The the Hello and

I'm going to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood.

Just one guest today, Quinn Slobodian, who was last in this show in January to

discuss his book Globalists in Intellectual and Political History of Neoliberalism published by Harvard University

Press.

That word is sometimes used sloppily, but it's a real thing, and Slobodians' work is a critical

look at them from the left, but one that takes them seriously.

Its marquee names, like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and James Buchanan were thinkers who not

only had firm ideas of what the world should look like, but also had plans for how to get there.

Slobotian has several other recent essays that I thought worth discussing.

One is in Mutant Neoliberalism, a collection of essays edited by William Callison and

Zachary Mantrani, published by Fordham University Press.

That looks at neoliberal opposition to the EU, a project that is often thought to be a prime instance of

neoliberalism and action, and two others are about the neoliberalals attitude towards the rebellions of the 1960s.

Many people on the left think of Neoliberals as partisans of the doctrine of Homo economicists,

the view of humans as rational calculators who rank order their preferences and

maximize their returns as if they had perfect knowledge of the world around them.

The classic Neolibrals were not partisans of this view and were often critical of it

for a variety of reasons ranging from a belief

in the limited nature of human knowledge to frankly racist views about the appropriateness

of certain nationalities or cultures to life under capitalism. The contemporary European right is an odd amalgam of

neoliberal economics and what Slobodian calls a McKinseyized scientific racism.

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