Alexander Zevin reviews ‘Globalists’ by Quinn Slobodian · LRB 15 August 2019
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n16/alexander-zevin/every-penny-a-vote
Slobodian is right to stress that ‘the main stream of neoliberals saw a world of rules, not a world of #races,’ but this made their theories attractive to many who saw the world in racial terms. The formal freedoms of the marketplace, of buyers and sellers, have always meant that those excluded from it need not be named. Far from dissolving existing social relations, the neoliberal vision of a depoliticised economy offered ingenious ways to seal them in amber – whether in Austria, South Africa or the American South. Hayek designed constitutions for Salazar in Portugal and Pinochet in Chile – as ‘proof’, he told Salazar, ‘against the abuses of democracy’, and proof, too, that ‘it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way.’