A deep investigation of neoliberalism's proselytizers in Eastern
Europe and the Global South
Where does free
market ideology come from? Recent work on the neoliberal intellectual
movement around the Mont Pelerin Society has allowed for closer study
of the relationship between ideas, interests, and institutions. Yet
even as this literature brought neoliberalism down to earth, it
tended to reproduce a European and American perspective on the world.
With the notable exception of Augusto Pinochet's Chile, long seen as
a laboratory of neoliberalism, the new literature followed a story of
diffusion as ideas migrated outward from the Global North. Even in
the most innovative work, the cast of characters remains surprisingly
limited, clustering around famous intellectuals like Milton Friedman
and Friedrich Hayek.
Market
Civilizations redresses this absence by introducing a range of
characters and voices active in the transnational neoliberal movement
from the Global South and Eastern Europe. This includes B. R. Shenoy,
an early member of the Mont Pelerin Society from India, who has been
canonized in some circles since the Singh reforms; Manuel Ayau,
another MPS president and founder of the Marroquín University, an
underappreciated Latin American node in the neoliberal network;
Chinese intellectuals who read Hayek and Mises through local
circumstances; and many others. Seeing neoliberalism from beyond the
industrial core helps us understand what made radical capitalism
attractive to diverse populations and how often disruptive policy
ideas "went local."