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explanations. On a BBC radio show, Desert Island Discs, the petulant host, Sue Lawley, asked how Hobsbawm could excuse the deaths of so many at the hands of the Soviet Union: “Dead is dead,” Hobsbawm brusquely replied. Yet having to explain himself time and again could have been nothing short of enervating. Were I to have guessed who was chosen as Hobsbawm’s authorized biographer, Richard Evans’s name would not likely have tripped off the tongue. A prominent liberal historian of Nazi Germany, Evans’s talents are less in the practice of “immanent critique” or in the sweeping prose trademarked by his subject. Yet upon reflection, the choice reveals itself to be understandable. Both Evans and Hobsbawm are purveyors of a traditional historical method wherein facts count. Evans even penned a long historiographical essay—In Defense of History—that makes the claim explicitly. Although he would likely depart from some of the economic arguments Hobsbawm specifies and likely does not share his hardcore leftism, Hobsbawm’s approach to historical writing mirrors Evans’s own. Hobsbawm’s own late collection of essays succinctly titled “On History” begins with his contention that “I strongly defend the view that what historians investigate is real.” That “without the distention between what is and what is not so, there can be no history.” Amid the truth-skeptical nostrums of postmodernity, Evans and Hobsbawm are true modernists at heart. Hobsbawm would surely have been tickled by the unlikely reappearance of socialism as presented by Bernie Sanders, or the breakout popularity of the socialist journal Jacobin. Historical patience has its virtues, he might have counseled. In a period where truth is called into question as a matter of course, Hobsbawm’s stubborn appeal to evidence and the accumulation of knowledge could seem out of place. But the great 20th-century Marxist historian, who may have stayed too long at the party, left us with a corpus of scholarship that will undeniably stand the test of time. Leonard Benardo is vice president of Open Society Foundations.
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Money Against Democracy How neoliberals captured the machinery of the state to keep citizens from regulating markets. BY JORDAN ECKER B
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re democracy and capitalism compatible? For much of the postwar era, mainstream economists, foreign-policy decision-makers, and the political commentariat believed not only in the intrinsic compatibility of a market economy and a liberal democratic polity, but in the idea that each strengthened the other. But that faith has been shattered in the years since 2008, by the rise of farright political parties in many liberal democracies and the anti-democratic abuse of political power by elites in North America and Europe. Rather than capitalism and democracy being soulmates, political life seems a threeway battle among moneyed interests, nationalist populists, and pro-democracy progressives. For many progressives, writing in the tradition of Karl Polanyi or echoing concerns as old as JeanJacques Rousseau’s social-contract theory, the recent rise of the market to pre-eminence in political life has had familiar negative effects on democracy. The decline of union membership, the shareholder revolution, tax cuts for the wealthy, and wage stagnation for the working and middle classes are injustices not only because of the dramatic economic inequality they produce, but because of the unequal distribution of political power and the loss of democratic legitimacy that results. On this telling, the assault on unions has hollowed out working-class political power, while rising wealth inequality and the deregulation of campaign finance beneath the banner of “money is speech” has created a plutocracy where money, and not the people, speaks and rules. On the right, the inverse has long been the worry. There, the fear is that democracy may grow too strong and intrude on the market. This is the story line of theorists such as James Buchanan and Mancur Olson, and
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the rational choice revolution that resulted. Democracy, supposedly, is incapable of giving the people what is really in their interest (if that was knowable at all), and instead ineluctably degenerates into special-interest “rent-seeking.” In 2009, Peter Thiel said the quiet part out loud: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” One of the invaluable services provided by Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism is to trace this anti-democratic tendency’s theoretical origins, and demonstrate how for generations, ultra-market intellectuals have viewed democracy as a potential threat to the market. For some commentators—Jonathan Chait made the case two years ago in New York magazine—“neoliberalism” is an empty epithet, just a word angry leftists use to lump the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party in with conservative free-marketeers. Hopefully, Slobodian has forever put this line of thought to bed. Beginning in post–World War I Austria, Slobodian shows how an internally consistent body of thought reproduced itself through the 20th century, eventually providing the intellectual inspiration for institutions like the World Trade Organization. The protagonists of Slobodian’s story are the Austrians Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and German Wilhelm Röpke. Hayek and Mises are famous today in the U.S. as the intellectual forefathers of Milton Friedman, the Chicago school of economics, and the Goldwater presidential campaign, but Slobodian frames his story around the problem of international organization that Austrians faced after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Beginning with the meetings held in Mises’s office at the Chamber of Commerce in Vienna, these Austrians
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