In this essay, I interrogate the racialized roots of the early neoliberal conception of (Western) civilization. I do so by placing that conception in a broader genealogy of early Austrian economic theory, focusing in particular on the writings of Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, and Ludwig von Mises. Rather than directly analyzing their understanding of civilization, however, I approach this topic by centering the way they construct the figure of the “savage.” This figure, as historians of racial discourse have shown, has long played an important role in European thought, often serving as the constitutive racial other to the “civilized” European. I proceed by asking what role the figure of the “savage” plays in the writings of the early Austrian economists. In doing so, I argue that while Menger and Böhm-Bawerk utilize deeply racialized tropes about “savage” peoples to establish the limits of their own theory of subjective valuation, Wieser not only adopts these tropes but also folds them into a broader racialized philosophy of history that sees historical development as a function of racial endowment. In the final section, I explore Mises’s writings in more detail, arguing that his understanding of race partially overlaps with Wieser’s but also departs from it in several crucial ways. In particular, Mises sees racial hierarchy as a historical rather than a natural phenomenon, prompting him to articulate a mode of “racial historicism” that sees racial hierarchy as a precarious system that could be overturned. In closing, I argue that Mises’s position on racial hierarchy anticipated several key elements of later neoliberal approaches to the question of race.

Martin Beddeleem, member of the Global Perspectives Emerging Scholars Forum, talk about Thomas Biebricher’s book on the political theory of neoliberalism as well as Biebricher’s article in Global Perspectives, teasing out links between neoliberal thought and forms of authoritarianism.

Neoliberalism was a global spectrum of ideas on how to create and preserve free markets in an age of popular sovereignty. A notion of a powerful state to create the institutions and mentalities needed for a liberal market society, and—if need be—to fend off potentially antiliberal democratic majorities characterized neoliberal ideas far more than antistate laissez-faire economics or apolitical technocratic visions. The article presents historical evidence from Chile and Russia from the 1960s to the 1990s to make the case that global varieties of neoliberal ideas were created in different local contexts. These ideas were not imposed or imported from without; they emerged from domestic intellectual trajectories and in engagement with local political and economic conditions before their carriers connected to other, both Western and “peripheral,” varieties of neoliberalism. Actual economic reforms undertaken in these countries were not a wholesale implementation of a neoliberal agenda or manifestations of a globally hegemonic “governmentality”; rather, they were the outcome of multiple ideational influences and, more crucially, the result of domestic political power play.

This article presents a detailed case study of “RoboDebt” in Australia and examines the political rationalities that underpin automated welfare surveillance systems. First, it is argued that neoliberal political rationalities shape the bureaucratic strategies enacted by agencies established to administer neoliberal welfare policy. Second, it is shown that neoliberal political rationalities influence the design and deployment of new surveillance technologies, and therefore they are embedded with and within politics too. Third, it is argued that the political architecture of the welfare state and associated use of information communication technologies has consequences for social justice. This article demonstrates that information communication technologies are implicated in the neoliberal governance of poverty but are not responsible for it. The article concludes by reflecting on the relevance of critical qualitative inquiry as one possible political intervention to advance social (and data) justice agendas.

China is found both to be neoliberal and to provide an alternative to neoliberal development. To illuminate the origins of this contradiction, this paper analyzes China’s relationship with neoliberalism from a historical and economic theory perspective. Neoliberal economic thinking became relevant to China with the beginning of reform and opening up in 1978, when the Communist Party moved from Maoism to an economic determinist outlook on socialism. This ideological shift opened the door for exchanges with the World Bank and foreign economists, including neoliberals. Yet an analysis of Milton Friedman’s speeches in China reveals a critical divide: the Chinese reformers embrace the market but deny that the market requires universal private property. Thus, China is integrated into the global market while the Chinese state reserves its rights to control the economy.

In the larger public debate, it is often suggested that neoliberalism has been swept aside by an upsurge of what are commonly referred to as right-wing populist movements, parties, and figures but are, in fact, authoritarian ones. It is the more or less explicit assumption of this narrative—namely, that there is a conflictual and dichotomous relationship between neoliberalism and authoritarianism—which is the focal point of the critical inquiry contained in this paper, thus building on recent scholarly accounts, which also challenge this assumption. The argument proceeds in two broad steps, prefaced by a theoretical-historical conceptualization of neoliberalism. First, an admittedly cursory survey of authoritarian parties and movements is conducted to show that there is ample reference to typical neoliberal ideas and arguments in their party platforms or concrete reform proposals. Secondly, the issue is approached from the converse perspective in order to ascertain the extent to which there are authoritarian potentialities in neoliberal thought. Here, calls for a strong state by some neoliberal thinkers are discussed as well as the link between some of them and the military dictatorship in Chile. Finally, the paper argues that the neoliberal view of politics is—possibly inadvertently but still systematically—drawn toward authoritarian politics and the respective actors because neoliberal thinkers largely lack any alternative option to account for the possibility of neoliberal reform. Neoliberalism and authoritarianism are not intrinsically tied to each other, but even less are they inherently opposed to one another; an amalgam of “authoritarian neoliberalism” thus seems far from impossible and may very well become the dominant shape of neoliberalism to come.