Quinn Slobodian (b. 1978), a Canadian intellectual historian, has remade the study of neoliberalism, globalization, international economic governance, and the contemporary right, and over the past decade he has become an influential historian of political economy writing in English. His central claim cuts against the familiar picture of neoliberalism as a creed of deregulation and laissez-faire. Neoliberal thinkers, he argues, cared above all about building legal and institutional orders that could shield markets from democratic pressure. Across several books he reconstructs the intellectual architecture of globalization and shows how many of the institutions that govern the modern world grew out of efforts to insulate property, investment, and commerce from political interference.
He was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1978, and his childhood ranged across continents. His father practiced medicine, and the family moved often. After Vancouver Island they relocated to Lesotho in southern Africa in 1984, then to Vanuatu in the South Pacific in 1992, before returning to Canada in 1993. These years placed him among postcolonial societies, international development projects, and the realities of global inequality while he was still young. The themes that later organize his scholarship, decolonization, international institutions, sovereignty, and global economic governance, trace in part to this early life beyond North America.
Slobodian studied at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and took a bachelor’s degree in history in 2000. He then entered graduate school at New York University and completed his Ph.D. in history in 2008 under the historian Molly Nolan. His training joined intellectual history, international history, and political economy. From the start he resisted the national frame and preferred to follow ideas, institutions, and networks across borders.
After the doctorate he joined the faculty at Wellesley College. Over more than fifteen years he became a prominent scholar there and took the title of Marion Butler McLean Professor of the History of Ideas in 2021. In January 2024 he moved to Boston University as Professor of International History in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies.
Alongside these appointments he held a wide range of fellowships and visiting posts. He served as a Residential Fellow at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs in 2017 and 2018. He has held positions at Harvard University, Brown University, Harvard Business School, the Free University of Berlin, Chatham House in London, and Roma Tre University in Italy. These affiliations mark both the interdisciplinary reach of his work and the broad audience it draws among historians, economists, political scientists, and legal scholars.
His influence runs past his own writing. From 2020 to 2024 he served as co-editor of Contemporary European History, a leading journal in the field. He also co-directs the History and Political Economy Project, which brings historians into conversation with economists and political scientists. Through these roles he has helped shape a generation of scholarship on capitalism, globalization, and economic governance.
Slobodian first drew wide scholarly notice with Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (2012). The book examines how anti-colonial movements, liberation struggles, and Third World politics shaped political life inside West Germany. Rather than cast Europe as the sole engine of postwar history, he shows how actors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America shaped European argument. The work reflects his long interest in reading European history through a global lens.
His international standing rests on Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018), which won the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize and became an influential work on neoliberalism.
At the center of Globalists sits his concept of the Geneva School. Historians, he argues, have given too much attention to the Chicago School of Milton Friedman (1912-2006) or the Austrian School of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992). He identifies instead a transnational tradition centered in Geneva and tied to institutions such as the League of Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and later global economic bodies. Hayek, Mises, Wilhelm Röpke (1899-1966), and their allies cared less about domestic economic policy than about building a legal order for the world economy.
The Geneva School, on his account, faced a historical problem: the collapse of European empires and the rise of newly sovereign nation-states. Neoliberal thinkers feared that democratic governments might nationalize industry, restrict foreign investment, expropriate property, devalue currency, or raise barriers to trade. Rather than abolish government, they sought supranational institutions that could constrain it.
A central distinction in his work separates imperium from dominium. Imperium names the sphere of political sovereignty, territorial rule, and state authority. Dominium names the sphere of property rights, contracts, and market relations. Many neoliberals, he argues, accepted the end of formal empire so long as a global order of dominium survived. States might keep political sovereignty, yet legal and institutional structures protecting capital, investment, and property across borders would hold them in check.
This reading leads him to dispute the common assumption that neoliberalism wants weak government. Neoliberal thinkers, he argues, wanted strong institutions that could protect markets from political interference. He describes the process with terms such as encasement, encirclement, and immunization. Markets were to sit enclosed within protective legal structures and immunized against democratic demands for redistribution, regulation, or economic nationalism. They aimed to redesign governance rather than remove it.
Globalists also helped redefine method in the field. Rather than lean on published books and articles, Slobodian worked in archival collections that intellectual historians had often passed over. He drew on the records of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris, the League of Nations in Geneva, the Mont Pelerin Society, and personal papers held at the Hoover Institution and elsewhere. By tracing correspondence among economists, lawyers, policymakers, and international officials, he showed how abstract ideas settled into treaties, trade agreements, and international organizations.
After the success of Globalists, Slobodian widened his agenda through several edited volumes: Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (2015), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (2020, with Dieter Plehwe and Philip Mirowski (b. 1951)), and Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South (2020, with Plehwe). These books carried the study of neoliberalism beyond its older focus on Britain and the United States and stressed its global growth.
His next monograph, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023), examined efforts to break political authority into special economic zones, offshore jurisdictions, charter cities, tax havens, and semi-sovereign enclaves. Many market radicals, he argues, came to see democracy as a threat to economic freedom. Rather than reform democratic institutions, they sought to carve out spaces beyond democratic control. The book ranges across Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, seasteading projects, and contemporary charter-city proposals.
Where Globalists tracked authority moving upward toward supranational institutions, Crack-Up Capitalism tracked it breaking downward into fragments. Together the two books map complementary strategies for protecting markets: lift authority up to international bodies, or splinter it into smaller units where capital holds greater leverage.
In Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (2025), Slobodian turned to the tie between neoliberalism and the contemporary far right. The book disputes the popular belief that right-wing populism amounts to a revolt against neoliberalism. Important strands of present-day reactionary politics, he argues, grew from within neoliberal and libertarian traditions.
Much of the book traces what one might call an anarcho-capitalist mutation. Thinkers such as Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) and Hans-Hermann Hoppe (b. 1949) reworked the earlier neoliberal project. Where Hayek and his generation often sought to guard markets through international institutions, later libertarians grew suspicious of those institutions and feared that global bodies might fall under democratic or progressive control.
Some libertarian thinkers therefore embraced secession, micro-states, gated jurisdictions, private governance, and forms of cultural conservatism meant to stabilize property relations. Slobodian shows how claims about race, intelligence, immigration, cultural hierarchy, and civilizational decline braided together with market radicalism in certain circles. He argues for strong continuities between some libertarian traditions and modern ethnonationalist politics, while stopping short of the claim that neoliberalism produced the far right on its own. The book drew wide public attention and confirmed his standing as a leading interpreter of the intellectual roots of contemporary right-wing movements.
Across his career Slobodian stands apart from historians who treat ideas as self-contained philosophical systems. His work is institutional in character. He asks not only what thinkers believed but how they tried to turn belief into organizations, treaties, courts, constitutions, and international regimes. This attention to implementation marks him off from more textual intellectual historians.
His scholarship also carries the stamp of global history. He treats political ideas less as products of single nations than as the outcome of exchange among intellectuals, policymakers, and institutions across continents. Decolonization, globalization, and international governance run through all of it.
Beyond the academy he has become a prominent public intellectual. He writes for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, The New Statesman, and other major outlets. His essays take up neoliberalism, globalization, technology, populism, libertarianism, and democratic decline, and in recent years he has turned increasing attention to the meeting point of technological power, billionaire influence, and governance.
Grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have supported his work. By the mid-2020s he had become a much-cited historian of political economy in the English-speaking world.
Taken together, his books form a sustained effort to explain how modern capitalism is governed. He portrays markets as built legal and political orders rather than natural or spontaneous phenomena. From the collapse of empire to the rise of globalization, from offshore finance to charter cities, from neoliberal internationalism to libertarian ethnonationalism, his scholarship tracks the continuing effort to shield economic life from democratic control. Whether a reader accepts or rejects his conclusions, Slobodian has reshaped debate about neoliberalism, sovereignty, and the future of the global economic order.
Slobodian’s Field
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) treats an intellectual life as a series of moves within a structured space of positions. A field holds its own stakes, its own currencies, and its own gatekeepers. A scholar rises by gathering the capital the field recognizes and by taking the positions its structure leaves open. Read this way, Quinn Slobodian’s career shows the shape of a field strategy carried through with skill, and his chosen subject turns back on him in a way that rewards Bourdieu’s method.
Begin with trajectory, since habitus comes from a path. A physician’s son carried from Vancouver Island to Lesotho to Vanuatu and back acquires a set of dispositions the national historian rarely shares. The world arrives early as a single connected place, and the nation looks like a small container. When Slobodian later refuses the national frame and follows ideas across borders, he draws on a disposition laid down young, and he turns that disposition into a position. Against a historiography organized by country, the global lens marks him off. Distinction, in Bourdieu’s sense, begins as difference from rivals, and the transnational method supplies it.
The founding move comes with a name. Slobodian calls a cluster of thinkers the Geneva School and sets it beside the Chicago School of Friedman and the Austrian School of Mises and Hayek. The older schools sit consecrated, worked over by many hands. Geneva he constitutes himself. To name a thing is to claim the power to impose a vision and a division on the world, and the man who names an object holds the first claim on the authority to interpret it. He does not enter a crowded position. He builds one and occupies it alone. Whoever wants to argue about the Geneva School argues on ground Slobodian cleared.
Around that move he accumulates the capital a field rewards. The monographs carry cultural capital. The archives at the International Chamber of Commerce, the League of Nations, the Mont Pelerin Society, and the Hoover Institution supply the rare material that marks serious labor and raises the cost of disagreement. The edited volumes with Dieter Plehwe and Philip Mirowski bring social capital and borrow the consecration of established names. The co-editorship of a leading journal and the founding of the History and Political Economy Project place him at a node where he confers legitimacy on others. The convener gains a capital above the ordinary kind, the power to consecrate, and that power compounds.
The field’s gatekeepers then return their verdict in symbolic capital: the George Louis Beer Prize, the Guggenheim, grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, a residential fellowship at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center, a named chair at Wellesley, and a professorship in international history at Boston University. Each is a stamp from an authorized hand. The named chair crystallizes the process. The field tells the man that he embodies its values, and the title travels with him.
Slobodian also plays at two poles at once, and Bourdieu studies this game in Homo Academicus and The Rules of Art. The autonomous pole judges work by the field’s internal standards, the archive and the monograph and the peer. The heteronomous pole answers to demand from outside, from the market and the press and politics. Slobodian writes for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Atlantic, and the traffic runs both directions. Academic standing lends weight to the essay, and the essay lends visibility to the scholar. The resonance of his thesis in the wider argument about markets and democracy rewards a particular position-taking from outside the discipline, and that outside reward shapes a career no less than the inside one. Bourdieu marks the risk in the bargain. The more the journalistic field rewards a scholar, the more it pulls the work toward its own tempo and its own questions.
The largest stake sits in the word neoliberalism. The term is a classification, and classification is a struggle. Whoever fixes the legitimate sense of neoliberalism controls a currency that spends across history, political economy, journalism, and activism at once. Slobodian’s redefinition does the work. Neoliberalism stops meaning deregulation and starts meaning encasement, the construction of legal armor around markets. Imperium and dominium give the redefinition a portable shape. He imposes a vision and a division on a contested object, and the field begins to see through his categories.
A heresy that succeeds becomes an orthodoxy. Slobodian enters by correcting a settled belief, the picture of neoliberalism as a creed of weak government and free markets. The heretic gains by exposing the doxa and naming what the orthodox missed. Yet the prizes and the citations convert the heresy into the new received view. Students now reach for encasement and the Geneva School as the obvious starting point. The challenger becomes the authority he challenged, and the position he cleared fills with followers who take it for the natural order.
Slobodian’s body of work studies how a set of thinkers built institutions, treaties, journals, and societies to encase markets and shield them from democratic pressure. He traces the Mont Pelerin Society as a machine for reproducing a position. Run the same lens over the man who wrote the books. He too builds institutions, a project and a journal and a network, to encase a position and shield a body of work, and to reproduce a way of seeing across a generation of students. The historian of durable orders constructs a durable order inside his own field. Bourdieu does not call this hypocrisy. He calls it the common condition of the player who refuses to see the game while playing it well, and he grants the rare scholar a further distinction for naming his own stakes out loud.
Slobodian pushes the misunderstanding myth. Look at the books in a row. Globalists tells you that you misunderstood neoliberalism, that it never meant deregulation, that the neoliberals wanted strong institutions and legal armor around markets. Crack-Up Capitalism tells you that you misread the zone and the enclave, that these were attempts to escape the voter. Hayek’s Bastards tells you that you misunderstood right-wing populism, that it grew from neoliberalism rather than rebelled against it. Each book opens the same way. You had it wrong. Here is what was happening behind your back. The serial corrector.
The premise carries the heroism. If the trouble Slobodian describes, markets walled off from majorities, comes from a public that failed to grasp what was done to it, then the historian who lays the architecture bare performs a service close to rescue. The archives become consciousness-raising. See the cage and you might break it.
Pinsof turns the premise over. There was no misunderstanding. Start with his rule that people understand what they have an incentive to understand. The neoliberals Slobodian studies understood their aim. They wanted property shielded from majorities, and they wrote it down in letters and treaties and society minutes, which is the only reason Slobodian can quote them at such length. His evidence is their candor. The men in Geneva were not confused about what they built.
Nor were the publics who lived under the result. A voter has scant incentive to trace a legal order assembled in Geneva across decades, and tracing it would change nothing in his week. He understood neoliberalism the way he needed to and spent his attention elsewhere. Call that ignorance if you like. Pinsof calls it strategy. Stupidity is usually strategic, and the loose talk of deregulation served the people who talked that way well enough.
If markets constrain democracy, the cause is that men with the means wanted them to and worked to make it so, and not that the rest of us flunked a reading test. Better understanding leaves the motive untouched. You can hand every voter a clean account of imperium and dominium, and the men who built the order keep their reasons for building it, and the voter keeps his reasons for looking away.
Slobodian’s work carries the quiet hope that exposure leads somewhere, that a public shown the hidden order can contest it. Pinsof denies the step. You can study the hole you are stuck in to the last handful of dirt and remain at the bottom. The understanding was never the missing piece. The voters who would have to act gain nothing by acting, and the powerful who built the order lose everything by dismantling it, and no monograph rearranges that arithmetic. The world Slobodian maps does not want to be saved, and it would not be saved by being understood.
What if the capitalists understood what they were doing all too well? Slobodian answers yes for his villains. His whole argument credits the neoliberals with clear sight and firm intent, which means he has conceded half of Pinsof’s case before it starts. He keeps the misunderstanding only for the audience, the public that supposedly mistook the project for laissez-faire. What if the cause is bad motives rather than bad beliefs? Then the misunderstanding frame adds nothing to the history except a hero, the man who arrives to clear up a confusion that was doing real work for the people who held it.
Slobodian found a misunderstanding, corrected it three times, and made himself the one who understands. His neoliberals understood. His publics understood as much as they cared to. The trouble he describes was never confusion in the first place. The only misunderstanding is that there has been a misunderstanding.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
The order Slobodian anatomizes belongs to liberalism’s family. The Geneva School wanted a global legal frame that would lift the market above the nation and shield property and contract from the democratic majority. Dominium over imperium. Treaties and courts above the voter. That is reason and law set against the social group, the cosmopolitan instrument built to discipline the tribal one. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says the bet is a losing one. Nationalism is the strongest political faith on earth, stronger than any creed of rights or any architecture of markets, because it runs on socialization and innate sentiment rather than on argument. A treaty is a product of reason. A nation is taught in the cradle. When the two collide the cradle wins.
Read Slobodian’s three books in order and the contest shows through his own evidence. Globalists is the dream of encasement, reason building the cage. Crack-Up Capitalism is the move to fragment sovereignty, the same flight from the national majority by other means. Hayek’s Bastards is the eruption, ethnonationalism rising out of the libertarian tradition that meant to transcend the nation. Slobodian reads the last as a kinship inside libertarianism, a hidden tie between market radicalism and the racial right. Mearsheimer reads it as the return of the repressed. The globalist project tried to suppress the social nature of man, and the social nature of man came back as nationalism. The bastards are not a scandal in need of a villain. They are what Mearsheimer predicts when a cosmopolitan order forgets that people are tribal to the bone.
Slobodian gives you clever men in Geneva building a cage and a public that failed to notice. Mearsheimer gives you a contest between two forces of unequal strength. On one side the reason of jurists and economists, the encasement, the immunization. On the other the socialization and sentiment of national peoples, the oldest and deepest pull in political life. The cage frays not because a historian exposed it but because the weaker force was always going to lose to the stronger. Slobodian supplies the law and the institutions. Mearsheimer supplies the reason they never held.
Reason is the weakest of the three drivers for the scholar as much as for the voter. Slobodian’s frame treats the nation as a small container to see past and prizes the transnational view as the clear one. Where does that disposition come from? Not from reason alone. A man carried as a boy from Vancouver Island to Lesotho to Vanuatu, schooled in the cosmopolitan precincts of the American university, takes on a value infusion no less than the nationalist who gets his at the village fair. The globalist optic is a socialization, the creed of a particular group, the transnational professoriate, with its own attachments and its own loyalties. Mearsheimer’s man is tribal, and the cosmopolitan intellectual has a tribe too. He looks past the nation because his people taught him to, not because reason compelled it.
So if Mearsheimer is right, Slobodian wrote the natural history of a delusion while standing inside a cousin of it. He chronicled the cosmopolitan dream of walling the market off from the people, and the dream broke for the reason Mearsheimer gives for every such dream. The people are not atoms. They are a tribe, and the tribe outlasts the treaty. The historian who sees past the nation belongs to the one group that believes the nation can be seen past, and that belief is a socialization like any other.
Alliance Theory holds that a political belief system is not a philosophy built from values like equality or liberty. It is a patchwork of justifications, grievances, and attributions assembled to support a coalition’s allies and damage its rivals. The values come second, as banners. The alliance comes first. David Pinsof and his coauthors add that elites are no more coherent than the masses. They are better attuned to the contingent alliances of their time, and their training lets them dress the coalition’s narrative in finer cloth. Read Quinn Slobodian through this lens and the body of work looks less like a discovery about capitalism and more like the learned propaganda of a coalition.
Begin with the map. Slobodian’s allies and rivals sit on the page once you look for them. The allies are the democratic public, organized labor, the postcolonial states of the global South, and the redistributive arm of government. The rivals are capital, the neoliberal economists, the libertarians, and the contemporary right. His sentences carry the allegiance. Markets get encased, immunized, shielded from the people, walled off. Democracy gets constrained, hemmed in, denied. The first set of verbs names a perpetrator. The second names a victim. Alliance Theory predicts the pairing before you open the book.
Transitivity comes next, the rule that the enemy of my ally is my enemy and that we favor allies who share our rivals. Slobodian’s coalition counts the libertarian as a rival and the ethnonationalist as a rival. Hayek’s Bastards binds the two into a single cluster. The book argues that market radicalism and the racial right share a lineage, that the gold cranks and the IQ obsessives grew from the same root as Hayek’s heirs. Alliance Theory reads the continuities he traces as the scholarly form of transitivity. Partisans fuse their rivals into one enemy, and a historian fuses them with footnotes. The claim wears caution. He does not say neoliberalism produced the far right, only that strong ties run between them, and the caution is the tool that lands the charge while keeping the hands clean.
Three propagandistic biases run through the corpus. The perpetrator bias falls on the rival. Slobodian grants the neoliberals clear intent and long foresight, men who knew what they wanted and built it on purpose. Their order is no accident of history but a contrivance, drawn up to defeat the voter. The victim bias falls on the ally. The subtitle of Crack-Up Capitalism names the dream of a world without democracy, which is competitive victimhood on behalf of the demos, the embellished grievance of the wronged party. The attributional bias recodes outcomes. A working global market becomes not a thing that emerged but a cage that someone welded shut. The rival’s advantage gets traced to scheming and design, never to merit or use. Alliance Theory names each move and expects all three.
Alliance Theory also insists that coalitions are historically contingent and need no deeper pattern. The pairing of libertarian economics with Christian fundamentalism in America came from a deal struck in the 1970s, not from philosophy. Slobodian does the reverse with his rivals. He reads the neoliberal coalition as a coherent project with a traceable logic, a Geneva School, an imperium and a dominium, a doctrine carried across decades by allied minds. He grants his rivals a designed machine. His own coalition’s strange bedfellows go unexamined. The defender of the global South sits beside the defender of the Western regulatory state. The friend of the demos recoils when the demos votes for borders. Alliance Theory expects this. We see our rivals’ beliefs as a system and our own as principle.
The banner over the whole project reads democracy. Alliance Theory treats a value of that kind as a flag run up to rally support, raised when it serves the allies and furled when it does not. Watch what happens when the demos votes the wrong way. The majorities who chose Brexit, who backed the populists, who number among the losers of globalization, do not count as democracy vindicated. In Hayek’s Bastards they turn into a pathology to explain, a contamination traced back to the libertarian root. The democracy Slobodian defends is the democracy that returns his coalition’s preferences. When the vote runs the other way it becomes manipulation or false consciousness. Pinsof’s coauthors found the same pattern with equality. Support for the value tracks whether the value benefits the allies. Support for democracy tracks the same way.
