This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you
from the Stanford campus.
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We're going to be talking about globalists today.
So here's a question to start out with.
At what level of interconnection are we globular?
At the economic level, for sure.
At the geopolitical level, maybe.
At the cultural level, not really.
It becomes increasingly evident when you start thinking about it
that the world gets globalized only by flattening itself out.
There's something paradoxical about that,
or so it seems to me, a flat world wrapping itself
around a rotund globe.
But maybe flat is the wrong adjective.
Earlier today in preparation for this show,
I decided to look up the word globe just out of curiosity.
It is a beautiful word, after all.
And here's one of the older meanings, which
goes back to the mid-1500s, I quote,
"Map of the earth or sky drawn on the surface
of an artificial sphere."
Is that what globalism means when pundits,
populists, and politicians throw the term around,
a network of interconnection on the surface
of an artificial sphere?
Are we living these days on such a surface?
And if so, what lies beneath us in the depths under our feet?
Now that sounds like a question for entitled opinions
where we always go deep.
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I'm joined in the studio today by the author of a book
that's just been published on a topic I know very little about.
I usually try to avoid doing that.
Since I'd like to feel that I'm entitled to my opinion
on any given day, but today is one of those occasions
where I mostly hear to listen and learn.
In fact, I'm curious and even intrigued
by exactly how this show will unfold
and what exactly we're in for.
A few weeks ago, I received a query from an editor
at Harvard University Press asking me
if I would be interested in having the author of a newly published
book on the show, the editor sent me the book.
I looked through it, read the introduction carefully,
and was intrigued enough to work things out
so that the author and I could have this on-air conversation
during his pre-scheduled visit to Stanford.
So here we are.
I'm joined in the studio by Quinn Slobodian,
a professor of history at Wellesley College, whom I met
for the first time just minutes ago.
Quinn Slobodian specializes in modern German
and international history with a focus
on North-South politics, social movements,
and the intellectual history of neoliberalism.
He is the author of Foreign Front, Third World Politics
in '60s West Germany, which came out in 2012.
He is also the editor of Comrades of Color,
East Germany and the Cold War world.
But it's his new book that interests us today.
That book is called Globalists, the End of Empire
and the Birth of Neoliberalism, which just came out
with Harvard University Press, Quinn Slobodian,
welcome to entitled opinions.
- Thank you, I'm happy to be here.
- So your editor at Harvard, Gregory Cornblur.
- The publicist, yeah, great cornblur, yeah.
He mentioned in his first email to me that you're a fan
of entitled opinions, I don't know if that's true or not.
But if so, it bodes well.
- It is.
- Your new book is in the genre of intellectual history
and, or at least so it seems to me,
and that also bodes well.
We do a lot of that around here.
And what you set out to do in this book
is to follow a group of thinkers, quoting you,
from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire
to the creation of the World Trade Organization, the WTO,
and these thinkers who were also economists,
or theorists of the economy,
belong to the so-called Geneva School,
which for you was crucial to the ideology
and theories of what is known as neoliberalism.
And members of that school would include Friedrich Hayek,
Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke,
and Habbler, among others.
And you were intrigued enough by this school,
the Geneva School, to devote a very big book
to its theories about things like the global economy,
the nation state, the role of international law
and transnational institutions.
And we're going to try to think through some of those theories
today, but first it would be helpful
for the listeners of this program,
if you could tell us exactly what neoliberalism means
or what it refers to.
- Sure, it's a term that often had to sort of defend itself,
its own existence as having any kind of validity
or legitimacy at all.
And I think what's helpful is to realize
that it is used in different ways by different scholars.
So one of the ways that it's used is to describe
a kind of period of global capitalism,
beginning in the 1970s with the oil crisis,
the breakdown of the bread and wood system,
the move from manufacturing to services
and especially the rise of finance as a dominant force
in the global north,
the introduction of deregulation,
privatization and liberalization policies in both the north
and more specifically in the third world
of the global south after the debt crisis in 1982.
And a general kind of move to what's called a post-foretest
or a more immaterial rather than a material economy.
So that's one way of thinking about neoliberalism
is it's a kind of time period that embraces
the world economy beginning in the 1970s or so.
Another way of looking at it is as a kind of policy package.
So some of those things I just mentioned,
deregulation, privatization, which replace
pre-existing principles of the welfare state
and redistribution or the principle of solidarity
with the necessity of constant risk,
the importance of competition and innovation
as the sort of load stars of national economic policy.
And the people like political philosophers,
for example, Wendy Brown, who have taken the consideration
of neoliberalism to furthest,
have started to talk about it as a kind of order
of normative reason as she calls it,
or a kind of a new form of subjectivity
or a different form of being,
whereby people perceive themselves as vessels
of human capital that needs to be maximized
at all times in a kind of a competitive market struggle
with other human beings.
This notion introduced by Foucault
of being the entrepreneur of oneself,
often as a way that people sort of summarize
the notion of a neoliberal subjectivity.
As a historian, I'm a little bit less ambitious
in my interpretation compared to some of the more
probing political theoretical approaches to neoliberalism.
What I look at it as is more as a discrete intellectual
and political movement,
the term at self neoliberalism was coined in 1938
by a group of mostly European economists
and policymakers and journalists who are gathered in Paris,
considering in the wake of the Great Depression,
how one would be forced to renovate or rethink liberalism
to prevent it from breaking down as it had
in that course of the Great Depression
and the First World War.
So their conclusion was in the 1930s was that the market
would not take care of itself.
The capitalism actually required a set of
extra economic conditions or safeguards
to prevent the market from undergoing dissolution
or disintegration as it had in the 1930s.
So the neo part of neoliberalism for them
and for me is a kind of actually a break with
a 19th century less a fair idea
that the market would take care of itself,
it would self regulate itself and self direct.
Rather, there was a new role for politicians,
policymakers and philosophers,
which was to rethink the role of the state,
to defend the economy against corrosive forces such as
labor unions, empowered populations,
anti-colonial struggle and things of that sort.
- So the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism
fundamentally would be that liberalism would be a lacy
fair philosophy of the market's self regulating
and that the states should just get out of the way.
And in fact, if the whole apparatus of state
were to vanish, it would be a good thing, right?
- Right.
- And the neo liberals in the wake of the collapse
of the Habsburg Empire in the case of these thinkers
of the Geneva school especially,
who were concerned with the rise of nationalism,
thinking that certain forms of virulent nationalism
could hinder or inhibit the market forces doing their thing,
believed that rather than just
militate against government and institutions
that you would concede that they're here to stay.
And now the point, if I understand what I've read
of your argument that the point would be to find a way
to negotiate the demands of state with the demands
of a free market and that you would rather than presume
to repudiate the nation state, you would what you call
incase, the incasement which is that you would prevent
as much as possible interference of governments
from the free flow of capital.
- That's right, people like Hayek for example,
and you see this up to the present with people like Charles Murray
for example will often call themselves classical liberals,
drawing a kind of self-conscious genealogy back
to someone like Adam Smith in the 18th century.
But the reason why I think neo-liberalism is an appropriate label
is the changed conditions of the 20th century
versus the 19th century.
And the most important changed conditions
that I focus on in the book are one, the emergence
of universal suffrage as ever more common norm globally.
So the idea of one man, one vote, which becomes a reality,
certainly by the end of the second world war
from much of the world was simply not the dominant principle
in the 18th century.
And secondly, the end of empire, the dissolution
of European overseas empires into self-determining
nation-states that began in my argument
with the end of the first world war.
And then progressed into the 1960s and '70s
presents new challenges to liberalism.
So in the 19th century you could rely on
from the liberal point of view, the British Empire
to oversee the stability of some kind of global monetary
order, the stability of global financial flows,
gunboat diplomacy ensured that if people weren't being paid
back by this or that foreign government
then force would be used to get those debts back.
Egypt becomes a colony because it effectively goes
into bankruptcy and Britain steps in and takes over.
So there's all of these forms of unilateral force
that become no longer viable and so naked away
in the era of decolonization and mass democracy.
So the question indeed becomes one of how to redesign
or refashion the state to practice
that sort of imperial oversight over capitalism but in a new form.
- In fact your book is called Globalists
and I get a sense that the main protagonists were,
I don't wanna say that they were nostalgic for empire
but that they would have been much more comfortable
with empire rather than nation as a model
because empires have a global, a more global reach.
They would not impose the same kind of trade barriers
at least between different ethnic groups
within their large, vast domains and so forth.
And yet the distinction that Carl Schmidt draws
between Imperium and dominion, yeah, dominion.
It's the Imperium being the power
that you would then associate with the nation state.
So it would be political power.
Dominion would be the realm of capital or market.
- Is that property?
- Do I get that right?
- Yeah.
- He makes that distinction lamenting the fact
that there's a double world,
the world of Imperium and Dominion.
Your guys like the idea that there's a double world
and wanna make sure that one of them
does not infringe on the other, correct?
- That's right.
I think there's two things there.
I mean, first on the question of empires,
from the point of view of the neoliberal,
as I studied, there were sort of many bad empires
and very few good ones.
So the British Empire, they saw as a positive example
because it did not practice protectionism
and didn't create tariff walls within its own colony.
So that form of empire became something
that could be a kind of template.
The Hopsburg Empire was famously quite protectionist.
So what was attractive about the Hopsburg Empire
was the way in their mind it protected
the very division you're mentioning from Schmidt,
which is the idea as high it called,
called it that you could have a double government.
So on the one hand, you could have a kind of
an institutional arrangement whereby goods
could flow freely, capital could flow freely.
And wherever your property was in the world,
it would still be your property.
And there would be no sense that it was in jeopardy
or was gonna be taken away by the sovereign power
under which it happened to be located.
So there'd be a world of dominion
and one sphere of the double government
and the other sphere would be the world of imperium
and sovereign self-determination states.
So this is this doubled world as I described,
but it is indeed what Schmidt saw as kind of
the nightmare world of liberalism that had been produced
by the 19th century where politics had been drained
to such a point that it couldn't exercise its own
control even over things on its own territory.
So if a foreign capitalist owned, let's say,
the coal mines in your country
and you needed that coal for your own nation's development,
you would have no right or ability to simply nationalize
or make or socialize that coal mine
and use it for the well-being of your own people
because the doubled world of 19th century liberalism meant
that even though it was right in front of you,
it was beyond your grasp because it was contained
in this world of property rather than that
in the world of politics.
So the reason I mentioned that I'm intrigued
about how the conversation is going on fold
is because I did not get a clear sense
from reading you whether you're championing
these neo-liberals or whether you're just being neutral
as a historian, but let me just tell you my impression
from reading what I have of your book is that
the neo-liberals Geneva School and other,
maybe, forms of it, that there's no sense of any allegiance
to either a people, a nation state, a polity
that it's the complete promiscuity of capital
and that you need dominion so that anyone
will theoretically be able to own not only property
but factories and interests in any country of the world
and that there should be this complete cash blanche
when it comes to the global circulation of capital.
And first, I admit this was a nightmare precisely
because it infringed on self-determination
of nations and of peoples and so forth.
In the research, I've done a lot of people
are very vociferous critics of neo-liberalism,
precisely because I think it's a completely one-sided
in its allegiance to global capital,
which means non-alligence to anything
not associated with that.
And frankly, my instincts are to say that
that kind of dominion, I would really
probably favor strong measures to protect
against that kind of rampant freedom for capital
to just to follow its bliss wherever it leads.
- Yeah, I mean, I think that I am also critical
of neo-liberalism as I think becomes clear,
perhaps the further you read into the book.
And the reason that I'm critical of it
is because of my own kind of prior normative beliefs
about the good life and a good order.
And I believe I do believe in the principles of social justice
and some form of redistributive egalitarianism
and redistributive equality.
And neo-liberalism as a project is expressly designed
to undercut-- - Expressively.
Oh, yes, definitely, definitely.
- Definitely, definitely. - Definitely.
The best example that Warren can use
is the title of Hayek's book from the 1970s,
the second book of his law legislation and liberty trilogy
and the title is the Mirage of Social Justice,
which he means, Social Justice doesn't actually mean anything.
It can't be pursued because no collective can decide
conclusively on what kind of world they all want to live in.
The only way for any kind of justice to be enacted
is a justice before the law.
So everyone needs to have a right to enter the market
and compete on their own terms.
And inequality is a necessary outcome of that,
not just an unfortunate outcome, but a necessary outcome.
And the model that I'm describing
at a kind of a global level is one that allows for
what neo-liberalism self-s' call policy competition,
which a lot of other people would call a battle
to the bottom.
I mean, this idea that if you do have completely
a fulfilled loose capital that is a natural right,
and in fact, as I talk about in one of the chapters,
there was an attempt to even write in a human right
of capital flight to amend that to the UN Declaration
of Human Rights.
If there's a human right of capital flight,
that means any time a state chooses to do something
whether it's to expand their public education system
or to expand their health insurance program
to raise taxation for purposes of redistribution
or purposes of creating more quality within their own nation,
then capital will just up and leave.
And this is an intentional feature
of competitive federal system of the kind
that the neo-liberalists are describing.
- Well, are they in describing or envisioning
or hoping for it because it seems a reality
that capital can just pick up and leave any time it was
from at least developed nation states?
- Right.
Well, that's where one needs to be sort of specific
about the historical moment.
And the Bretton Woods system, which I mentioned,
breaking down in the 1970s, one of the ways that one saw
it breaking down was the capital controls
that had been in existence from 1945 until the early 1970s,
by which you couldn't simply up and take your money
out of a country at the moment you wanted to.
That was the norm at something like the IMF
that capital controls were necessary
because at that point the horizon of political hope
was to produce indeed a kind of a forest,
well-ferrous state in miniature sort of modularly repeated
in all of the new states of the decolonizing world.
So the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system was the freeing
of capital from those constraints and the ability now of ever
more globally-foot-loose capital to discipline
any attempts of creating domestic welfare states
or redistribution of states.
And that was an intentional project of which some of the people
I'm describing were sort of active participants in.
So Gottfried Haberler, who you mentioned in the outset,
was one of the chief proponents of the move
from a fixed exchange rate system
through a floating exchange rate system.
And before the 1970s, the rate at which currencies were
exchanged was not determined freely by speculative capital.
It was regulated by the IMF.
And if you wanted to change your exchange rate,
you needed to go to the IMF and consult with them, et cetera.
After the 1970s under a system of floating exchange rate,
speculative capital determined the value of currency.
So how did the floating rate system win out?
Why?
Was it the neoliberal theorists that were convincing
politicians?
I just had a better way to go, or was there
there's some way in which--
well, the fixed rate was just working
against the economic self-interest of the countries.
Well, it was in part a persuasive project
undertaken by Haberler and Fritz Mahlop,
who was another Vienna-trained economist
who I described in the book, who coordinated with central bankers
and figures from finance to push this self-consciously.
It's a program beginning in the 1960s to the mid-1960s.
But one of the problems was that the realities
that they were confronting that states were confronting
was it was ever harder to actually control people
getting around capital controls.
Among other things, you had the creation
of what was called a Euro-dollar market, meaning
that people were getting around capital controls
by simply keeping their investments offshore.
So the offshore world that we now think
of at the kind of constellation of tax havens
where capital goes to find low tax rates and kind of secrecy
was something that was already emerging in the 1960s.
So partially the move to floating exchange
rates was just simply to say-- or the disappearance
of capital controls was to concede
that this was happening in reality already.
And it was actually preventing the reinvestment
of capital at home if you simply
denied at the right to leave and then return,
which is actually very similar to the argument made
in the Trump tax reform package that just went through it,
which is just to say you can try to legislate against tax havens,
but they're just going to find new ones.
So we might as well lower tax rates at home
to try to repatriate that capital.
So it's a combination of sort of an ideological persuasive
project and the changing realities of a private financial sector
that was always looking for ways to go around regulations.
In many ways, the intellectuals and the academics
were not leading changes, but they
are simply reacting to changes that were happening
in the private sector.
So if we bring it closer to our own-- well, actually,
let's do one historical step, which
is Thatcher and Reaganism or Thatcherism and Reaganism,
because I gather that these were the two big heroes
of neoliberalism.
Or it was a peak of neoliberal influence.
And we're in a slightly different regime now,
where there's been a profound disenchantment
with globalism.
And if you look online and things like everyone
wants to repudiate the label of neoliberal,
because there's a sense among many people
that it's proven itself to be a failed philosophy
for the economy that there's more to money and capital
than just this kind of reductive value of it,
that then there's a whole debate about embeddedness
and non-embeddedness.
So was Margaret Thatcher a neoliberal classic neoliberal?
Yeah, I mean, I would classify her that way.
Therefore a globalist.
Well, see, that's where I would pause.
The reason why I was compelled to write this book
is because the intellectual histories of neoliberalism,
as they'd been written so far, were often
very much national-based histories.
So you would get a story about the influence
of the Institute of Economic Affairs
and the Adams-Smith Institute on Thatcher's rise to power.
You'd get a story about the influence
of the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise
Institute on Reagan in his time in office.
And the story about the intellectual pedigree
of international ideas of governance,
so the origins of super-national institutions,
like the World Trade Organization,
like the GATT that preceded the World Trade Organization,
was a story that hadn't really been told.
And one of the things that I think you find,
and this gets to the sort of the difficulty of selling
globalism, is it often in the writings of the people
I'm writing about is not expressly in the interest of this
or that population.
It's in the interest of some imagined totality
of the world economy, which the Theresa May quote
from earlier this year is appropriate.
If you're the citizen of the world,
you're a citizen of no place.
And there is that way in which it's politically hard
to use the notion of international citizenship
or global citizenship to make hay politically
domestically.
And the notion of diminishing sovereignty, for example,
is that not a selling strategy in any kind of series
of congressional debates about this or that policy.
But so you had something like the WTO,
you have one faction saying this reduces sovereignty
and other factions saying the United States.
This is actually increasing US sovereignty.
But the neoliberal intellectuals I'm looking at
are saying openly, yes, it is diminishing US sovereignty.
And that's a good thing that we're actually actively trying
to create a super national layer of governance
that disempowers nation states.
And the delicacy of pitching that to a domestic audience
is something that they've never quite figured out,
which is why the book ends with the World Trade Organization
protests in 1999, in which these people who had been designing
this thing for decades suddenly discovered the concept
of legitimacy and realized that they had sort of forgotten
about the need to secure legitimacy
for any large scale project of governance.
It wasn't something they had thought about.
The obsession is with a kind of a project
of legal design and institutional design,
which ironically becomes a kind of engineering project,
even though someone like Hayek was very skeptical
about the idea that human behavior could be engineered away.
There's still this idea of if we can get the constitutional
constraints right, then order will result.
But the idea of why people should be personally invested emotionally
in the world economy as a functioning order
is often a question that's not really asked.
It's-- except there is an overlapping
with certain political parties.
In the United States, one has the impression these days
that you have the Trump version of the Republican party,
which is nationalist America first.
It's anti-globalist in some ways.
I mean, at least rhetorically, of course,
in terms of the actual fiscal policies that are promoted,
just anything but--
but the Democratic party has very consistently,
at least morally, socially, environmentally speaking,
been at least perceived as through and through globalist
where America is not a nation like any other nation is where
all-- throughout diversity, it's associated
with the passage of things like Gatt and NAFTA
and the Clintonian, globalist prejudices and so forth.
And the backlash, the Nationalistic populist backlash,
it doesn't seem to have changed much the perception
of a alliance of the Democratic party with global capital.
Do you think that the Democratic party in the United States
is still a kind of bastion of this neoliberal thinking?
In other words, that if it's good for the world,
it's good for everyone?
Well, so I think that though, if there is a problem
of legitimacy for a kind of a globalist institution
building project, the problem is solved in the moments
when national interests correspond with kind of globalist
interests.
And so the mid-90s is a wonderful example of that,
where for the United States to sign on with the WTO
was not something that was really costing them anything,
because they were able to retain all of their access
to markets and retain their kind of commercial dominance
that they already had without really being
subject to any kind of downside.
That's changed in the last 25 years since the WTO was created,
as specifically the rise of China and India,
they've both been able to use the WTO in ways
that the United States had not anticipated.
So you have either a kind of departure
of the national interest from the kind of globalist project.
And I think that it's more helpful to think
about some of the ways in which institution building
kind of corresponds with also exertions of sovereign power.
So I think that actually that this dichotomy of Trumpian
national populism quote unquote,
versus democratic globalism is actually not that helpful
when you look at the way that Trump's trade policy
actually works.
I agree with that, yeah.
Which isn't to say it becomes just business as usual,
but if you look at someone like Robert Lighthizer,
who's the current US trade representative,
he is, I think of him as kind of an adversarial internationalist.
So on the one hand, he will be blocking the appointment
of new judges to the appellate court at the WTO.
But at the same time, they're suing India
through the WTO, placing cases at the WTO.
So it's not an either or, it's rather a both-and relationship
to kind of global institutions, which is to say,
when it works for us to assert sovereign power
and to be tough in a kind of a shmidian
way and assert decisions, then we will do that.
But in so far as the institutions serve our interests
that we will use them as well.
And that was really the model of Reagan,
like what we're seeing with Trump economically
is last to kind of throw back to the 1930s
and much more throw back to the mid-1980s
when the Reagan trade policy establishment
used moments of executive power to actually
bully people into more buy-in and to a globalist institutions.
I mean, that's the irony.
What do you think of the WTO and what is doing these days?
Or what should we think-- not what do you think?
What should we think by we, meaning citizens who are not
particularly well-versed in economic theory and policy,
but who feel that we just don't want to be screwed over
by the big capitalist bullies that determine our fate,
regardless of any kind of democratic consent
that is accorded.
Decisions being made independently of any political process
or accountability are environments and habitats
being transformed through just the logic of capital.
And it's the world trade organization
just enabling this kind of indiscriminate, so-called economic
development all around the world, regardless
of what Rousseau would have called the Volontization
or any kind of general will or the people's will.
Right.
I think it depends on where you stand.
I mean, at the moment of the passage of the WTO,
if you were from a small nation in the world economy,
you had two options, either be subject
to the lateral policy decisions of the United States
and they'd be treated however they chose to treat you
in any given moment, or at least have the semblance
of a forum where there was lip service being paid to something
like the rule of law and equal treatment.
And so for a lot of-- it was a lesser of two evils
for a lot of global South countries, which was to say,
we will use this as a negotiating forum
because we don't have any other option,
other than no forum at all.
I think the question is different if you're
sitting in the United States, because then you get back
the debates return to the moment of the passage of the WTO
in which you had the adversaries of the WTO
were on the two far ends of the spectrum in a way, right?
Bernie Sanders was opposed to the creation of the WTO.
But so was Papi Cannon.
So if you are going to make the gamble of returning power
to the national sovereign, then much
starts to depend on who that sovereign is, right?
And then the question of the general will kind of reasserts itself,
which is to say, if you do what some of the interesting things
that, for example, this Lighthizer is doing
in his opposition to NAFTA as it exists,
he's actually against these investor state dispute courts,
right?
These sort of private courts that can do things
to override the sovereign decisions of nations.
And for the left, that's been an argument
that they've been making for decades,
is that the bad thing about the WTO and the NAFTA
is it takes power, depoliticized, and de-democratizes economic power.
So on the face of it, that's actually something good.
But if that repoliticization is being pursued
in the interest of a political project
that we're not interested in, then politics is bad, right?
I mean, it just raises the question again of how
the political gets defined locally.
But I think it definitely one can see a way
in which American investment at a sort of popular level
and an elite level in a project of depoliticization
is a kind of waning.
I mean, the investment in the supernational
and the international, because they don't see their own
interest intersecting with a kind of global project anymore,
it means that politics will reassert itself
as more of a problem and more of a divisive problem.
But one that then it just becomes the responsibility
of everyday Americans to fill with,
the content of solidarity and a notion of Americanness built on
the demos, an inclusive notion of the demos
rather than an exclusive notion of the ethnos.
- Right, so we'll return to this in a moment,
but let's take a step back to talk a little bit about
your book, Globalist, the End of Empire
and the birth of neoliberalism
and the so-called Geneva school,
you say that they're very under-acknowledged
and if you look in the Wikipedia entries and so forth,
you'll find that they'll talk about the Austrian school
of neoliberal, the Chicago school and others,
but I didn't come across a lot about the Geneva school.
And you say that that is a gap in the historical narrative
that you wanna fill by writing this book.
So what is the Geneva school?
Why is it called the Geneva school
since so many of its members were not from Geneva?
- Well, part of the reason why it isn't have a Wikipedia entry
and so on is I kind of more or less coined the term,
and the course of the book, it had been suggested by
one of the people I write about, but more or less,
I more or less created this idea of a coherent school
of thought myself out of what I thought
were pretty, for out of, I think,
pretty compelling reasons.
The people identify as members of the Geneva school
include people who did, in fact, teach and spend
a lot of time in Geneva, so Phil Humbropke
is an example he taught there for decades.
Haberler did some very important work
for the League of Nations, Ingeniva,
people like Hayek and Robbins gave very important lectures
that became kind of canonical books
about international order Ingeniva.
- It's the Journal Ordo, which is foundational journal
for neoliberalism.
Was that a Geneva-based journal?
- No, that's a German.
- German, that's published out of Freiburg,
which was the kind, the place where Hayek went
after he was in Chicago.
- So would the Geneva school be associated
with ordo liberalism, or getting the name,
or do liberalism coming, getting a name
from this journal, or do?
- No.
- Yeah, I mean, the difference between
ordo liberalism and American style
in Chicago School, neoliberalism, in broad terms,
is ordo liberalism is very attentive to this idea
of the need to create an institutional framework
for the reproduction of market competition.
So the idea of rolling back the state,
which was a central part of the rhetoric
of someone like Thatcher, or people like Thatcher and Reagan,
isn't really part of the ordo liberal rhetoric.
The the ordo liberal rhetoric has always been upfront
that what they seek is a strong state and a free market.
And the question is not, how much state,
or how little about what kind of state.
The Geneva school, as I describe it,
because it is composed of largely German speaking thinkers,
kind of poses that same question at the global level,
which is to say, what kind of institutional framework
do we need for the reproduction of market competition
at the global or international level?
And Geneva is important because it was the site
of the most intensive discussions
that the problem of international order
from the creation of the League of Nations,
the International Labor Organization was based there.
After the war, the International Standards Organization,
the GAT was based in Geneva now.
The WTO, the UN, has a branch office there.
So the site of Geneva is interesting
because it does serve as almost like this kind of
extra national location where problems of the global
can be thought of in the abstract without being too bound up
in national concerns of this or that, I'm sure.
- Good, so that's why you speak about
or do globalism might be a better term
for the Geneva school people.
So let me ask up now about,
if not the Geneva school, at least Hayek,
as one of the major proponents and democracy,
because I got a sense reading you
that there's a deep rooted fear and paranoia
about democracy and even antagonism and hostility towards it.
And let me read a quote that I came across
in your introduction about democracy
where Hayek says, "I believe that limiting the powers
of democracy in these new parts of the world
is the only chance of preserving democracy
in those parts of the world.
If democracies do not limit their own powers,
they will be destroyed."
That is something that one can think a lot about.
It's probably a lot of evidence that if democracies
do not limit their own powers and they will indeed be destroyed
not only in third world, you know,
nation, incipient democracies but even for ourselves.
And then you refer to the authoritarian liberalism
that was coined in 1933 by Herman Heller.
Now that term is, I think, back in circulation.
Is it not in places like Hungary or Turkey
or even Putin that we were talking about authoritarian liberalism
or is it authoritarian democracy?
What is the thinking there about how much
must democracy be constrained according to these people?
- Right, I mean, it's related to what the French theorist,
Chantal move calls the Democratic paradox,
which is that we sort of naturally conjoined
or have for the last several decades
this idea of liberal democracy,
but actually those two concepts are very different
and potentially in detention with one another
in the sense that liberalism is invested
in protecting a certain set of institutions
regardless of what the people think.
And democracy, on the other hand, can have highly
illiberal outcomes and so democracy,
if understood as a majoritarian expression
of the people's will, could easily say
these liberal institutions are not what we want.
So there's a constant decision being made,
you know, whether we realize it or not,
about where the sort of stress should be placed
on the democracy or the liberalism.
And the United States is a perfect example
where of course constitutional constraints
and checks and balances are an essential part
of the way democracy functions in this country.
And if you asked someone who sees themselves
as either a Hayekian or a follower of James Buchanan
who is a closely related thinker,
they would find the kind of arguments
that Hayek is making in the quote you,
you just read there quite, but now they would say
that well, this of course,
that this is the standard way that democracies work
as they produce, or they include constraints
on the will of the majority.
- Sure, they do, but what is authoritarian liberalism?
- Well, I mean, I think that there you need to sort of
look at particular moments.
So for, I'm trying to think of a good example
that I use in the book.
- I mean, would the Hungarian or bun
would he be a authoritarian liberal?
- Or.
- Well, let's use the example of something
like the Austrian freedom party,
or the alternative for Germany,
just to sort of prevent the kind of pathologizing
of the Eastern Europe as the site of the bad European politics.
- Oh, yeah, I'm all for Eastern,
meet a little Ropez, what a fair question.
- No, no, I wasn't saying that you're doing that,
but I think that you can see the stuff actually
in the heartland of order liberalism quite clearly.
And there, if you look at the position of something
like alternative for Germany, AFD party,
their argument is that to preserve exactly conditions
of competition and free trade,
then there needs to be the ability to override things
like the freedom of entry for refugees
or non-Western immigrants.
So, and the curtailment of free speech
for certain kinds of unacceptable attacks on Western values
and things like that.
So, the notion of using the force of the state
to push back against threats to the market order,
could be seen in the example like that.
I'm just remembering now some examples from the book
in the case of the interwar period in Austria,
the use of police violence against striking protesters
or against organized labor was something that
some, that Mises saw as entirely acceptable
and actually necessary.
So, Mises helped draft something with the,
that he called the anti-terror law,
which was designed to designate any forms of strike
labor action as terror and therefore just to find
the imposition of, or the use of police violence.
So, this, I think that the use of the police wing
of the state against threats to the market order
usually originating in organized labor
is a pretty clear case of authoritarian liberalism,
as I understand it.
- And can I ask about another important figure
who's not part of the Geneva school
and in some times is argued against neoliberalism,
that's Polany, the Hungarian economist theorist,
historian historian.
He's very big these days, right?
- He is, yeah.
- And in what way does he not conjugate well
with the neoliberals you're dealing with?
- Well, it's an argument that I make in the introduction
which is that I think that it's better to think
of people like Hayek and Rupa as contemporaries of Polany,
which of course they are and of people who are arguing
for a form of embeddedness as Polany argues for it
rather than, so that capitals should not, yeah.
- Well, it depends on the fine embeddedness.
I mean, the argument that gets the sort of,
the short version of the argument about Polany's argument
that gets made is that liberals and thereby
neoliberal seek to disembed the market from society
because they believe that a market can be self-regulating
and therefore effectively institutions can fall away,
community bonds can fall away
and we will all just encounter each other
as kind of exchanging units in the marketplace.
And this leads to a vision of neoliberalism as an ideology
which I think is not very accurate
because as I'm trying to argue in the book,
they were equally interested in embeddedness
but simply for different outcomes than him
whereas he wanted to use embeddedness as a way
to increase the sense of social evenness
and equality and redistribution and local identity,
they want to use embeddedness specifically to embed
the freedom of capital to move where it wants to
and so on.
- So they could be careless about social justice
as you said earlier.
- They are explicitly opposed to social justice.
I mean, the argument against democracy,
I think it's worth dwelling on that for a moment
is a kind of a mixture of two things.
It's a way of seeing people as both naturally inclined
towards solidarity and naturally inclined towards self interest
and both of those are problems for someone like Hayek
and a democracy because either people are going to use
their vote to effectively blackmail politicians
to give them favors and leaving the state as kind of the prey
to be torn apart by the electorate and eventually
they make so many promises that the whole thing
turns into inflation and falls apart
or people are still kind of hardwired from their time
as members of the tribe on the savannah
which is really how Hayek thought about it
to want to be communally sharing all of the resources
available with the small group in the village
the way that they would have once.
I mean, this is actually Hayek's argument
that we still have this sort of remnant of our tribal life
and so we mistakenly extrapolate that to the modern
state form and think we can actually practice socialism
and communism like we used to on the savannah.
So the democratic subject is sort of
doubly hazardous for the reproduction of a market order
because of both wanting everything for themselves
and also having this idea that we can have it all.
But it's a sense that the reproduction of the market order
is ultimately good for everyone or is it completely
beyond good and evil to use an etienne term
and it's money, don't confuse money with humanity
and it's the philosophy of the country.
But we need to, if you have to choose between money
and humanity, choose money.
- Yeah, I mean, it's a good question
and I think there's a recent book about liberalism
that was published in Germany called the philosophy
of the lesser evil.
And I actually think that's quite a helpful way
of thinking about it, which is to say there is often
this argument made that this may not be a happy thought
that this might be a kind of a cold way of looking at the world.
They'll make this argument themselves.
The one of Buchanan's most famous books is called
"Politics Without Romance."
There's this argument that one needs to face
the sort of the coldness and cruelty of the world
because it's better than sort of no world at all.
So it's actually deeply pessimistic ideology
when you read the writings of the thinkers themselves,
which I think quite different from the sunny kind of 1990s
in a world of Coca-Cola kind of neoliberalism,
the way that people think about it a lot.
We're all part of a world of goods and money.
But for the new liberals that I study anyway,
they're gloomy, fantasy, act, Viennese intellectuals
at the end of it, right?
They sort of see the need for a market order as a way
to prevent kind of the mass death that would result
if we try to actually enact socialism.
- So that's what they believed in it.
- Yeah, I mean, Hayek says, if we try to genuinely carry
out socialism and create a communist society,
then billions of people who are now living will die.
And why would it not be the case if you just let capital
follow its own vagaries wherever it led?
- Without a state framework you mean?
Or even within a state framework that would enable
it to function better rather than inhibit it.
- You're saying why won't that lead to mass death?
- Yes, or mass misery or something equal to that.
- Absolutely horrible.
- I mean, it becomes this competition of kind of,
you know, this is actually where we're at often
the kind of left right conversations
at the moment as a sort of argument about body counts, right?
I mean, you know, who is creating more misery,
who has caused more deaths, you know,
was malware, sent Hitler, et cetera.
- Yeah, well, it's not only fascism versus communism,
but it's also this ravage that there's enough evidence
to suggest that the ravages of capitalism are not negligible.
As Mark said in the Communist Manifesto,
it doesn't mean you have to go all follow his whole agenda,
but he says that there's an invested interest
in capitalism to create uproot and destabilize
and create conditions of havoc so that in that turbulence,
you know, you can serve the interests of enrichment.
- Right, yeah, and that's where I think,
I mean, I spent some time in the book in the decade of the 1970s,
and this is something that wouldn't have to study
in a different book,
but the way in which the natural limits
of the worlds, the globes carrying capacity,
the earth's carrying capacity,
which were very much in the forefront of people's minds
in the 1970s.
- I think. - Serious policy makers know.
Much more than now, and that's what I was gonna say,
is that one of the real victories of neoliberalism
and it still needs to be tracked how it actually happened,
was to sort of roll back or reverse that true sense
of existential threat about the limits of the earth's
carrying capacity that I think was much more mainstream,
and you say it was a victory,
but it's a victory that was not necessarily desirable, right?
- From my point, you know, but I mean, from there,
- No, but I mean, from there, no, I mean,
I think that we would be well-served to actually,
you know, face the kind of the strong limits
to this ever proliferating world of capitalist human structure.
- It's never because environmental deregulation
would be almost like a tentative faith
for this neoliberal thinking, right?
- It is, I mean, it's the notion that there will always
be a technological fix, that there will always be some way
in which the limits of the earth's resources
will be transcended.
So the Heritage, or the American Enterprise Institute,
for example, sort of pursues this in two directions.
On the one hand, there's a lot of work sort of
questioning climate science.
There's a lot of work that comes out of neoliberal
think tanks trying to undo the evidentiary base of
climate change, but on the other hand,
there's also a unit.
Philip Marowski talks about this at the American Enterprise
Institute on geoengineering.
So there's both a kind of a belief in the mammoth
technological fix and an undermining of the notions of truth
that help try to anchor us to a realistic sense
of how much the earth can actually give us.
- Yeah, and that's, well, that's the totalizing monster
of technology is that the problems that it creates
creates them in such a way that only it can provide
the solutions to them.
So you get more of the same and you get into this
hypedigarian cycle of endless consumption and production
that each feeds the other.
- Right.
- So I began in my intro, speaking about the kind of
untimely thinking or the way in which one can
re-venture future possibilities that hide in the
shadowy recesses of the past, I mentioned.
And I said that that's not the has been passed of
historiography, but this stream of latent legacies that
might come to us from previous thinkers or
previous schools.
Is there anything in your opinion of the Geneva
school thinking that can be freely and creatively
retrieved and recast as a future possibility that, you
know, might make it worthwhile for us to take them
seriously and not just be horrified at the kind of
indifference to certain forms of human disaggregation
that might be implied there.
- Well, I think that if one thinks about the book itself that
I've just written, that could be discovered probably
more profitably in the opponents of the Geneva
school neoliberal that I follow throughout, because
what the book is, the book is not just a kind of a
doctrinal reading of the master tax to produce the kind
of authoritative version of the ideology of
neoliberalism on its own terms.
But it's arguing that neoliberalism as a way of
thinking was worked out in opposition over the decades with
threats to or what they perceived as threats to the
market order.
And these threats were competing forms of globalism, in
fact, and competing ideas of justice that would be, I
think, a better reservoir for kind of unrealized futures
than trying to kind of retrofit some part of the
Geneva school neoliberal thought in itself.
So, and I think that is a difference from, you know,
talking about the Earth consciousness of the 1970s, but the
global South consciousness of even the 1990s, when people
were talking about the WTO and its effect on parts of the
third world, for example, I don't feel like our current
discussion about international political economy and
globalism versus nationalism really has as much time anymore
for the thought of the global repercussions and the way
that this reaches into the lives of people who aren't, don't
share our same background or our same nationality, because
it's become pitched as this question of can we retrieve
populism for the left or a nationalism be a positive
force for the left, that kind of cosmopolitan impulses of
caring about distant humans as much as we care about
ourselves seems to have been relegated to a kind of a
secondary status.
So I think paying attention again to, you know, the lives of
people who compose the vast majority of the world's
population might be a good move here too.
Yeah.
So and that means that there may be a school that is not the
direct air of this Geneva school in particular, right?
Well, thank you very much.
We've been speaking with Professor Quinn Slobodian,
Professor of History at Wellesley about his new book that
just came out with Harvard University press called Globalist,
the End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
Thanks for listening.
And thank you again, Quinn, for coming on to entitled
opinions.
Thank you for having me.
Take care.
[MUSIC]
Since I've been, when I saw my name, I thought I'd seen the last
That old frame
Don't want my heart to be broken and teased
And you can chew many chances
Sometimes it's been when the dream he has
I must be in some kind of poor paradise
I don't know what to take, but yeah, I can't hurt
You can chew many chances
No matter what I'm doing it is wrong
But I can't hear myself
I can't see you
No matter what I'm doing it is wrong
I cannot understand it
I can't hear myself
I know what I'm doing it is wrong
But I can't hear myself
See you
Sometimes what I'm doing is wrong
And I'll get burned
(Music)
I'm always on my guard
I gotta cover my dream
It's been so hard to keep behind the line
Still searching for treasure
Looking for pleasure
I'm taking true many chances
Yes, I am
I know what I'm doing it is wrong
But I can't hear myself
I can't hear myself
I know what I'm doing is wrong
I can't understand it
I can't hear myself
I know what I'm doing is wrong
But I can't hear myself
See you
Sometimes what I'm doing is wrong
But I'll get burned
Yeah, I can't hear myself
I know what I'm doing is wrong
But I can't hear myself
See you
Sometimes what I'm doing is wrong
I can't understand it
I know what I'm doing is wrong
But I can't hear myself
I know what I'm doing is wrong
I can't hear myself
I know what I'm doing is wrong
But I can't hear myself
I know what I'm doing is wrong
But I can't hear myself
See you
Sometimes what I'm doing is wrong
I can't understand it
I know what I'm doing is wrong
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