Where does free market ideology come from? Recent work on the neoliberal intellectual movement around the Mont Pelerin Society has allowed for closer study of the relationship between ideas, interests, and institutions. Yet even as this literature brought neoliberalism down to earth, it tended to reproduce a European and American perspective on the world. With the notable exception of Augusto Pinochet鈥檚 Chile, long seen as a laboratory of neoliberalism, the new literature followed a story of diffusion as ideas migrated outward from the Global North. Even in the most innovative work, the cast of characters remains surprisingly limited, clustering around famous intellectuals like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
Market Civilizations redresses this absence by introducing a range of characters and voices active in the transnational neoliberal movement from the Global South and Eastern Europe. This includes B. R. Shenoy, an early member of the Mont Pelerin Society from India, who has been canonized in some circles since the Singh reforms; Manuel Ayau, another MPS president and founder of the Marroqu铆n University, an underappreciated Latin American node in the neoliberal network; Chinese intellectuals who read Hayek and Mises through local circumstances; and many others. Seeing neoliberalism from beyond the industrial core helps us understand what made radical capitalism attractive to diverse populations and how often disruptive policy ideas 鈥渨ent local.鈥�
Quinn Slobodian is Marion Butler McLean Associate Professor in the History of Ideas at Wellesley College. He is the author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Dieter Plehwe is a research fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and private lecturer of political science at the University of Kassel. He co-edited Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, The Road from Mont P猫lerin, and Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique.
鈥淭his landmark study confronts a key barrier to 鈥榞lobal knowledge鈥� and scholarship, particularly in this age of 鈥榙ecolonizing鈥� knowledge. This outstanding collection is the response of how to overcome such obstacles, a model others would do well to follow. Slobodian and Plehwe have gathered a group of excellent scholars expert in the histories of economic ideas and philosophies of a wide variety of societies in global East and South鈥攊ncluding China, India, Iceland, Montenegro, Brazil, Guatemala, Russia鈥攖o consider the global and local knowledge networks that helped make neoliberalism a dominant global ideology for 鈥榤arket civilizations鈥�. The story of a smooth process of knowledge movement from Western 鈥榗ore鈥� to eastern and southern 鈥榩eripheries鈥� is not only challenged via local histories and ideas, it is complexified to form a more accurate assessment of how ideas become the bases of profound transformations. The book successfully establishes that there are simultaneous, separate, and interconnected, local and global conversations, layers upon layers of thinking, understanding, and practice, independent, semiautonomous, and dependent in a bewildering complexity. A study of 鈥榞lobal knowledge鈥� at its best, and a model for emulation. A brilliant must-read collection.鈥濃�擨nderjeet Parmar, University of London
鈥淥ver 150 years ago Francis Galton made a bet that diffusion of practices from a common point to other sites is far more likely to succeed than multiple sites spontaneously finding similar solutions to common problems. The student of neoliberalism is a subconscious Galtonian, viewing neoliberal thought as a western core diffusing to a global periphery that 鈥榮ucks it up鈥� with various national edits to the script. Not so, say Plehwe and Slobodian. To truly understand neoliberalism鈥檚 global reach we have to break with Galton and appreciate how indigenous varieties emerge and thrive autochthonously. Doing so explains its persistence since 鈥榠t鈥� is never one thing.鈥濃�擬ark Blyth, Brown University
鈥淢arket Civilizations shines a bright light on how neoliberalism has 鈥榯raveled鈥� beyond the neoliberal heartlands. In a series of illuminating essays, a stellar group of contributors provide highly detailed, nicely nuanced analyses of how neoliberalism 鈥榳ent local鈥� in unexpected ways in unusual places. And in so doing, they offer groundbreaking insights into the ins-and-outs as well as the ups-and-downs of neoliberal ideas, adaptations, and applications in a wide range of lesser-known cases around the world.鈥濃�擵ivien A. Schmidt, Boston University
鈥�Market Civilizations leaves us with an intellectually vibrant understanding of neoliberalism as a diffuse and diverse school of thought, with various proponents across the world harboring numerous reasons for complementing an evolving liberal international order and their own distinct means and understandings on what it means to nurture 鈥榤arket civilizations,鈥� or rather, what it means to shape societies by the 鈥榣ogic of capital.鈥欌�濃�擬aribel Morey, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences
"Critics of neoliberalism have long treated it as a homogeneous and homogenizing force, radially spreading out from the capitalist metropoles of the Global North and spearheaded by Western intellectuals and institutions. Slobodian and Plehwe have assembled a kaleidoscope of studies which explode this view, revealing the plural origins and forms of neoliberal thought and practice. Ranging from efforts to neutralize Black resistance in apartheid South Africa to 'ultraliberal' online movements in contemporary Brazil, from Turkey's experiments in Islamic neoliberalism to their Hindu nationalist counterparts in India, Market Civilizations is an indispensable ideological map at a time when the mutations and fragmentations of neoliberalism are too often mistaken for its demise."鈥擜lberto Toscano, Goldsmiths, University of London
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