05/30/2018
Quinn Slobodian on Neoliberalism
Quinn Slobodian is a historian of 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 Sixties West Germany, and most recently Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Professor Slobodian is the editor […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you
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from the Stanford campus.
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We're going to be talking about globalists today.
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So here's a question to start out with.
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At what level of interconnection are we globular?
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At the economic level, for sure.
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At the geopolitical level, maybe.
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At the cultural level, not really.
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It becomes increasingly evident when you start thinking about it
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that the world gets globalized only by flattening itself out.
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There's something paradoxical about that,
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or so it seems to me, a flat world wrapping itself
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around a rotund globe.
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But maybe flat is the wrong adjective.
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Earlier today in preparation for this show,
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I decided to look up the word globe just out of curiosity.
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It is a beautiful word, after all.
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And here's one of the older meanings, which
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goes back to the mid-1500s, I quote,
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"Map of the earth or sky drawn on the surface
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of an artificial sphere."
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Is that what globalism means when pundits,
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populists, and politicians throw the term around,
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a network of interconnection on the surface
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of an artificial sphere?
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Are we living these days on such a surface?
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And if so, what lies beneath us in the depths under our feet?
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Now that sounds like a question for entitled opinions
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where we always go deep.
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I'm joined in the studio today by the author of a book
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that's just been published on a topic I know very little about.
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I usually try to avoid doing that.
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Since I'd like to feel that I'm entitled to my opinion
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on any given day, but today is one of those occasions
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where I mostly hear to listen and learn.
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In fact, I'm curious and even intrigued
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by exactly how this show will unfold
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and what exactly we're in for.
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A few weeks ago, I received a query from an editor
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at Harvard University Press asking me
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if I would be interested in having the author of a newly published
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book on the show, the editor sent me the book.
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I looked through it, read the introduction carefully,
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and was intrigued enough to work things out
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so that the author and I could have this on-air conversation
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during his pre-scheduled visit to Stanford.
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So here we are.
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I'm joined in the studio by Quinn Slobodian,
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a professor of history at Wellesley College, whom I met
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for the first time just minutes ago.
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Quinn Slobodian specializes in modern German
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and international history with a focus
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on North-South politics, social movements,
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and the intellectual history of neoliberalism.
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He is the author of Foreign Front, Third World Politics
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in '60s West Germany, which came out in 2012.
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He is also the editor of Comrades of Color,
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East Germany and the Cold War world.
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But it's his new book that interests us today.
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That book is called Globalists, the End of Empire
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and the Birth of Neoliberalism, which just came out
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with Harvard University Press, Quinn Slobodian,
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welcome to entitled opinions.
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- Thank you, I'm happy to be here.
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- So your editor at Harvard, Gregory Cornblur.
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- The publicist, yeah, great cornblur, yeah.
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He mentioned in his first email to me that you're a fan
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of entitled opinions, I don't know if that's true or not.
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But if so, it bodes well.
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- It is.
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- Your new book is in the genre of intellectual history
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and, or at least so it seems to me,
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and that also bodes well.
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We do a lot of that around here.
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And what you set out to do in this book
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is to follow a group of thinkers, quoting you,
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from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire
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to the creation of the World Trade Organization, the WTO,
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and these thinkers who were also economists,
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or theorists of the economy,
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belong to the so-called Geneva School,
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which for you was crucial to the ideology
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and theories of what is known as neoliberalism.
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And members of that school would include Friedrich Hayek,
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Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke,
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and Habbler, among others.
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And you were intrigued enough by this school,
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the Geneva School, to devote a very big book
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to its theories about things like the global economy,
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the nation state, the role of international law
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and transnational institutions.
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And we're going to try to think through some of those theories
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today, but first it would be helpful
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for the listeners of this program,
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if you could tell us exactly what neoliberalism means
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or what it refers to.
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- Sure, it's a term that often had to sort of defend itself,
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its own existence as having any kind of validity
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or legitimacy at all.
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And I think what's helpful is to realize
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that it is used in different ways by different scholars.
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So one of the ways that it's used is to describe
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a kind of period of global capitalism,
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beginning in the 1970s with the oil crisis,
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the breakdown of the bread and wood system,
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the move from manufacturing to services
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and especially the rise of finance as a dominant force
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in the global north,
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the introduction of deregulation,
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privatization and liberalization policies in both the north
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and more specifically in the third world
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of the global south after the debt crisis in 1982.
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And a general kind of move to what's called a post-foretest
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or a more immaterial rather than a material economy.
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So that's one way of thinking about neoliberalism
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is it's a kind of time period that embraces
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the world economy beginning in the 1970s or so.
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Another way of looking at it is as a kind of policy package.
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So some of those things I just mentioned,
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deregulation, privatization, which replace
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pre-existing principles of the welfare state
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and redistribution or the principle of solidarity
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with the necessity of constant risk,
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the importance of competition and innovation
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as the sort of load stars of national economic policy.
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And the people like political philosophers,
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for example, Wendy Brown, who have taken the consideration
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of neoliberalism to furthest,
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have started to talk about it as a kind of order
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of normative reason as she calls it,
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or a kind of a new form of subjectivity
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or a different form of being,
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whereby people perceive themselves as vessels
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of human capital that needs to be maximized
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at all times in a kind of a competitive market struggle
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with other human beings.
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This notion introduced by Foucault
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of being the entrepreneur of oneself,
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often as a way that people sort of summarize
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the notion of a neoliberal subjectivity.
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As a historian, I'm a little bit less ambitious
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in my interpretation compared to some of the more
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probing political theoretical approaches to neoliberalism.
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What I look at it as is more as a discrete intellectual
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and political movement,
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the term at self neoliberalism was coined in 1938
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by a group of mostly European economists
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and policymakers and journalists who are gathered in Paris,
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considering in the wake of the Great Depression,
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how one would be forced to renovate or rethink liberalism
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to prevent it from breaking down as it had
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in that course of the Great Depression
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and the First World War.
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So their conclusion was in the 1930s was that the market
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would not take care of itself.
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The capitalism actually required a set of
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extra economic conditions or safeguards
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to prevent the market from undergoing dissolution
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or disintegration as it had in the 1930s.
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So the neo part of neoliberalism for them
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and for me is a kind of actually a break with
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a 19th century less a fair idea
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that the market would take care of itself,
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it would self regulate itself and self direct.
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Rather, there was a new role for politicians,
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policymakers and philosophers,
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which was to rethink the role of the state,
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to defend the economy against corrosive forces such as
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labor unions, empowered populations,
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anti-colonial struggle and things of that sort.
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- So the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism
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fundamentally would be that liberalism would be a lacy
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fair philosophy of the market's self regulating
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and that the states should just get out of the way.
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And in fact, if the whole apparatus of state
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were to vanish, it would be a good thing, right?
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- Right.
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- And the neo liberals in the wake of the collapse
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of the Habsburg Empire in the case of these thinkers
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of the Geneva school especially,
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who were concerned with the rise of nationalism,
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thinking that certain forms of virulent nationalism
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could hinder or inhibit the market forces doing their thing,
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believed that rather than just
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militate against government and institutions
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that you would concede that they're here to stay.
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And now the point, if I understand what I've read
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of your argument that the point would be to find a way
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to negotiate the demands of state with the demands
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of a free market and that you would rather than presume
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to repudiate the nation state, you would what you call
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incase, the incasement which is that you would prevent
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as much as possible interference of governments
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from the free flow of capital.
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- That's right, people like Hayek for example,
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and you see this up to the present with people like Charles Murray
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for example will often call themselves classical liberals,
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drawing a kind of self-conscious genealogy back
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to someone like Adam Smith in the 18th century.
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But the reason why I think neo-liberalism is an appropriate label
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is the changed conditions of the 20th century
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versus the 19th century.
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And the most important changed conditions
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that I focus on in the book are one, the emergence
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of universal suffrage as ever more common norm globally.
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So the idea of one man, one vote, which becomes a reality,
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certainly by the end of the second world war
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from much of the world was simply not the dominant principle
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in the 18th century.
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And secondly, the end of empire, the dissolution
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of European overseas empires into self-determining
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nation-states that began in my argument
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with the end of the first world war.
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And then progressed into the 1960s and '70s
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presents new challenges to liberalism.
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So in the 19th century you could rely on
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from the liberal point of view, the British Empire
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to oversee the stability of some kind of global monetary
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order, the stability of global financial flows,
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gunboat diplomacy ensured that if people weren't being paid
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back by this or that foreign government
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then force would be used to get those debts back.
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Egypt becomes a colony because it effectively goes
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into bankruptcy and Britain steps in and takes over.
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So there's all of these forms of unilateral force
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that become no longer viable and so naked away
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in the era of decolonization and mass democracy.
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So the question indeed becomes one of how to redesign
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or refashion the state to practice
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that sort of imperial oversight over capitalism but in a new form.
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- In fact your book is called Globalists
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and I get a sense that the main protagonists were,
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I don't wanna say that they were nostalgic for empire
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but that they would have been much more comfortable
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with empire rather than nation as a model
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because empires have a global, a more global reach.
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They would not impose the same kind of trade barriers
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at least between different ethnic groups
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within their large, vast domains and so forth.
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And yet the distinction that Carl Schmidt draws
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between Imperium and dominion, yeah, dominion.
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It's the Imperium being the power
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that you would then associate with the nation state.
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So it would be political power.
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Dominion would be the realm of capital or market.
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- Is that property?
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- Do I get that right?
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- Yeah.
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- He makes that distinction lamenting the fact
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that there's a double world,
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the world of Imperium and Dominion.
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Your guys like the idea that there's a double world
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and wanna make sure that one of them
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does not infringe on the other, correct?
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- That's right.
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I think there's two things there.
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I mean, first on the question of empires,
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from the point of view of the neoliberal,
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as I studied, there were sort of many bad empires
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and very few good ones.
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So the British Empire, they saw as a positive example
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because it did not practice protectionism
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and didn't create tariff walls within its own colony.
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So that form of empire became something
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that could be a kind of template.
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The Hopsburg Empire was famously quite protectionist.
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So what was attractive about the Hopsburg Empire
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was the way in their mind it protected
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the very division you're mentioning from Schmidt,
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which is the idea as high it called,
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called it that you could have a double government.
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So on the one hand, you could have a kind of
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an institutional arrangement whereby goods
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could flow freely, capital could flow freely.
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And wherever your property was in the world,
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it would still be your property.
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And there would be no sense that it was in jeopardy
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or was gonna be taken away by the sovereign power
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under which it happened to be located.
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So there'd be a world of dominion
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and one sphere of the double government
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and the other sphere would be the world of imperium
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and sovereign self-determination states.
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So this is this doubled world as I described,
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but it is indeed what Schmidt saw as kind of
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the nightmare world of liberalism that had been produced
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by the 19th century where politics had been drained
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to such a point that it couldn't exercise its own
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control even over things on its own territory.
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So if a foreign capitalist owned, let's say,
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the coal mines in your country
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and you needed that coal for your own nation's development,
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you would have no right or ability to simply nationalize
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or make or socialize that coal mine
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and use it for the well-being of your own people
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because the doubled world of 19th century liberalism meant
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that even though it was right in front of you,
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it was beyond your grasp because it was contained
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in this world of property rather than that
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in the world of politics.
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So the reason I mentioned that I'm intrigued
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about how the conversation is going on fold
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is because I did not get a clear sense
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from reading you whether you're championing
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these neo-liberals or whether you're just being neutral
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as a historian, but let me just tell you my impression
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from reading what I have of your book is that
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the neo-liberals Geneva School and other,
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maybe, forms of it, that there's no sense of any allegiance
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| 00:16:53.240 |
to either a people, a nation state, a polity
|
| 00:16:58.240 |
that it's the complete promiscuity of capital
|
| 00:17:02.760 |
and that you need dominion so that anyone
|
| 00:17:06.720 |
will theoretically be able to own not only property
|
| 00:17:11.240 |
but factories and interests in any country of the world
|
| 00:17:15.640 |
and that there should be this complete cash blanche
|
| 00:17:19.400 |
when it comes to the global circulation of capital.
|
| 00:17:23.400 |
And first, I admit this was a nightmare precisely
|
| 00:17:26.920 |
because it infringed on self-determination
|
| 00:17:29.400 |
of nations and of peoples and so forth.
|
| 00:17:32.040 |
In the research, I've done a lot of people
|
| 00:17:34.200 |
are very vociferous critics of neo-liberalism,
|
| 00:17:38.640 |
precisely because I think it's a completely one-sided
|
| 00:17:42.280 |
in its allegiance to global capital,
|
| 00:17:47.040 |
which means non-alligence to anything
|
| 00:17:49.560 |
not associated with that.
|
| 00:17:51.560 |
And frankly, my instincts are to say that
|
| 00:17:55.560 |
that kind of dominion, I would really
|
| 00:17:59.200 |
probably favor strong measures to protect
|
| 00:18:04.400 |
against that kind of rampant freedom for capital
|
| 00:18:09.760 |
to just to follow its bliss wherever it leads.
|
| 00:18:12.360 |
- Yeah, I mean, I think that I am also critical
|
| 00:18:17.320 |
of neo-liberalism as I think becomes clear,
|
| 00:18:21.920 |
perhaps the further you read into the book.
|
| 00:18:24.960 |
And the reason that I'm critical of it
|
| 00:18:26.320 |
is because of my own kind of prior normative beliefs
|
| 00:18:30.080 |
about the good life and a good order.
|
| 00:18:32.040 |
And I believe I do believe in the principles of social justice
|
| 00:18:37.040 |
and some form of redistributive egalitarianism
|
| 00:18:41.720 |
and redistributive equality.
|
| 00:18:43.640 |
And neo-liberalism as a project is expressly designed
|
| 00:18:47.840 |
to undercut-- - Expressively.
|
| 00:18:49.640 |
Oh, yes, definitely, definitely.
|
| 00:18:51.360 |
- Definitely, definitely. - Definitely.
|
| 00:18:53.040 |
The best example that Warren can use
|
| 00:18:55.080 |
is the title of Hayek's book from the 1970s,
|
| 00:19:01.080 |
the second book of his law legislation and liberty trilogy
|
| 00:19:04.240 |
and the title is the Mirage of Social Justice,
|
| 00:19:07.240 |
which he means, Social Justice doesn't actually mean anything.
|
| 00:19:12.240 |
It can't be pursued because no collective can decide
|
| 00:19:17.080 |
conclusively on what kind of world they all want to live in.
|
| 00:19:21.640 |
The only way for any kind of justice to be enacted
|
| 00:19:24.400 |
is a justice before the law.
|
| 00:19:26.560 |
So everyone needs to have a right to enter the market
|
| 00:19:29.520 |
and compete on their own terms.
|
| 00:19:31.200 |
And inequality is a necessary outcome of that,
|
| 00:19:36.000 |
not just an unfortunate outcome, but a necessary outcome.
|
| 00:19:39.760 |
And the model that I'm describing
|
| 00:19:42.240 |
at a kind of a global level is one that allows for
|
| 00:19:46.360 |
what neo-liberalism self-s' call policy competition,
|
| 00:19:51.160 |
which a lot of other people would call a battle
|
| 00:19:53.360 |
to the bottom.
|
| 00:19:54.600 |
I mean, this idea that if you do have completely
|
| 00:19:57.520 |
a fulfilled loose capital that is a natural right,
|
| 00:20:01.200 |
and in fact, as I talk about in one of the chapters,
|
| 00:20:03.160 |
there was an attempt to even write in a human right
|
| 00:20:06.200 |
of capital flight to amend that to the UN Declaration
|
| 00:20:10.080 |
of Human Rights.
|
| 00:20:11.160 |
If there's a human right of capital flight,
|
| 00:20:13.800 |
that means any time a state chooses to do something
|
| 00:20:17.000 |
whether it's to expand their public education system
|
| 00:20:19.880 |
or to expand their health insurance program
|
| 00:20:22.760 |
to raise taxation for purposes of redistribution
|
| 00:20:26.720 |
or purposes of creating more quality within their own nation,
|
| 00:20:31.080 |
then capital will just up and leave.
|
| 00:20:33.280 |
And this is an intentional feature
|
| 00:20:38.000 |
of competitive federal system of the kind
|
| 00:20:40.840 |
that the neo-liberalists are describing.
|
| 00:20:43.760 |
- Well, are they in describing or envisioning
|
| 00:20:46.200 |
or hoping for it because it seems a reality
|
| 00:20:48.920 |
that capital can just pick up and leave any time it was
|
| 00:20:52.200 |
from at least developed nation states?
|
| 00:20:56.920 |
- Right.
|
| 00:20:57.760 |
Well, that's where one needs to be sort of specific
|
| 00:21:01.800 |
about the historical moment.
|
| 00:21:03.640 |
And the Bretton Woods system, which I mentioned,
|
| 00:21:06.520 |
breaking down in the 1970s, one of the ways that one saw
|
| 00:21:11.720 |
it breaking down was the capital controls
|
| 00:21:14.520 |
that had been in existence from 1945 until the early 1970s,
|
| 00:21:20.320 |
by which you couldn't simply up and take your money
|
| 00:21:23.720 |
out of a country at the moment you wanted to.
|
| 00:21:25.880 |
That was the norm at something like the IMF
|
| 00:21:27.840 |
that capital controls were necessary
|
| 00:21:29.680 |
because at that point the horizon of political hope
|
| 00:21:34.280 |
was to produce indeed a kind of a forest,
|
| 00:21:36.960 |
well-ferrous state in miniature sort of modularly repeated
|
| 00:21:41.280 |
in all of the new states of the decolonizing world.
|
| 00:21:44.520 |
So the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system was the freeing
|
| 00:21:48.560 |
of capital from those constraints and the ability now of ever
|
| 00:21:53.840 |
more globally-foot-loose capital to discipline
|
| 00:21:57.160 |
any attempts of creating domestic welfare states
|
| 00:22:00.000 |
or redistribution of states.
|
| 00:22:02.120 |
And that was an intentional project of which some of the people
|
| 00:22:06.640 |
I'm describing were sort of active participants in.
|
| 00:22:08.880 |
So Gottfried Haberler, who you mentioned in the outset,
|
| 00:22:12.240 |
was one of the chief proponents of the move
|
| 00:22:14.760 |
from a fixed exchange rate system
|
| 00:22:17.320 |
through a floating exchange rate system.
|
| 00:22:19.400 |
And before the 1970s, the rate at which currencies were
|
| 00:22:26.400 |
exchanged was not determined freely by speculative capital.
|
| 00:22:30.440 |
It was regulated by the IMF.
|
| 00:22:32.600 |
And if you wanted to change your exchange rate,
|
| 00:22:34.360 |
you needed to go to the IMF and consult with them, et cetera.
|
| 00:22:37.240 |
After the 1970s under a system of floating exchange rate,
|
| 00:22:40.480 |
speculative capital determined the value of currency.
|
| 00:22:43.280 |
So how did the floating rate system win out?
|
| 00:22:48.560 |
Why?
|
| 00:22:49.640 |
Was it the neoliberal theorists that were convincing
|
| 00:22:52.600 |
politicians?
|
| 00:22:53.360 |
I just had a better way to go, or was there
|
| 00:22:55.560 |
there's some way in which--
|
| 00:22:57.800 |
well, the fixed rate was just working
|
| 00:23:00.520 |
against the economic self-interest of the countries.
|
| 00:23:03.880 |
Well, it was in part a persuasive project
|
| 00:23:06.280 |
undertaken by Haberler and Fritz Mahlop,
|
| 00:23:10.320 |
who was another Vienna-trained economist
|
| 00:23:14.640 |
who I described in the book, who coordinated with central bankers
|
| 00:23:18.880 |
and figures from finance to push this self-consciously.
|
| 00:23:21.920 |
It's a program beginning in the 1960s to the mid-1960s.
|
| 00:23:24.880 |
But one of the problems was that the realities
|
| 00:23:29.040 |
that they were confronting that states were confronting
|
| 00:23:30.880 |
was it was ever harder to actually control people
|
| 00:23:33.680 |
getting around capital controls.
|
| 00:23:35.320 |
Among other things, you had the creation
|
| 00:23:37.400 |
of what was called a Euro-dollar market, meaning
|
| 00:23:41.200 |
that people were getting around capital controls
|
| 00:23:44.200 |
by simply keeping their investments offshore.
|
| 00:23:46.800 |
So the offshore world that we now think
|
| 00:23:49.440 |
of at the kind of constellation of tax havens
|
| 00:23:52.160 |
where capital goes to find low tax rates and kind of secrecy
|
| 00:23:56.960 |
was something that was already emerging in the 1960s.
|
| 00:23:59.280 |
So partially the move to floating exchange
|
| 00:24:01.080 |
rates was just simply to say-- or the disappearance
|
| 00:24:03.280 |
of capital controls was to concede
|
| 00:24:05.040 |
that this was happening in reality already.
|
| 00:24:07.800 |
And it was actually preventing the reinvestment
|
| 00:24:11.240 |
of capital at home if you simply
|
| 00:24:14.440 |
denied at the right to leave and then return,
|
| 00:24:17.040 |
which is actually very similar to the argument made
|
| 00:24:20.520 |
in the Trump tax reform package that just went through it,
|
| 00:24:25.240 |
which is just to say you can try to legislate against tax havens,
|
| 00:24:29.120 |
but they're just going to find new ones.
|
| 00:24:31.080 |
So we might as well lower tax rates at home
|
| 00:24:34.200 |
to try to repatriate that capital.
|
| 00:24:36.760 |
So it's a combination of sort of an ideological persuasive
|
| 00:24:40.280 |
project and the changing realities of a private financial sector
|
| 00:24:45.880 |
that was always looking for ways to go around regulations.
|
| 00:24:49.560 |
In many ways, the intellectuals and the academics
|
| 00:24:53.360 |
were not leading changes, but they
|
| 00:24:55.560 |
are simply reacting to changes that were happening
|
| 00:24:58.320 |
in the private sector.
|
| 00:25:00.720 |
So if we bring it closer to our own-- well, actually,
|
| 00:25:05.880 |
let's do one historical step, which
|
| 00:25:09.320 |
is Thatcher and Reaganism or Thatcherism and Reaganism,
|
| 00:25:13.080 |
because I gather that these were the two big heroes
|
| 00:25:16.600 |
of neoliberalism.
|
| 00:25:18.640 |
Or it was a peak of neoliberal influence.
|
| 00:25:23.200 |
And we're in a slightly different regime now,
|
| 00:25:27.160 |
where there's been a profound disenchantment
|
| 00:25:30.120 |
with globalism.
|
| 00:25:32.200 |
And if you look online and things like everyone
|
| 00:25:35.880 |
wants to repudiate the label of neoliberal,
|
| 00:25:40.080 |
because there's a sense among many people
|
| 00:25:43.440 |
that it's proven itself to be a failed philosophy
|
| 00:25:48.120 |
for the economy that there's more to money and capital
|
| 00:25:53.200 |
than just this kind of reductive value of it,
|
| 00:25:57.040 |
that then there's a whole debate about embeddedness
|
| 00:26:00.480 |
and non-embeddedness.
|
| 00:26:01.680 |
So was Margaret Thatcher a neoliberal classic neoliberal?
|
| 00:26:06.040 |
Yeah, I mean, I would classify her that way.
|
| 00:26:08.920 |
Therefore a globalist.
|
| 00:26:10.800 |
Well, see, that's where I would pause.
|
| 00:26:12.800 |
The reason why I was compelled to write this book
|
| 00:26:17.960 |
is because the intellectual histories of neoliberalism,
|
| 00:26:21.360 |
as they'd been written so far, were often
|
| 00:26:23.120 |
very much national-based histories.
|
| 00:26:25.400 |
So you would get a story about the influence
|
| 00:26:28.040 |
of the Institute of Economic Affairs
|
| 00:26:30.120 |
and the Adams-Smith Institute on Thatcher's rise to power.
|
| 00:26:33.880 |
You'd get a story about the influence
|
| 00:26:35.560 |
of the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise
|
| 00:26:37.840 |
Institute on Reagan in his time in office.
|
| 00:26:42.720 |
And the story about the intellectual pedigree
|
| 00:26:46.560 |
of international ideas of governance,
|
| 00:26:49.040 |
so the origins of super-national institutions,
|
| 00:26:53.400 |
like the World Trade Organization,
|
| 00:26:55.200 |
like the GATT that preceded the World Trade Organization,
|
| 00:26:58.440 |
was a story that hadn't really been told.
|
| 00:27:02.160 |
And one of the things that I think you find,
|
| 00:27:04.320 |
and this gets to the sort of the difficulty of selling
|
| 00:27:07.760 |
globalism, is it often in the writings of the people
|
| 00:27:12.440 |
I'm writing about is not expressly in the interest of this
|
| 00:27:15.440 |
or that population.
|
| 00:27:17.280 |
It's in the interest of some imagined totality
|
| 00:27:20.480 |
of the world economy, which the Theresa May quote
|
| 00:27:25.080 |
from earlier this year is appropriate.
|
| 00:27:27.200 |
If you're the citizen of the world,
|
| 00:27:28.440 |
you're a citizen of no place.
|
| 00:27:30.200 |
And there is that way in which it's politically hard
|
| 00:27:33.600 |
to use the notion of international citizenship
|
| 00:27:37.080 |
or global citizenship to make hay politically
|
| 00:27:41.000 |
domestically.
|
| 00:27:42.280 |
And the notion of diminishing sovereignty, for example,
|
| 00:27:44.960 |
is that not a selling strategy in any kind of series
|
| 00:27:50.360 |
of congressional debates about this or that policy.
|
| 00:27:53.000 |
But so you had something like the WTO,
|
| 00:27:55.560 |
you have one faction saying this reduces sovereignty
|
| 00:27:58.520 |
and other factions saying the United States.
|
| 00:28:00.880 |
This is actually increasing US sovereignty.
|
| 00:28:03.520 |
But the neoliberal intellectuals I'm looking at
|
| 00:28:05.880 |
are saying openly, yes, it is diminishing US sovereignty.
|
| 00:28:09.320 |
And that's a good thing that we're actually actively trying
|
| 00:28:13.000 |
to create a super national layer of governance
|
| 00:28:16.440 |
that disempowers nation states.
|
| 00:28:19.400 |
And the delicacy of pitching that to a domestic audience
|
| 00:28:24.280 |
is something that they've never quite figured out,
|
| 00:28:27.360 |
which is why the book ends with the World Trade Organization
|
| 00:28:30.280 |
protests in 1999, in which these people who had been designing
|
| 00:28:34.560 |
this thing for decades suddenly discovered the concept
|
| 00:28:39.480 |
of legitimacy and realized that they had sort of forgotten
|
| 00:28:42.320 |
about the need to secure legitimacy
|
| 00:28:46.920 |
for any large scale project of governance.
|
| 00:28:50.120 |
It wasn't something they had thought about.
|
| 00:28:51.440 |
The obsession is with a kind of a project
|
| 00:28:56.640 |
of legal design and institutional design,
|
| 00:29:01.040 |
which ironically becomes a kind of engineering project,
|
| 00:29:04.120 |
even though someone like Hayek was very skeptical
|
| 00:29:06.400 |
about the idea that human behavior could be engineered away.
|
| 00:29:09.600 |
There's still this idea of if we can get the constitutional
|
| 00:29:12.200 |
constraints right, then order will result.
|
| 00:29:16.880 |
But the idea of why people should be personally invested emotionally
|
| 00:29:20.600 |
in the world economy as a functioning order
|
| 00:29:23.920 |
is often a question that's not really asked.
|
| 00:29:27.480 |
It's-- except there is an overlapping
|
| 00:29:31.080 |
with certain political parties.
|
| 00:29:33.640 |
In the United States, one has the impression these days
|
| 00:29:37.520 |
that you have the Trump version of the Republican party,
|
| 00:29:44.200 |
which is nationalist America first.
|
| 00:29:47.600 |
It's anti-globalist in some ways.
|
| 00:29:51.960 |
I mean, at least rhetorically, of course,
|
| 00:29:53.960 |
in terms of the actual fiscal policies that are promoted,
|
| 00:29:57.240 |
just anything but--
|
| 00:29:58.920 |
but the Democratic party has very consistently,
|
| 00:30:04.000 |
at least morally, socially, environmentally speaking,
|
| 00:30:08.240 |
been at least perceived as through and through globalist
|
| 00:30:12.720 |
where America is not a nation like any other nation is where
|
| 00:30:17.680 |
all-- throughout diversity, it's associated
|
| 00:30:21.240 |
with the passage of things like Gatt and NAFTA
|
| 00:30:24.320 |
and the Clintonian, globalist prejudices and so forth.
|
| 00:30:30.920 |
And the backlash, the Nationalistic populist backlash,
|
| 00:30:36.440 |
it doesn't seem to have changed much the perception
|
| 00:30:40.040 |
of a alliance of the Democratic party with global capital.
|
| 00:30:46.200 |
Do you think that the Democratic party in the United States
|
| 00:30:50.600 |
is still a kind of bastion of this neoliberal thinking?
|
| 00:30:58.760 |
In other words, that if it's good for the world,
|
| 00:31:00.920 |
it's good for everyone?
|
| 00:31:04.000 |
Well, so I think that though, if there is a problem
|
| 00:31:07.040 |
of legitimacy for a kind of a globalist institution
|
| 00:31:09.920 |
building project, the problem is solved in the moments
|
| 00:31:12.920 |
when national interests correspond with kind of globalist
|
| 00:31:16.600 |
interests.
|
| 00:31:17.200 |
And so the mid-90s is a wonderful example of that,
|
| 00:31:20.880 |
where for the United States to sign on with the WTO
|
| 00:31:25.560 |
was not something that was really costing them anything,
|
| 00:31:28.160 |
because they were able to retain all of their access
|
| 00:31:31.360 |
to markets and retain their kind of commercial dominance
|
| 00:31:34.400 |
that they already had without really being
|
| 00:31:36.520 |
subject to any kind of downside.
|
| 00:31:39.320 |
That's changed in the last 25 years since the WTO was created,
|
| 00:31:44.680 |
as specifically the rise of China and India,
|
| 00:31:49.360 |
they've both been able to use the WTO in ways
|
| 00:31:52.040 |
that the United States had not anticipated.
|
| 00:31:54.760 |
So you have either a kind of departure
|
| 00:31:58.840 |
of the national interest from the kind of globalist project.
|
| 00:32:02.800 |
And I think that it's more helpful to think
|
| 00:32:05.800 |
about some of the ways in which institution building
|
| 00:32:09.000 |
kind of corresponds with also exertions of sovereign power.
|
| 00:32:12.840 |
So I think that actually that this dichotomy of Trumpian
|
| 00:32:16.640 |
national populism quote unquote,
|
| 00:32:18.520 |
versus democratic globalism is actually not that helpful
|
| 00:32:22.520 |
when you look at the way that Trump's trade policy
|
| 00:32:25.160 |
actually works.
|
| 00:32:25.920 |
I agree with that, yeah.
|
| 00:32:27.320 |
Which isn't to say it becomes just business as usual,
|
| 00:32:29.920 |
but if you look at someone like Robert Lighthizer,
|
| 00:32:32.600 |
who's the current US trade representative,
|
| 00:32:35.400 |
he is, I think of him as kind of an adversarial internationalist.
|
| 00:32:39.480 |
So on the one hand, he will be blocking the appointment
|
| 00:32:44.560 |
of new judges to the appellate court at the WTO.
|
| 00:32:47.800 |
But at the same time, they're suing India
|
| 00:32:51.920 |
through the WTO, placing cases at the WTO.
|
| 00:32:55.120 |
So it's not an either or, it's rather a both-and relationship
|
| 00:32:59.120 |
to kind of global institutions, which is to say,
|
| 00:33:02.320 |
when it works for us to assert sovereign power
|
| 00:33:04.880 |
and to be tough in a kind of a shmidian
|
| 00:33:07.040 |
way and assert decisions, then we will do that.
|
| 00:33:10.080 |
But in so far as the institutions serve our interests
|
| 00:33:12.160 |
that we will use them as well.
|
| 00:33:14.480 |
And that was really the model of Reagan,
|
| 00:33:17.280 |
like what we're seeing with Trump economically
|
| 00:33:20.400 |
is last to kind of throw back to the 1930s
|
| 00:33:23.280 |
and much more throw back to the mid-1980s
|
| 00:33:25.960 |
when the Reagan trade policy establishment
|
| 00:33:30.320 |
used moments of executive power to actually
|
| 00:33:32.920 |
bully people into more buy-in and to a globalist institutions.
|
| 00:33:36.480 |
I mean, that's the irony.
|
| 00:33:38.520 |
What do you think of the WTO and what is doing these days?
|
| 00:33:42.920 |
Or what should we think-- not what do you think?
|
| 00:33:44.600 |
What should we think by we, meaning citizens who are not
|
| 00:33:50.560 |
particularly well-versed in economic theory and policy,
|
| 00:33:54.800 |
but who feel that we just don't want to be screwed over
|
| 00:33:59.080 |
by the big capitalist bullies that determine our fate,
|
| 00:34:04.960 |
regardless of any kind of democratic consent
|
| 00:34:09.400 |
that is accorded.
|
| 00:34:10.800 |
Decisions being made independently of any political process
|
| 00:34:14.280 |
or accountability are environments and habitats
|
| 00:34:17.240 |
being transformed through just the logic of capital.
|
| 00:34:21.840 |
And it's the world trade organization
|
| 00:34:26.040 |
just enabling this kind of indiscriminate, so-called economic
|
| 00:34:30.440 |
development all around the world, regardless
|
| 00:34:33.120 |
of what Rousseau would have called the Volontization
|
| 00:34:36.520 |
or any kind of general will or the people's will.
|
| 00:34:40.120 |
Right.
|
| 00:34:41.440 |
I think it depends on where you stand.
|
| 00:34:43.840 |
I mean, at the moment of the passage of the WTO,
|
| 00:34:48.000 |
if you were from a small nation in the world economy,
|
| 00:34:51.560 |
you had two options, either be subject
|
| 00:34:53.680 |
to the lateral policy decisions of the United States
|
| 00:34:58.000 |
and they'd be treated however they chose to treat you
|
| 00:35:00.040 |
in any given moment, or at least have the semblance
|
| 00:35:03.000 |
of a forum where there was lip service being paid to something
|
| 00:35:06.640 |
like the rule of law and equal treatment.
|
| 00:35:08.880 |
And so for a lot of-- it was a lesser of two evils
|
| 00:35:11.040 |
for a lot of global South countries, which was to say,
|
| 00:35:14.200 |
we will use this as a negotiating forum
|
| 00:35:17.440 |
because we don't have any other option,
|
| 00:35:19.160 |
other than no forum at all.
|
| 00:35:21.240 |
I think the question is different if you're
|
| 00:35:23.040 |
sitting in the United States, because then you get back
|
| 00:35:25.480 |
the debates return to the moment of the passage of the WTO
|
| 00:35:29.000 |
in which you had the adversaries of the WTO
|
| 00:35:31.840 |
were on the two far ends of the spectrum in a way, right?
|
| 00:35:34.480 |
Bernie Sanders was opposed to the creation of the WTO.
|
| 00:35:38.800 |
But so was Papi Cannon.
|
| 00:35:41.760 |
So if you are going to make the gamble of returning power
|
| 00:35:46.320 |
to the national sovereign, then much
|
| 00:35:47.800 |
starts to depend on who that sovereign is, right?
|
| 00:35:50.800 |
And then the question of the general will kind of reasserts itself,
|
| 00:35:54.640 |
which is to say, if you do what some of the interesting things
|
| 00:35:58.480 |
that, for example, this Lighthizer is doing
|
| 00:36:00.520 |
in his opposition to NAFTA as it exists,
|
| 00:36:03.280 |
he's actually against these investor state dispute courts,
|
| 00:36:07.920 |
right?
|
| 00:36:08.080 |
These sort of private courts that can do things
|
| 00:36:10.920 |
to override the sovereign decisions of nations.
|
| 00:36:13.240 |
And for the left, that's been an argument
|
| 00:36:14.880 |
that they've been making for decades,
|
| 00:36:16.120 |
is that the bad thing about the WTO and the NAFTA
|
| 00:36:18.920 |
is it takes power, depoliticized, and de-democratizes economic power.
|
| 00:36:25.320 |
So on the face of it, that's actually something good.
|
| 00:36:28.000 |
But if that repoliticization is being pursued
|
| 00:36:32.560 |
in the interest of a political project
|
| 00:36:34.000 |
that we're not interested in, then politics is bad, right?
|
| 00:36:36.400 |
I mean, it just raises the question again of how
|
| 00:36:39.680 |
the political gets defined locally.
|
| 00:36:42.400 |
But I think it definitely one can see a way
|
| 00:36:47.440 |
in which American investment at a sort of popular level
|
| 00:36:52.240 |
and an elite level in a project of depoliticization
|
| 00:36:56.520 |
is a kind of waning.
|
| 00:36:58.040 |
I mean, the investment in the supernational
|
| 00:37:00.320 |
and the international, because they don't see their own
|
| 00:37:02.360 |
interest intersecting with a kind of global project anymore,
|
| 00:37:06.600 |
it means that politics will reassert itself
|
| 00:37:08.960 |
as more of a problem and more of a divisive problem.
|
| 00:37:12.080 |
But one that then it just becomes the responsibility
|
| 00:37:14.200 |
of everyday Americans to fill with,
|
| 00:37:17.160 |
the content of solidarity and a notion of Americanness built on
|
| 00:37:21.640 |
the demos, an inclusive notion of the demos
|
| 00:37:25.120 |
rather than an exclusive notion of the ethnos.
|
| 00:37:27.800 |
- Right, so we'll return to this in a moment,
|
| 00:37:31.880 |
but let's take a step back to talk a little bit about
|
| 00:37:35.680 |
your book, Globalist, the End of Empire
|
| 00:37:37.920 |
and the birth of neoliberalism
|
| 00:37:39.680 |
and the so-called Geneva school,
|
| 00:37:41.760 |
you say that they're very under-acknowledged
|
| 00:37:44.440 |
and if you look in the Wikipedia entries and so forth,
|
| 00:37:47.520 |
you'll find that they'll talk about the Austrian school
|
| 00:37:51.080 |
of neoliberal, the Chicago school and others,
|
| 00:37:53.440 |
but I didn't come across a lot about the Geneva school.
|
| 00:37:56.720 |
And you say that that is a gap in the historical narrative
|
| 00:38:02.800 |
that you wanna fill by writing this book.
|
| 00:38:05.200 |
So what is the Geneva school?
|
| 00:38:07.880 |
Why is it called the Geneva school
|
| 00:38:09.720 |
since so many of its members were not from Geneva?
|
| 00:38:13.280 |
- Well, part of the reason why it isn't have a Wikipedia entry
|
| 00:38:15.960 |
and so on is I kind of more or less coined the term,
|
| 00:38:18.680 |
and the course of the book, it had been suggested by
|
| 00:38:22.360 |
one of the people I write about, but more or less,
|
| 00:38:24.800 |
I more or less created this idea of a coherent school
|
| 00:38:28.400 |
of thought myself out of what I thought
|
| 00:38:30.680 |
were pretty, for out of, I think,
|
| 00:38:32.280 |
pretty compelling reasons.
|
| 00:38:33.480 |
The people identify as members of the Geneva school
|
| 00:38:38.600 |
include people who did, in fact, teach and spend
|
| 00:38:41.680 |
a lot of time in Geneva, so Phil Humbropke
|
| 00:38:43.960 |
is an example he taught there for decades.
|
| 00:38:46.440 |
Haberler did some very important work
|
| 00:38:48.960 |
for the League of Nations, Ingeniva,
|
| 00:38:52.600 |
people like Hayek and Robbins gave very important lectures
|
| 00:38:56.360 |
that became kind of canonical books
|
| 00:38:58.760 |
about international order Ingeniva.
|
| 00:39:02.520 |
- It's the Journal Ordo, which is foundational journal
|
| 00:39:07.280 |
for neoliberalism.
|
| 00:39:08.600 |
Was that a Geneva-based journal?
|
| 00:39:10.800 |
- No, that's a German.
|
| 00:39:12.440 |
- German, that's published out of Freiburg,
|
| 00:39:16.960 |
which was the kind, the place where Hayek went
|
| 00:39:18.760 |
after he was in Chicago.
|
| 00:39:20.560 |
- So would the Geneva school be associated
|
| 00:39:23.880 |
with ordo liberalism, or getting the name,
|
| 00:39:27.240 |
or do liberalism coming, getting a name
|
| 00:39:29.400 |
from this journal, or do?
|
| 00:39:31.400 |
- No.
|
| 00:39:32.240 |
- Yeah, I mean, the difference between
|
| 00:39:34.600 |
ordo liberalism and American style
|
| 00:39:36.960 |
in Chicago School, neoliberalism, in broad terms,
|
| 00:39:41.320 |
is ordo liberalism is very attentive to this idea
|
| 00:39:43.720 |
of the need to create an institutional framework
|
| 00:39:46.720 |
for the reproduction of market competition.
|
| 00:39:50.120 |
So the idea of rolling back the state,
|
| 00:39:53.120 |
which was a central part of the rhetoric
|
| 00:39:55.160 |
of someone like Thatcher, or people like Thatcher and Reagan,
|
| 00:39:58.640 |
isn't really part of the ordo liberal rhetoric.
|
| 00:40:01.120 |
The the ordo liberal rhetoric has always been upfront
|
| 00:40:03.680 |
that what they seek is a strong state and a free market.
|
| 00:40:06.720 |
And the question is not, how much state,
|
| 00:40:09.080 |
or how little about what kind of state.
|
| 00:40:11.240 |
The Geneva school, as I describe it,
|
| 00:40:12.720 |
because it is composed of largely German speaking thinkers,
|
| 00:40:17.160 |
kind of poses that same question at the global level,
|
| 00:40:19.920 |
which is to say, what kind of institutional framework
|
| 00:40:22.800 |
do we need for the reproduction of market competition
|
| 00:40:26.840 |
at the global or international level?
|
| 00:40:29.400 |
And Geneva is important because it was the site
|
| 00:40:32.080 |
of the most intensive discussions
|
| 00:40:35.200 |
that the problem of international order
|
| 00:40:36.960 |
from the creation of the League of Nations,
|
| 00:40:39.640 |
the International Labor Organization was based there.
|
| 00:40:42.520 |
After the war, the International Standards Organization,
|
| 00:40:45.800 |
the GAT was based in Geneva now.
|
| 00:40:49.400 |
The WTO, the UN, has a branch office there.
|
| 00:40:52.800 |
So the site of Geneva is interesting
|
| 00:40:55.680 |
because it does serve as almost like this kind of
|
| 00:40:58.760 |
extra national location where problems of the global
|
| 00:41:03.320 |
can be thought of in the abstract without being too bound up
|
| 00:41:06.960 |
in national concerns of this or that, I'm sure.
|
| 00:41:11.360 |
- Good, so that's why you speak about
|
| 00:41:13.760 |
or do globalism might be a better term
|
| 00:41:16.120 |
for the Geneva school people.
|
| 00:41:18.120 |
So let me ask up now about,
|
| 00:41:21.080 |
if not the Geneva school, at least Hayek,
|
| 00:41:23.240 |
as one of the major proponents and democracy,
|
| 00:41:28.240 |
because I got a sense reading you
|
| 00:41:32.200 |
that there's a deep rooted fear and paranoia
|
| 00:41:36.920 |
about democracy and even antagonism and hostility towards it.
|
| 00:41:40.880 |
And let me read a quote that I came across
|
| 00:41:44.760 |
in your introduction about democracy
|
| 00:41:46.920 |
where Hayek says, "I believe that limiting the powers
|
| 00:41:49.600 |
of democracy in these new parts of the world
|
| 00:41:52.600 |
is the only chance of preserving democracy
|
| 00:41:55.600 |
in those parts of the world.
|
| 00:41:56.600 |
If democracies do not limit their own powers,
|
| 00:41:58.920 |
they will be destroyed."
|
| 00:42:01.280 |
That is something that one can think a lot about.
|
| 00:42:05.000 |
It's probably a lot of evidence that if democracies
|
| 00:42:10.400 |
do not limit their own powers and they will indeed be destroyed
|
| 00:42:14.520 |
not only in third world, you know,
|
| 00:42:16.160 |
nation, incipient democracies but even for ourselves.
|
| 00:42:21.160 |
And then you refer to the authoritarian liberalism
|
| 00:42:27.800 |
that was coined in 1933 by Herman Heller.
|
| 00:42:32.800 |
Now that term is, I think, back in circulation.
|
| 00:42:35.920 |
Is it not in places like Hungary or Turkey
|
| 00:42:40.080 |
or even Putin that we were talking about authoritarian liberalism
|
| 00:42:43.640 |
or is it authoritarian democracy?
|
| 00:42:45.640 |
What is the thinking there about how much
|
| 00:42:50.320 |
must democracy be constrained according to these people?
|
| 00:42:55.320 |
- Right, I mean, it's related to what the French theorist,
|
| 00:43:00.320 |
Chantal move calls the Democratic paradox,
|
| 00:43:03.760 |
which is that we sort of naturally conjoined
|
| 00:43:08.040 |
or have for the last several decades
|
| 00:43:09.440 |
this idea of liberal democracy,
|
| 00:43:11.240 |
but actually those two concepts are very different
|
| 00:43:13.440 |
and potentially in detention with one another
|
| 00:43:16.120 |
in the sense that liberalism is invested
|
| 00:43:19.120 |
in protecting a certain set of institutions
|
| 00:43:22.280 |
regardless of what the people think.
|
| 00:43:24.760 |
And democracy, on the other hand, can have highly
|
| 00:43:27.520 |
illiberal outcomes and so democracy,
|
| 00:43:30.200 |
if understood as a majoritarian expression
|
| 00:43:32.800 |
of the people's will, could easily say
|
| 00:43:34.880 |
these liberal institutions are not what we want.
|
| 00:43:37.960 |
So there's a constant decision being made,
|
| 00:43:41.640 |
you know, whether we realize it or not,
|
| 00:43:44.400 |
about where the sort of stress should be placed
|
| 00:43:46.400 |
on the democracy or the liberalism.
|
| 00:43:48.680 |
And the United States is a perfect example
|
| 00:43:51.160 |
where of course constitutional constraints
|
| 00:43:53.280 |
and checks and balances are an essential part
|
| 00:43:55.840 |
of the way democracy functions in this country.
|
| 00:43:58.680 |
And if you asked someone who sees themselves
|
| 00:44:01.000 |
as either a Hayekian or a follower of James Buchanan
|
| 00:44:04.600 |
who is a closely related thinker,
|
| 00:44:06.880 |
they would find the kind of arguments
|
| 00:44:08.480 |
that Hayek is making in the quote you,
|
| 00:44:10.880 |
you just read there quite, but now they would say
|
| 00:44:13.880 |
that well, this of course,
|
| 00:44:15.080 |
that this is the standard way that democracies work
|
| 00:44:18.560 |
as they produce, or they include constraints
|
| 00:44:21.880 |
on the will of the majority.
|
| 00:44:23.440 |
- Sure, they do, but what is authoritarian liberalism?
|
| 00:44:26.520 |
- Well, I mean, I think that there you need to sort of
|
| 00:44:32.840 |
look at particular moments.
|
| 00:44:35.200 |
So for, I'm trying to think of a good example
|
| 00:44:39.080 |
that I use in the book.
|
| 00:44:41.120 |
- I mean, would the Hungarian or bun
|
| 00:44:43.600 |
would he be a authoritarian liberal?
|
| 00:44:46.880 |
- Or.
|
| 00:44:47.720 |
- Well, let's use the example of something
|
| 00:44:49.960 |
like the Austrian freedom party,
|
| 00:44:53.360 |
or the alternative for Germany,
|
| 00:44:56.000 |
just to sort of prevent the kind of pathologizing
|
| 00:44:58.720 |
of the Eastern Europe as the site of the bad European politics.
|
| 00:45:03.400 |
- Oh, yeah, I'm all for Eastern,
|
| 00:45:05.800 |
meet a little Ropez, what a fair question.
|
| 00:45:07.320 |
- No, no, I wasn't saying that you're doing that,
|
| 00:45:09.720 |
but I think that you can see the stuff actually
|
| 00:45:12.600 |
in the heartland of order liberalism quite clearly.
|
| 00:45:15.920 |
And there, if you look at the position of something
|
| 00:45:19.400 |
like alternative for Germany, AFD party,
|
| 00:45:23.520 |
their argument is that to preserve exactly conditions
|
| 00:45:28.520 |
of competition and free trade,
|
| 00:45:31.040 |
then there needs to be the ability to override things
|
| 00:45:34.840 |
like the freedom of entry for refugees
|
| 00:45:39.720 |
or non-Western immigrants.
|
| 00:45:42.200 |
So, and the curtailment of free speech
|
| 00:45:45.600 |
for certain kinds of unacceptable attacks on Western values
|
| 00:45:50.600 |
and things like that.
|
| 00:45:52.760 |
So, the notion of using the force of the state
|
| 00:45:57.320 |
to push back against threats to the market order,
|
| 00:46:02.320 |
could be seen in the example like that.
|
| 00:46:04.840 |
I'm just remembering now some examples from the book
|
| 00:46:07.760 |
in the case of the interwar period in Austria,
|
| 00:46:12.880 |
the use of police violence against striking protesters
|
| 00:46:16.360 |
or against organized labor was something that
|
| 00:46:21.000 |
some, that Mises saw as entirely acceptable
|
| 00:46:23.560 |
and actually necessary.
|
| 00:46:24.720 |
So, Mises helped draft something with the,
|
| 00:46:27.160 |
that he called the anti-terror law,
|
| 00:46:29.480 |
which was designed to designate any forms of strike
|
| 00:46:33.600 |
labor action as terror and therefore just to find
|
| 00:46:36.920 |
the imposition of, or the use of police violence.
|
| 00:46:41.280 |
So, this, I think that the use of the police wing
|
| 00:46:45.760 |
of the state against threats to the market order
|
| 00:46:48.520 |
usually originating in organized labor
|
| 00:46:51.520 |
is a pretty clear case of authoritarian liberalism,
|
| 00:46:55.400 |
as I understand it.
|
| 00:46:56.480 |
- And can I ask about another important figure
|
| 00:47:01.080 |
who's not part of the Geneva school
|
| 00:47:03.040 |
and in some times is argued against neoliberalism,
|
| 00:47:08.400 |
that's Polany, the Hungarian economist theorist,
|
| 00:47:13.400 |
historian historian.
|
| 00:47:16.040 |
He's very big these days, right?
|
| 00:47:18.000 |
- He is, yeah.
|
| 00:47:18.960 |
- And in what way does he not conjugate well
|
| 00:47:23.480 |
with the neoliberals you're dealing with?
|
| 00:47:27.040 |
- Well, it's an argument that I make in the introduction
|
| 00:47:29.120 |
which is that I think that it's better to think
|
| 00:47:32.520 |
of people like Hayek and Rupa as contemporaries of Polany,
|
| 00:47:37.040 |
which of course they are and of people who are arguing
|
| 00:47:41.040 |
for a form of embeddedness as Polany argues for it
|
| 00:47:44.520 |
rather than, so that capitals should not, yeah.
|
| 00:47:48.160 |
- Well, it depends on the fine embeddedness.
|
| 00:47:50.160 |
I mean, the argument that gets the sort of,
|
| 00:47:53.120 |
the short version of the argument about Polany's argument
|
| 00:47:56.880 |
that gets made is that liberals and thereby
|
| 00:48:00.240 |
neoliberal seek to disembed the market from society
|
| 00:48:05.360 |
because they believe that a market can be self-regulating
|
| 00:48:08.640 |
and therefore effectively institutions can fall away,
|
| 00:48:11.760 |
community bonds can fall away
|
| 00:48:13.280 |
and we will all just encounter each other
|
| 00:48:14.920 |
as kind of exchanging units in the marketplace.
|
| 00:48:18.880 |
And this leads to a vision of neoliberalism as an ideology
|
| 00:48:22.880 |
which I think is not very accurate
|
| 00:48:24.520 |
because as I'm trying to argue in the book,
|
| 00:48:27.280 |
they were equally interested in embeddedness
|
| 00:48:29.840 |
but simply for different outcomes than him
|
| 00:48:31.760 |
whereas he wanted to use embeddedness as a way
|
| 00:48:34.040 |
to increase the sense of social evenness
|
| 00:48:37.200 |
and equality and redistribution and local identity,
|
| 00:48:40.880 |
they want to use embeddedness specifically to embed
|
| 00:48:43.760 |
the freedom of capital to move where it wants to
|
| 00:48:46.280 |
and so on.
|
| 00:48:47.120 |
- So they could be careless about social justice
|
| 00:48:48.840 |
as you said earlier.
|
| 00:48:50.040 |
- They are explicitly opposed to social justice.
|
| 00:48:52.000 |
I mean, the argument against democracy,
|
| 00:48:54.600 |
I think it's worth dwelling on that for a moment
|
| 00:48:57.320 |
is a kind of a mixture of two things.
|
| 00:48:59.080 |
It's a way of seeing people as both naturally inclined
|
| 00:49:02.760 |
towards solidarity and naturally inclined towards self interest
|
| 00:49:06.160 |
and both of those are problems for someone like Hayek
|
| 00:49:08.560 |
and a democracy because either people are going to use
|
| 00:49:11.960 |
their vote to effectively blackmail politicians
|
| 00:49:15.080 |
to give them favors and leaving the state as kind of the prey
|
| 00:49:18.680 |
to be torn apart by the electorate and eventually
|
| 00:49:20.880 |
they make so many promises that the whole thing
|
| 00:49:23.400 |
turns into inflation and falls apart
|
| 00:49:25.840 |
or people are still kind of hardwired from their time
|
| 00:49:29.680 |
as members of the tribe on the savannah
|
| 00:49:32.240 |
which is really how Hayek thought about it
|
| 00:49:34.200 |
to want to be communally sharing all of the resources
|
| 00:49:37.520 |
available with the small group in the village
|
| 00:49:39.480 |
the way that they would have once.
|
| 00:49:41.200 |
I mean, this is actually Hayek's argument
|
| 00:49:43.080 |
that we still have this sort of remnant of our tribal life
|
| 00:49:47.240 |
and so we mistakenly extrapolate that to the modern
|
| 00:49:51.600 |
state form and think we can actually practice socialism
|
| 00:49:54.640 |
and communism like we used to on the savannah.
|
| 00:49:57.320 |
So the democratic subject is sort of
|
| 00:50:01.360 |
doubly hazardous for the reproduction of a market order
|
| 00:50:05.960 |
because of both wanting everything for themselves
|
| 00:50:08.280 |
and also having this idea that we can have it all.
|
| 00:50:10.320 |
But it's a sense that the reproduction of the market order
|
| 00:50:13.000 |
is ultimately good for everyone or is it completely
|
| 00:50:16.520 |
beyond good and evil to use an etienne term
|
| 00:50:20.640 |
and it's money, don't confuse money with humanity
|
| 00:50:25.240 |
and it's the philosophy of the country.
|
| 00:50:27.640 |
But we need to, if you have to choose between money
|
| 00:50:29.920 |
and humanity, choose money.
|
| 00:50:31.800 |
- Yeah, I mean, it's a good question
|
| 00:50:34.440 |
and I think there's a recent book about liberalism
|
| 00:50:38.440 |
that was published in Germany called the philosophy
|
| 00:50:40.040 |
of the lesser evil.
|
| 00:50:41.120 |
And I actually think that's quite a helpful way
|
| 00:50:42.640 |
of thinking about it, which is to say there is often
|
| 00:50:45.960 |
this argument made that this may not be a happy thought
|
| 00:50:50.560 |
that this might be a kind of a cold way of looking at the world.
|
| 00:50:53.680 |
They'll make this argument themselves.
|
| 00:50:55.760 |
The one of Buchanan's most famous books is called
|
| 00:50:58.440 |
"Politics Without Romance."
|
| 00:51:00.880 |
There's this argument that one needs to face
|
| 00:51:03.920 |
the sort of the coldness and cruelty of the world
|
| 00:51:07.040 |
because it's better than sort of no world at all.
|
| 00:51:10.960 |
So it's actually deeply pessimistic ideology
|
| 00:51:13.520 |
when you read the writings of the thinkers themselves,
|
| 00:51:16.440 |
which I think quite different from the sunny kind of 1990s
|
| 00:51:19.760 |
in a world of Coca-Cola kind of neoliberalism,
|
| 00:51:22.280 |
the way that people think about it a lot.
|
| 00:51:23.800 |
We're all part of a world of goods and money.
|
| 00:51:26.280 |
But for the new liberals that I study anyway,
|
| 00:51:29.520 |
they're gloomy, fantasy, act, Viennese intellectuals
|
| 00:51:32.240 |
at the end of it, right?
|
| 00:51:33.560 |
They sort of see the need for a market order as a way
|
| 00:51:36.400 |
to prevent kind of the mass death that would result
|
| 00:51:39.280 |
if we try to actually enact socialism.
|
| 00:51:41.520 |
- So that's what they believed in it.
|
| 00:51:44.720 |
- Yeah, I mean, Hayek says, if we try to genuinely carry
|
| 00:51:47.760 |
out socialism and create a communist society,
|
| 00:51:50.320 |
then billions of people who are now living will die.
|
| 00:51:53.600 |
And why would it not be the case if you just let capital
|
| 00:51:58.720 |
follow its own vagaries wherever it led?
|
| 00:52:02.320 |
- Without a state framework you mean?
|
| 00:52:06.160 |
Or even within a state framework that would enable
|
| 00:52:11.160 |
it to function better rather than inhibit it.
|
| 00:52:16.520 |
- You're saying why won't that lead to mass death?
|
| 00:52:18.640 |
- Yes, or mass misery or something equal to that.
|
| 00:52:23.560 |
- Absolutely horrible.
|
| 00:52:25.000 |
- I mean, it becomes this competition of kind of,
|
| 00:52:28.640 |
you know, this is actually where we're at often
|
| 00:52:30.840 |
the kind of left right conversations
|
| 00:52:32.800 |
at the moment as a sort of argument about body counts, right?
|
| 00:52:35.640 |
I mean, you know, who is creating more misery,
|
| 00:52:38.440 |
who has caused more deaths, you know,
|
| 00:52:39.960 |
was malware, sent Hitler, et cetera.
|
| 00:52:42.080 |
- Yeah, well, it's not only fascism versus communism,
|
| 00:52:45.440 |
but it's also this ravage that there's enough evidence
|
| 00:52:50.440 |
to suggest that the ravages of capitalism are not negligible.
|
| 00:52:54.440 |
As Mark said in the Communist Manifesto,
|
| 00:52:57.280 |
it doesn't mean you have to go all follow his whole agenda,
|
| 00:52:59.440 |
but he says that there's an invested interest
|
| 00:53:02.760 |
in capitalism to create uproot and destabilize
|
| 00:53:07.920 |
and create conditions of havoc so that in that turbulence,
|
| 00:53:12.920 |
you know, you can serve the interests of enrichment.
|
| 00:53:17.800 |
- Right, yeah, and that's where I think,
|
| 00:53:19.720 |
I mean, I spent some time in the book in the decade of the 1970s,
|
| 00:53:24.320 |
and this is something that wouldn't have to study
|
| 00:53:26.080 |
in a different book,
|
| 00:53:27.440 |
but the way in which the natural limits
|
| 00:53:31.560 |
of the worlds, the globes carrying capacity,
|
| 00:53:34.640 |
the earth's carrying capacity,
|
| 00:53:36.600 |
which were very much in the forefront of people's minds
|
| 00:53:39.840 |
in the 1970s.
|
| 00:53:41.000 |
- I think. - Serious policy makers know.
|
| 00:53:42.920 |
Much more than now, and that's what I was gonna say,
|
| 00:53:44.560 |
is that one of the real victories of neoliberalism
|
| 00:53:47.680 |
and it still needs to be tracked how it actually happened,
|
| 00:53:51.760 |
was to sort of roll back or reverse that true sense
|
| 00:53:56.000 |
of existential threat about the limits of the earth's
|
| 00:54:00.640 |
carrying capacity that I think was much more mainstream,
|
| 00:54:03.600 |
and you say it was a victory,
|
| 00:54:04.720 |
but it's a victory that was not necessarily desirable, right?
|
| 00:54:08.880 |
- From my point, you know, but I mean, from there,
|
| 00:54:11.080 |
- No, but I mean, from there, no, I mean,
|
| 00:54:12.520 |
I think that we would be well-served to actually,
|
| 00:54:15.520 |
you know, face the kind of the strong limits
|
| 00:54:19.920 |
to this ever proliferating world of capitalist human structure.
|
| 00:54:23.240 |
- It's never because environmental deregulation
|
| 00:54:25.320 |
would be almost like a tentative faith
|
| 00:54:26.960 |
for this neoliberal thinking, right?
|
| 00:54:29.560 |
- It is, I mean, it's the notion that there will always
|
| 00:54:32.600 |
be a technological fix, that there will always be some way
|
| 00:54:36.800 |
in which the limits of the earth's resources
|
| 00:54:39.880 |
will be transcended.
|
| 00:54:41.520 |
So the Heritage, or the American Enterprise Institute,
|
| 00:54:44.640 |
for example, sort of pursues this in two directions.
|
| 00:54:46.680 |
On the one hand, there's a lot of work sort of
|
| 00:54:49.720 |
questioning climate science.
|
| 00:54:51.360 |
There's a lot of work that comes out of neoliberal
|
| 00:54:53.320 |
think tanks trying to undo the evidentiary base of
|
| 00:54:58.320 |
climate change, but on the other hand,
|
| 00:55:02.560 |
there's also a unit.
|
| 00:55:04.040 |
Philip Marowski talks about this at the American Enterprise
|
| 00:55:06.360 |
Institute on geoengineering.
|
| 00:55:08.280 |
So there's both a kind of a belief in the mammoth
|
| 00:55:11.240 |
technological fix and an undermining of the notions of truth
|
| 00:55:15.800 |
that help try to anchor us to a realistic sense
|
| 00:55:20.320 |
of how much the earth can actually give us.
|
| 00:55:22.360 |
- Yeah, and that's, well, that's the totalizing monster
|
| 00:55:24.720 |
of technology is that the problems that it creates
|
| 00:55:27.480 |
creates them in such a way that only it can provide
|
| 00:55:30.280 |
the solutions to them.
|
| 00:55:31.280 |
So you get more of the same and you get into this
|
| 00:55:33.920 |
hypedigarian cycle of endless consumption and production
|
| 00:55:38.920 |
that each feeds the other.
|
| 00:55:40.360 |
- Right.
|
| 00:55:41.200 |
- So I began in my intro, speaking about the kind of
|
| 00:55:47.800 |
untimely thinking or the way in which one can
|
| 00:55:52.320 |
re-venture future possibilities that hide in the
|
| 00:55:55.360 |
shadowy recesses of the past, I mentioned.
|
| 00:55:57.760 |
And I said that that's not the has been passed of
|
| 00:56:00.640 |
historiography, but this stream of latent legacies that
|
| 00:56:05.000 |
might come to us from previous thinkers or
|
| 00:56:10.160 |
previous schools.
|
| 00:56:11.280 |
Is there anything in your opinion of the Geneva
|
| 00:56:14.560 |
school thinking that can be freely and creatively
|
| 00:56:19.400 |
retrieved and recast as a future possibility that, you
|
| 00:56:24.560 |
know, might make it worthwhile for us to take them
|
| 00:56:29.800 |
seriously and not just be horrified at the kind of
|
| 00:56:32.920 |
indifference to certain forms of human disaggregation
|
| 00:56:37.600 |
that might be implied there.
|
| 00:56:39.760 |
- Well, I think that if one thinks about the book itself that
|
| 00:56:43.640 |
I've just written, that could be discovered probably
|
| 00:56:47.320 |
more profitably in the opponents of the Geneva
|
| 00:56:50.200 |
school neoliberal that I follow throughout, because
|
| 00:56:52.680 |
what the book is, the book is not just a kind of a
|
| 00:56:54.920 |
doctrinal reading of the master tax to produce the kind
|
| 00:56:59.200 |
of authoritative version of the ideology of
|
| 00:57:02.400 |
neoliberalism on its own terms.
|
| 00:57:03.640 |
But it's arguing that neoliberalism as a way of
|
| 00:57:06.680 |
thinking was worked out in opposition over the decades with
|
| 00:57:10.760 |
threats to or what they perceived as threats to the
|
| 00:57:13.760 |
market order.
|
| 00:57:14.760 |
And these threats were competing forms of globalism, in
|
| 00:57:18.120 |
fact, and competing ideas of justice that would be, I
|
| 00:57:22.800 |
think, a better reservoir for kind of unrealized futures
|
| 00:57:26.400 |
than trying to kind of retrofit some part of the
|
| 00:57:28.760 |
Geneva school neoliberal thought in itself.
|
| 00:57:31.600 |
So, and I think that is a difference from, you know,
|
| 00:57:34.120 |
talking about the Earth consciousness of the 1970s, but the
|
| 00:57:38.120 |
global South consciousness of even the 1990s, when people
|
| 00:57:41.080 |
were talking about the WTO and its effect on parts of the
|
| 00:57:46.000 |
third world, for example, I don't feel like our current
|
| 00:57:49.400 |
discussion about international political economy and
|
| 00:57:53.480 |
globalism versus nationalism really has as much time anymore
|
| 00:57:57.240 |
for the thought of the global repercussions and the way
|
| 00:58:02.400 |
that this reaches into the lives of people who aren't, don't
|
| 00:58:04.560 |
share our same background or our same nationality, because
|
| 00:58:07.880 |
it's become pitched as this question of can we retrieve
|
| 00:58:11.200 |
populism for the left or a nationalism be a positive
|
| 00:58:14.680 |
force for the left, that kind of cosmopolitan impulses of
|
| 00:58:17.800 |
caring about distant humans as much as we care about
|
| 00:58:20.800 |
ourselves seems to have been relegated to a kind of a
|
| 00:58:24.080 |
secondary status.
|
| 00:58:25.080 |
So I think paying attention again to, you know, the lives of
|
| 00:58:28.760 |
people who compose the vast majority of the world's
|
| 00:58:31.600 |
population might be a good move here too.
|
| 00:58:34.760 |
Yeah.
|
| 00:58:35.960 |
So and that means that there may be a school that is not the
|
| 00:58:41.600 |
direct air of this Geneva school in particular, right?
|
| 00:58:45.440 |
Well, thank you very much.
|
| 00:58:47.360 |
We've been speaking with Professor Quinn Slobodian,
|
| 00:58:50.400 |
Professor of History at Wellesley about his new book that
|
| 00:58:53.840 |
just came out with Harvard University press called Globalist,
|
| 00:58:56.560 |
the End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.
|
| 00:58:59.600 |
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
|
| 00:59:01.560 |
Thanks for listening.
|
| 00:59:02.360 |
And thank you again, Quinn, for coming on to entitled
|
| 00:59:04.640 |
opinions.
|
| 00:59:05.240 |
Thank you for having me.
|
| 00:59:06.120 |
Take care.
|
| 00:59:06.600 |
[MUSIC]
|
| 00:59:16.600 |
[MUSIC]
|
| 00:59:26.600 |
Since I've been, when I saw my name, I thought I'd seen the last
|
| 00:59:37.440 |
That old frame
|
| 00:59:38.880 |
Don't want my heart to be broken and teased
|
| 00:59:46.860 |
And you can chew many chances
|
| 00:59:51.700 |
Sometimes it's been when the dream he has
|
| 01:00:04.920 |
I must be in some kind of poor paradise
|
| 01:00:10.320 |
I don't know what to take, but yeah, I can't hurt
|
| 01:00:18.120 |
You can chew many chances
|
| 01:00:22.320 |
No matter what I'm doing it is wrong
|
| 01:00:30.920 |
But I can't hear myself
|
| 01:00:34.720 |
I can't see you
|
| 01:00:36.720 |
No matter what I'm doing it is wrong
|
| 01:00:39.720 |
I cannot understand it
|
| 01:00:41.720 |
I can't hear myself
|
| 01:00:44.720 |
I know what I'm doing it is wrong
|
| 01:00:47.720 |
But I can't hear myself
|
| 01:00:50.720 |
See you
|
| 01:00:52.720 |
Sometimes what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:00:55.720 |
And I'll get burned
|
| 01:00:58.720 |
(Music)
|
| 01:01:18.720 |
I'm always on my guard
|
| 01:01:21.720 |
I gotta cover my dream
|
| 01:01:26.720 |
It's been so hard to keep behind the line
|
| 01:01:31.720 |
Still searching for treasure
|
| 01:01:37.720 |
Looking for pleasure
|
| 01:01:40.720 |
I'm taking true many chances
|
| 01:01:44.720 |
Yes, I am
|
| 01:01:46.720 |
I know what I'm doing it is wrong
|
| 01:01:52.720 |
But I can't hear myself
|
| 01:01:55.720 |
I can't hear myself
|
| 01:01:57.720 |
I know what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:02:00.720 |
I can't understand it
|
| 01:02:03.720 |
I can't hear myself
|
| 01:02:05.720 |
I know what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:02:08.720 |
But I can't hear myself
|
| 01:02:11.720 |
See you
|
| 01:02:13.720 |
Sometimes what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:02:16.720 |
But I'll get burned
|
| 01:02:19.720 |
Yeah, I can't hear myself
|
| 01:02:23.720 |
I know what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:02:28.720 |
But I can't hear myself
|
| 01:02:31.720 |
See you
|
| 01:02:34.720 |
Sometimes what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:02:37.720 |
I can't understand it
|
| 01:02:39.720 |
I can't understand it
|
| 01:02:41.720 |
I know what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:02:45.720 |
But I can't hear myself
|
| 01:02:48.720 |
I know what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:02:52.720 |
I can't hear myself
|
| 01:02:55.720 |
I know what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:02:57.720 |
But I can't hear myself
|
| 01:03:00.720 |
I know what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:03:03.720 |
But I can't hear myself
|
| 01:03:07.720 |
See you
|
| 01:03:10.720 |
Sometimes what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:03:11.720 |
I can't understand it
|
| 01:03:14.720 |
I know what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:03:17.720 |
I know what I'm doing is wrong
|
| 01:03:21.720 |
[BLANK_AUDIO]
|