamber
of Commerce, the
people I describe
helped to torpedo that
in Congress, thereby
kind of paving the way for
the more provisional model
of the GAT.
And eventually the WTO kind
of realizes the harder version
of the ITO without
the kind of provisions
for national economic
development that have been
written into it originally.
Thank you so much for the stop.
I look forward to
reading the book.
I haven't as of yet.
I wanted to actually pick
your brain on one thing, which
is to do with libertarianism.
At what point, to be very
short, does libertarianism
take off away from
neoliberalism thought or the way
you describe it?
And in the sense
that neoliberalism,
whether it's Hayek or whether
it's von Mises, for them,
it's always the system,
right, this notion
of spontaneous
order, or the fact
that you can't
centralize knowledge,
which Hayek had on
one of his papers.
Whereas, libertarianism,
which is often close to it,
is yet different
because for them,
the starting point is
always the individual.
It's property rights.
You know, Nozick--
individuals have rights,
and nobody can do
anything to the rights
and rights are kind of perpetual
come hell or high water.
Whereas on one
side, neoliberalism
has some space built in.
Both need the state.
But both say no to the state.
But neoliberalism still has some
space built in for uncertainty,
for future uncertainty
that recognize that can't
know the economy [INAUDIBLE].
Whereas libertarianism,
given that it's
so stringent on property
rights, has this issue
of dealing with uncertainty.
For example, the big
pharma brought the guy
who raised the prices of--
[INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE] right?
That's classic libertarianism.
I own the right to this,
and I can do whatever.
So how do these two positions
get reconciled by both parties,
or they don't?
Yeah, I mean, so libertarianism
is a big tent, obviously,
right?
And my strong argument at
the beginning of this book
is to say that it's a falsehood
to say that neoliberals
don't believe in the state.
If you actually look
at what they're saying,
it's about redesigning
the state and how
can the state be a better shall
for capitalism, basically.
And I'm not the first
person to say that.
The rollback of
the state is always
about the rollout of another.
People like Jamie Peck have
been talking about making
that argument for years.
There are libertarians who
similarly are minarchists,
right?
That there needs to
be a minimal state.
It needs only do
things like protect
the rule of law and security.
But as soon as you
open that door,
he said only the rule
of law and security,
then the possibilities of an
intensive if not extensive
state I think come
rushing back in.
So in a sense, I see
neoliberalism libertarians
as sort of part of the
same camp until you
get to the truly radical,
stateless libertarians
of anarcho capitalism, right?
I think the Rothbard wing
and the [INAUDIBLE] wing
and those that go with them have
collected now around the Mises
Institute for the most
part in the United States,
represent something
that is substantively
different from the neoliberalism
of someone like Hayek, right?
It's a kind of a dissident
neoliberalism that
is no longer making
its arguments
on the basis of the need to
kind of protect the whole
and somehow be guardians of
the economic constitution
or guardians of the system.
It's kind of-- in
most versions of it,
it kind of discards with
that and just speaks
sort of a ruthlessly
mercenary language
of individual
self-interest, right?
So I think that that
is indeed something
that needs to be
categorically kept
separate from neoliberalism
as kind of a main line.
However, I need to add there
that those very anarcho
capitalist have also been quite
open with making alliances
with people who are
nonetheless, still
interested in using state.
So the best example
I can give of that
is a guy named Peter
Boehringer who is--
he was a libertarian anarcho
capitalist, gold consultant
blogger from Munich,
who is now sitting
in the Bundestag in Berlin
as a delegate for the AFD,
the Alternative
for Germany party.
And he's the chair of the
parliamentary budget committee.
So this is something
that you expect--
expect inconsistency seems
to be the best principle when
you actually follow
the history here.
And those moments
of kind of coalition
between supposedly properly
anarchistic, stateless,
libertarians with forms
of political parties
and political
mobilizations are in a way
some of the more
interesting places to look.
But I think that
they definitely--
I think you're right that you're
touching on something there
that there is self-description
of their own mission
that is at variance with the
kind of guardian of the system
model that otherwise pertains.
[INAUDIBLE]
I'm interested in you saying
a little bit more about a word
that you used, a
key word [INAUDIBLE]
in some of your talk, and
that's interdependence.
Because if that's a kind
of key word for Hayek,
it's also a key word for a
bunch of people in this period,
in the '30s, '40s,
'50s, that we would
have thought of as cutting
in other political ways.
And it suggests a
really ambivalence
at the heart of
that word, right?
So if for Hayek and
all that you say
is more about that, it's about
connection but inequality.
For others, it was
about the sense
that the world was
now connected and thus
needed to be made equal
to equal that connection
on the sense that those--
in the center left and
leaning further to the left
whether we think of it as
people who were multilateralist
or people who are
anti-imperialists or part
of the Non Aligned Movement.
So I wonder if you just
would say something
about the political valence,
the social valence of that
that term at that period
because that's interesting.
No, thanks.
Actually, I'm
really glad that you
ask the question in that way
because it allows me to protest
against what has
been already one
misreading of this book,
which is that I'm creating
a kind of dichotomy between
neoliberal globalism
and progressive nationalism,
right, by implication
that the only way that one
could-- because neoliberals
now own globalism according
to this narrative.
The only way that one could
have a resistance against it
would be to reclaim sovereignty,
the very sovereignty that's
being strangled
by the globalists.
The person who I'm
thinking of here
is actually the sociologist
Wolfgang Streeck,
who recently in a
public discussion
said I just read this book.
And now I know that
the neoliberals
have been at this for decades.
And the only way that we can
fight against kind of globalism
is by restoring
sovereignty to the nation
and thinking more about national
strength, which I kind of was
a troubling conclusion
from my book
because I like you see globalism
as something that contains
many different
political programs
as the inside of
interdependence does as well.
The best book I can
point you to on this
is the Emergence of
Globalism by Or Rosenboim,
which just came out
this last year, which
shows that precisely
at this moment of the--
a moment in which you've written
about yourself, the kind of one
worldest moment of the 1940s.
There's people who are saying
let's push this in a more
redistributionist direction.
And others are saying
let's put this in a more
anti-imperialists direction.
And others are saying
let's use federations
as a way to kind of
lock in capital rights
and ensure that there can't be
an expansionary social state.
So all those conversations
are happening.
The victory of one or the
other is not preordained.
And I think what I tried
to do in the book is
show these moments
of competition
actually more than a
kind of a smooth path
for the neoliberal vision
from the '40s to the '90s.
So I think that keeping an
eye on the kind of diversity
of political visions within
a broad idea of globalism
is more important now
than ever, clearly, right?
I mean, it's necessary to
not be kind of blackmailed
by Trump's own language into
a kind of just a recovery
of globalism as such.
One has to obviously see how
there's so many different forms
of politics contained within
that and figure out how we can
recover the legacy's that
we find useful and criticize
the ones that we don't.
Yeah, so my question is like how
is this politics of globalism--
how has that altered
in the age of Trump,
where you have this very right
wing response against globalist
bureaucrats and
the EU and whatnot,
and then portions of the center
left are kind of against that?
And how does this
relate to immigration
where parties on the right favor
restricted movement of labor
and free movement capital,
whereas members on the left
favor restrictions on capital
but free movement for labor?
Yeah, I mean, I think you're
kind of answering the question
right there in a
way in the sense
that I think that you're
exactly right that this
is the kind of conundrum
that we're faced with.
And I think that
the challenge is
to not kind of
default to the nation
as the active category of
politics in the sense of kind
of like the Lexit position,
that kind of left wing
Brexit position, which someone
like Streeck sort of implicitly
supports, or the
new kind of efforts
that left wing exclusionary
populism in Germany,
for example.
So I do talk about in
the book that this--
how this emerges this--
the dropping out of free
labor mobility as kind of one
of the central principles for
the neoliberals I write about.
So these particular characters,
Hayek and Mises and company,
I mean, they do
begin at-- they do
begin with a demand for
full labor mobility as well.
I mean, that's very
important for Mises.
They give it up provisionally in
the 1930s and 1940s in wartime
because they're
writing big books--
Road to Serfdom, Omnipotent
Government for Mises.
And there they say, as
far as our vision goes,
it's not realistic to ask for
open borders for migration
right now because America is
not going to let in Germans
and Japanese in wartime.
And then Mises sort
of inserts a footnote
that is often quoted now
by right wing libertarians,
and there is no white
man who wouldn't shudder
at the vision of millions
of black or yellow people
amongst him now or
something like that.
So they kind of say it's
the political, geopolitical
problems, and cultural
problems that unfortunately
are obstacles to the
realization of perfect border
free capitalism as we
might want to imagine it.
This changes over time.
So what becomes a kind of
a provisional carve out
of the neoliberal vision ends up
becoming a central part of it.
So Hayek in the
late 1970s, famously
comes out with a series of
articles in which he defends
Thatcher's immigration policy.
And he says she's actually doing
the right thing by blocking
the continuing migration
of non-white people
from the Commonwealth
countries into the UK
because it's
undermining social order
and people need certain
morals effectively
to be good market citizens.
So now, barriers on migration,
obstacles to migration
is no longer just a kind of
a wartime provisional part
of the neoliberal imagine.
But it's becoming like
a central constituent
part of the
neoliberal imaginary,
and that's really
where you get parties
like the Alternative
for Germany party
or the Austrian
Freedom Party, which
are totally neoliberal in their
financial and trade positions,
and then totally
restrictive and exclusionary
in their migration positions.
You do literally get some
of these people saying
we can do it because Hayek
said we could, right?
I mean, I have the writings
of some of the people like--
and they're more
well-educated kind of circles,
making these kind of
arguments, arguing
for the consistency of it.
So I think the answer
to that is what you say,
which is push back against
that, deny the idea
that international,
national is really
a meaningful division in
the era of financialization,
understand more how flows
within our countries
are also affecting inequality.
[INAUDIBLE] capital--
their inablity
to control against capitals
flees once you impose control
[INAUDIBLE].
Well, I think that,
you know, it's--
Europe is a good example, right?
I mean, and Streeck
is a good example.
There has been leftist critiques
of the European Union--
someone here has written
a couple of them--
over the last
decade or so, right,
which is basically saying that
kind of free capital mobility
and certain kinds of
free trade positions
are kind of locked in to the EU.
And it's designed
to kind of make--
depoliticize certain
decisions that
could be made at the level
of democratic government
through things like
the European Commission
and the European Court of
Justice, which can overrule
individual nation
states to cut state
subsidies to national
champions or state
owned services of
different kinds.
Right, that's been an argument.
But there was also
at the same time
an argument coming from the
further neoliberal right, which
is like no, Europe
is not the solution.
Europe is the problem.
And we need to
get out of Europe,
because Europe is
a transfer union.
And it's going to turn
into this social Europe,
and welfare is going to become
continentalized and stuff,
right?
[INAUDIBLE] embedded the
economical, social environment
of the socialites of the
European Union [INAUDIBLE]
opposed.
They want to go even
further away from it, right?
So I mean, and this is their
logic behind the Brexit
campaign as it comes from
certain-- the neoliberal wings
of the Tories, right?
So that doesn't mean that now we
need to all become Europhiles.
But it does mean that we
need to have as sort of agile
of a sense of
political possibility
as they do in the
sense that knowing
that the political content
of different formations
is not determined in advance
and is always open for pressure
and open for
transformation, right?
I mean, anyone who sort of
says but that's impossible,
how can we imagine
it, just needs
to think about what it
meant to drop borders
inside the entire
Schengen area in Europe.
I mean, what does
it mean to drive
a car past an abandoned
border post between Italy
and Switzerland?
I mean, it's-- or not
Switzerland but between Germany
and Czech Republic.
It's extraordinary.
That's an extraordinary
experiment
to happen without people even
really thinking about it.
Now we're trying to figure out
what that means politically.
But nothing is
really impossible.
So I think that being aware of
the openness of institutions
is something that is
really important for me
as a historian, too.
[INAUDIBLE]
Hi, so before this
talk, I always
thought about neoliberalism as
free markets, personal liberty,
et cetera, which is I think a
perspective that lends itself
well to thinking about economics
in terms of the way we learn it
in school here at Brown.
So I don't know if this
is a good question or not.
But does reframing
neoliberalism in terms
of the global systemic
institutional way
that you reformulate
it, does that
change the way your
representative neoliberal would
look at the efficacy
or the viability
of standard economic theory?
Can you rephrase the question?
Like you think that--
yeah, can you ask that again?
Yeah, so just
changing the way we--
reformulating you
liberalism in this way,
does that render,
not monetary policy,
but the standard
economic theory of today?
Does it render it useless?
Or does it-- because of all
the entangling institutions
and laws and whatnot,
does that change
the way we look at
the viability of what
we can do with economics?
Yeah, OK.
I see what you're saying now.
Yeah, I mean, I think that it--
I mean, because I wanted to
kind of decouple neoliberalism
as a category, which is indeed
often used as a kind of a slur
and sort of a curse word
really, by the progressive left,
to-- and which is fine--
but [CHUCKLES] to decouple that
from the practice of economics
as such does kind of
intentionally kind
of reclaim the
progressive possibilities
of the discipline of economics.
So that doesn't sort of mean
that economics is now the hero
and neoliberals is the villain.
But it's just-- it's the amount
of the lack of comprehension
outside of economics
departments about what
the politics of
economics is actually
quite extraordinary, right?
I mean, the fact that most
economics professors are indeed
left of center on the
political spectrum
and sees what they're
doing as in the interest
of distributional justice
and some level of equality
is not something that most
people I think realize.
And so I do kind of want
to let economics a bit
off the hook, or at
least not kind of blame
it directly for the problems
of the international order
because I think that the
arguments that have been made
for creating the international
trade architecture,
for example, that we have today,
have often been made in idioms
that aren't really that close
to the discipline of economics
actually, right?
I mean, it's about-- it's been
about great power politics,
for sure, but then
often through this idiom
of basically a version
of international law
rather than a language of demand
curves and economics per se.
So yeah, I think it's sort
of trying to be a bit more
specific about what
conversations the world order
we're in now came out of
and which ones they didn't.
And I think we're just
about out of time.
I'd like to take
this opportunity
to thank Quinn for a fantastic
conversation and even
better book.
And we have a reception outside.
You can all eat for free.
That's not markets.
That's something else.
Let's go with it.
Thank you.
Next week, Rick
Pearlstein is coming.
Another fabby historian.
So please come again.
See you then.
[APPLAUSE]
