Market Civilizations

The first comprehensive study 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 perspective that saw the world from Europe and the U.S. outward. 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 from the center to the periphery. The vast literature on neoliberalism remains dominated by histories of ideas beginning in the Global North and diffusing outward. 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 glaring 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 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 Marroquin University, an underappreciated Latin American node in the neoliberal network; Argentine think tanker and now head of the Christian-neoliberal Acton Institute Alejandro Chafuen; Chinese intellectuals who adapted Hayek and Mises to 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 their often disruptive policy ideas "went local."