MARKET CIVILIZATION

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 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. 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."

QUINN SLOBODIAN is Marion Butler MacLean Associate Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College.

DIETER PLEHWE is senior fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and private lecturer of Political Science at University of Kassel.