CHAPTER

Neoliberalism and Its Others 

Reijer Hendrikse

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197639108.013.6
Published: 18 December 2023

Abstract
Where ongoing debates suggest that neoliberalism is
ill, dying, or indeed dead—once again—this chapter
sets out how the neoliberal order has increasingly
morphed into its “other.” I first unpack key epochs
of modern liberalism, having been built on top of each
other since the nineteenth century. Although the
divide between liberalism and illiberalism is anything
but clear in practice, incompatibility with core
liberal premises is understood as illiberal. Next, I
highlight where and how neoliberalism relates to
preceding liberal epochs; how neoliberalism harbors
illiberal tendencies within; why it is compatible with
politically illiberal regimes, and how it fuels
illiberalization domestically and globally. As
neoliberalism’s compatibility with its “other”
becomes increasingly legible, we not only ought to
revisit neoliberalism’s liberal credentials, but
understand that modern liberalism has principally
functioned as the core ideological ordering
rationality undergirding global capitalism, with most
liberal premises anything but sacrosanct across time
and space.

Keywords: capitalism, democracy, illiberalism, liberalism,

neoliberalism, world order
Subject: Comparative Politics, Political Theory, Political
Institutions, Politics
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
Introduction

[T]he liberal tradition is constituted by the sum of

the arguments that have been classified as liberal,
and recognized as such by other self-proclaimed
liberals, across time and space .

(Bell 2014, 689–690)

Although my background is different, like the Albanian

scholar Lea Ypi (2021) I also came of age at the end of
history, a time when the Western established order was
being jubilantly projected upon the post-Cold War world
(Fukuyama 1992). As a privileged “native” to that order,
it could only feel natural—like the water that fish swim
in. My idea of liberalism equated with democracy—an
understanding reconfirmed when I studied international
relations in the late 2000s. Although “there is no
canonical description” of liberalism, I learned that it is
geared toward the “essential principle” of individual
freedom (Doyle 1997, 206–207). To this end, “four
essential institutions” guide liberalism: (1)
institutional commitments to juridical equality and civic
rights, (2) representative democracy based on popular
sovereignty, (3) private property, and (4) market rule
(207). Although I understood that different liberalisms
give varying weights to these political and economic
premises, I simply assumed the package to be sacrosanct.
Where the new millennium ignited a curtailment of civic
rights as part of the “war on terror,” the 2008 financial
crisis blew the assumption that markets generate the best
outcomes to pieces. Although this was a watershed moment,
neoliberalism quickly resumed business as usual (Hendrikse
and Sidaway 2010). Against market orthodoxy, governments
jumped in to save banks from bankruptcy, with taxpayers
left to pay the bill. While I knew that Friedrich von
Hayek’s neoliberalism constituted a more conservative
variant within the liberal family, having superseded John
Maynard Keynes’s new liberalism during the 1970s, it
became increasingly obvious that relentless
neoliberalization had corroded institutional commitments I
had long considered untouchable. As the millennium
unfolded, I recognized that the water I was swimming in was
profoundly ideological, exhibiting shape-shifting qualities
(Bell 2014). Although I knew that liberalism had often
looked profoundly illiberal in practice (Losurdo 2011),
especially outside the metropole, the principles enumerated
above had long led me to assume that progress would anchor
liberal democracy worldwide. Yet the more neoliberalism
escaped core liberal premises during the 2010s, the more I
realized how mistaken I was.
This chapter reflects my own reckoning with
(neo)liberalism. I first unpack competing currents of
modern liberalism, having been built on top of each other
since the nineteenth century, all (mis)informing
contemporary ideas of liberalism. Although the divide
between liberalism and its illiberal “others” is anything
but clear in practice, for the purpose of chapter the
opposite of the liberal sum of arguments is understood as
illiberal. Subsequently, I highlight where and how
neoliberalism as an ideology and political practice rhymes
with and differs from preceding liberal epochs; how
neoliberalism harbors illiberal tendencies within; why it
is compatible with politically illiberal regimes, and how
it fuels illiberalization domestically and globally. I
argue that neoliberalism has been constituted in an
ideological and political gray zone where liberal and
illiberal(izing) institutions, ideas and practices coexist.
As neoliberalism’s compatibility with “its other”
becomes increasingly legible, we not only ought to
reconsider neoliberalism’s liberal credentials, but
understand that modern liberalism has principally
functioned as the core ideological ordering rationality of
global capitalism, with most liberal premises anything but
sacrosanct across time and space.

Modern Liberalism

The real world of liberalism is shot through with

tensions…. [T]he tensions between two types of
liberalism—between that of social reformers, who
 defended an ideal of the common good, and that of
supporters of individual liberty as an absolute end—
never ceased.

(Dardot and Laval 2014, 21)

Although big concepts are inherently contested, few things
seem certain with regard to liberalism—a shape-shifting
(meta-)ideology aiming to unite socialists and
conservatives within an overarching architecture, which
through various transformations has come to shape the
modern world. It is impossible to do justice to all the
currents shaping liberalism’s development. Some scholars
trace (or project) the origins of liberalism back to the
ideas of John Locke in the seventeenth century, or Adam
Smith in the eighteenth century; others go back to the
sixteenth-century Reformation, if not the fourteenth-
century Renaissance, giving way to reason, the rise of
science, and—allegedly—liberalism (Dunt 2020). That said,
although liberalism unquestionably builds on Enlightenment
foundations, below I discuss liberalism as a political
ideology shaping capitalist modernity and world order,
having been formulated in the wake of the Atlantic
Revolutions, making modern political liberalism a product
of the nineteenth century (e.g., De Dijn 2020; Fawcett
2014; Hobsbawm 1962; 1975; Polanyi [1944] 2001; Zevin
2019).
The liberal quest to limit government power, although
associated with revolutionary struggle against absolute
rule, was hardly a democratic project. On the contrary,
self-proclaimed liberals dreaded democracy’s “illiberal”
if not “totalitarian” tendencies—foremost the call for
redistribution—and countered calls for popular self-
government (De Dijn 2020, 342). The nineteenth century gave
rise to classical liberalism, guided by the doctrine of
laissez-faire, preaching the virtues of uninhibited capital
accumulation under limited government. A planned rather
than spontaneous development (Polanyi [1944] 2001),
laissez-faire became the core ideological ordering
principle of Pax Britannica by the mid-nineteenth century.
1
As industrial(izing) capitalism steamrolled across the
globe, undoing feudal relations undergirding the social
order, emergent nation-states adopted diverse liberal
institutions—constitutions, parliaments, Rechtsstaat,
rights, and so on—forming the modern state template in a
crystallizing interstate system anchored in public
international law. The modern capitalist state and private
corporation emerged during the second half of the
nineteenth century (Hobsbawm 1975), alongside other legal
myths and innovations, including an embryonic offshore
system catering for multi-national capital (Fernandez and
Hendrikse 2020), which remain key building blocks of world
order today.
Classical liberalism’s failure to better people’s lives
gave rise to revolutionary fever and socialism—
liberalism’s emancipatory cousin (Hobsbawm 1962)—while
left-leaning liberals like John Stuart Mill and Harriet
Taylor sought to broaden liberalism’s emancipatory
promises, going as far as to discuss the abrogation of
property rights for the common good (Mill [1879] 1987). At
the right pole of the liberal church, paralleling the birth
of nationalism, Herbert Spencer moved the liberal emphasis
on the division of labor and general progress toward
competition and selective elimination, foreshadowing
twentieth-century neoliberalism and fascism (Dardot and
Laval 2014, 34–35). As neoclassical economics made its
debut, coming with a scientific blush based on self-serving
assumptions (something conservatives could and neoliberals
would buy into), the lure of classical liberalism eclipsed
with the hegemony of Pax Britannica, giving way to decades
of inter-imperial rivalry, wars, and power shifts—left
(Soviet Union), right (Nazi Germany), and center (United
States).

From the 1880s onward, … radicals, socialists,

populists, and progressives set out to revitalize the
legacy of the Atlantic revolutionaries by arguing for
a broader conception of freedom—a view that ended up
persuading even many self-described liberals.

(De Dijn 2020, 342–343)

Where classical liberalism sought to resuscitate itself
after World War I, the Great Depression of 1929 proved to
be the nail in laissez-faire’s coffin. In its place, a new
liberalism based on the economics of John Maynard Keynes
found its home in the United States of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, whose New Deal sought a class compromise between
capital and labor, remaking a troubled liberal order at
home while vying for hegemony abroad. As a consequence, a
more progressive liberalism emerged: where limited liberal
government defined the night-watchman state of the
nineteenth century, a more interventionist liberal
government—recalibrating liberalism’s core commitments to
realize a broader conception of freedom—came to define the
metropolitan welfare state of the mid-twentieth century.
Where socialists fought hard for material progress, and the
rise of revolutionary communism informed liberalism’s
evolution (Gerstle 2022), these gains would henceforth
become associated with liberal democracy under the aegis of
a new capitalist hegemon.

Classical liberalism had long made the full flowering

of each person’s individuality a centerpiece of its
agenda. New Dealers did not abandon this age-old
liberal goal; they simply argued that government
intervention in markets and, to a certain extent, in
private life had become necessary to position people
to enjoy the full ambit of their freedom.

(Gerstle 2022, 26)

Among other goals, “a commitment to the public good over

private right” defined the New Deal (Gerstle 2022, 27). In
parallel, the postwar international order was devised under
US leadership—giving birth to the United Nations (UN), the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank (WB),
along with a set of rights, including the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), symbolizing a liberal
bedrock to prevent the illiberal horrors of the twentieth
century. The international architecture, which would become
known as “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1983), allowed
states relative autonomy to pursue Keynesian policies. As
decolonization gave way to national self-determination,
many (emergent) states nominally acquired sovereignty from
their colonial masters. Under Pax Americana, resuscitating
the liberal world order while vying for hegemony with the
Soviet Union, national self-determination was to be
realized via liberal democracy—that is, representative
democracy bound by checks, balances, law, and rights—
becoming the governing template for members of the “free
world.” That said, the promise of democracy often proved
minimal in its consequences.

Democratic capitalism was fully established after the

Second World War and then only in the ‘Western’
parts of the world…. [T]his period of uninterrupted
economic growth still dominates our ideas and
expectations of what modern capitalism is…. This is
in spite of the fact that, in light of the turbulence
that followed, the quarter century immediately after
the war should be recognizable as truly exceptional.

(Streeck 2016, 73)

As postwar Keynesianism kicked into gear, moreover, “the

counterrevolutionary conception of liberty got a new lease
on life” (De Dijn 2020, 343). For starters, the quest for
democracy was now firmly re-embedded in a liberal
framework. Put differently, “liberalism’s great
achievement … was to force democracy to accept
capitalism” (Zevin 2019, 386; see also Fawcett 2014). As
before, however, not all were happy with the marriage
between democracy and capitalism, and soon enough another
chapter in the history of modern liberalism would see the
undoing of democratic capitalism. Yet before delving into
the mechanics of neoliberalism, I will summarize the
liberal “sum of arguments” (Bell 2014). Besides Doyle’s
(1997) institutional commitments detailed in the
introduction, Edmund Fawcett (2014) provides a fair idea of
what modern political liberalism ought to entail (all set
in a capitalist context of free markets and private
property, of course):
 Amid the ceaseless change of capitalist modernity, the
first liberals sought durable new ways to secure
ethical and political stability. That liberal search,
then as now, was guided by four broad ideas:
acceptance that moral and material conflict in society
cannot be expunged, only contained and perhaps in
fruitful ways tamed; hostility to unchecked power, be
it political, economic or social; faith that social
ills can be cured and that human life can be made
better; and law-backed respect by state and society
for people’s lives and projects, whatever they
believe and whoever they are. (xix)

The Opposites

The history of liberalism … is a history of constant

reinvention. The most sweeping of these occurred in
the middle of the twentieth century, when liberalism
was increasingly figured as the dominant ideology of
the West—its origins retrojected back into the early
modern era, it came to denote virtually all non-
totalitarian forms of politics.

(Bell 2014, 705)

Today’s dominant idea of liberalism occupies the broad

space in between two “totalitarian” and hence illiberal
opposites, one left (Stalinism) and one right (Nazism),
with Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism
([1951] 2017) featuring as a defining study. Members of the
embryonic “neoliberal thought collective” (Mirowski 2009)
also contributed to this idea. For example, Karl Popper
regarded The Open Society and Its Enemies ([1945] 2011) as
his “war effort” and “a contribution to the fight
against totalitarianism” (Bell 2014, 706). Meanwhile,
Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom ([1944] 2001)
does something similar, but crucially includes Keynes’s
new liberalism as another threat to liberty, featuring
alongside liberalism’s usual others. It is these “war
efforts” that remain baked into today’s narratives
dominating mass-mediated culture and politics, typically
drawing clear lines between what is liberal and what is
not. That said, critical evaluations reveal shades of gray,
with liberal and illiberal practices coexisting.

[H]ow far should the liberal order extend, not just to

the lower classes within the constitutional state, but
to territories beyond it? By the mid-nineteenth
century, the modal type of liberal state was national.
Could it also be imperial, with overseas possessions?
If so, did liberal principles apply to them?

(Zevin 2019, 14)

As the quest for individual freedom arose alongside

illiberal practices of slavery, the answer to Zevin’s
question is no. Losurdo (2011) shows how liberal demands
for inclusion typically served well-off minorities,
paralleling illiberal policies of mass exclusion. While
Mill and Taylor advanced the quest for universal suffrage
by stressing women’s rights, for example, the plight of
the Irish, Chinese, and nonwhites was not addressed. As the
“freely competing liberal world” of the mid-nineteenth
century gave way to monopoly, most observers “saw the
creation of colonial empires merely as one of its aspects”
2
without giving it much thought (Hobsbawm 1987, 59). The
nineteenth-century abolition of slavery was followed by
colonial conquest, with nationalism and racism rising as
conservative defenses against class politics (Arendt [1951]
2017), seeing a racialized “social imperialism” (Eley
1976) tame metropolitan populations by exploiting the
periphery. Although the metropole illiberalized
politically, giving way to “the concentration of executive
power in an autocracy” (Hobson [1902] 2018, 94), it did
not compare to the periphery. In the words of George
Padmore ([1936] 1969), writing in the 1930s, settler
colonies were “the breeding ground for the type of fascist
mentality which is being let loose in Europe today” (3–
4). By that time, however, even the allegedly progressive
New Dealers in the United States “tolerated the system of
white supremacy in the South” (Gerstle 2022, 27).
That (core) liberal regimes practice (peripheral)
illiberalism is a feature, not a bug (Wallerstein 1979). In
the United States, illiberal foreign policies are typically
sold to protect liberal values (Desch 2008). And where
liberal regimes have historically practiced political
illiberalism, moreover, one archetypal illiberal regime—
fascism—reveals a remarkable adherence to economic
liberalism. Where the nineteenth century already made clear
that the supposedly liberal bourgeoisie “preferred order”
and sided with conservatives “when faced with the threat
to property” (Hobsbawm 1975, 33), twentieth-century
“fascism was not an outsider to the liberal, ‘open
society,’ but in fact an intimate insider to that
society,” staunchly defending economic liberalism as both
conservatives and liberals reconfirmed their willingness to
“toss out the bathwater of political liberalism to save
the baby of capitalism” (Landa 2010, 9, 68, 92).
Notwithstanding these paradoxes, for the purpose of this
chapter I understand incompatibility with liberal premises
as illiberal, that is, liberalism’s opposite, defined as
“the global undermining challenge to the core concepts of
liberalism on the theoretical, political, and economic
levels” (Demias-Morisset 2022, 84). With contemporary
neoliberalism in trouble, the notion of illiberalism has
gained currency (see Hendrikse 2018; Sajó et al. 2022;
Luger 2022). Though there are other terms to describe
3
neoliberalism’s mutation, the higher-order notion
illiberalism generates parsimony as it “most fully
captures the nature of the movements that are challenging
liberal-democratic systems around the globe” (Laruelle
2022, 115).

These movements explicitly identify liberalism as

their enemy. They denounce, in varying proportions,
the political, economic, and cultural liberalism
embodied in supranational institutions, globalization,
multiculturalism, and minority-rights protections.
They do not necessarily make up a coherent ideology;
rather, they represent an interconnected set of values
that come together in country-specific patterns.
4
(115)
Neoliberalism

All but ignored by existing histories, the questions

of empire, decolonization, and the world economy were
at the heart of the neoliberal project from its
inception.

(Slobodian 2018, 25)

This section dissects neoliberalism and discusses how it is

escaping liberal premises. Again, I cannot do justice to
all schools constituting neoliberalism (Peck 2010), nor all
currents criticizing it (see Springer et al. 2016; Cahill
et al. 2018). Notwithstanding how neoliberalism operates in
various hybrid ensembles across state space (Brenner et al.
2010), below I focus on the global encasement of capital
and its consequences for liberal democracies.
Without doubt, neoliberalism can be plotted on the right
end of the liberal spectrum, with leading neoliberals
having to convince others “why I am not a conservative”
(Hayek 1960). Although some European countries exhibited
neoliberal tendencies during the postwar era (e.g., Mellink
and Oudenamspen 2022), its global ascendance paralleled the
1970s collapse of Keynes’s new liberalism. With the
collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving—in Milanovic’s
title—Capitalism, Alone (2019), the center left embraced
neoliberalism in the mid-1990s, forming neoliberalism’s
“extreme center” (Ali 2015) with the center right.
Today’s neoliberal family houses progressive (Fraser 2017)
and authoritarian (Bruff 2013) strands, respectively
informed by extensive and restrictive ideas of liberalism.
That said, all neoliberal strands, implanting themselves
within preexisting (liberal-democratic) institutional
frameworks, have incessantly transferred the levers of
economic policymaking to nonelected technocrats—out of
reach of public lawmakers and the popular will, with
centrist parties left “ruling the void,” in Mair’s
memorable phrase (2013).
 [W]hat is crucial is that the liberalism in what has
come to be called neoliberalism refers to
liberalism’s economic variant … rather than to
liberalism as a political doctrine, as a set of
political institutions, or as political practices.

(Brown 2003, 39)

Neoliberalism is based on a variety of schools—Austrian,
Chicago, Freiburg, and Virginia, among others. Below I
focus on the Geneva School (Slobodian 2018), tied to
Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, having spread
into other branches of neoliberalism, such as
ordoliberalism. That said, neoliberal history begins in
Vienna, in the ruins of the Habsburg Empire, where Mises
and Hayek anticipated the rise of national self-
determination and sought to protect global capitalism from
popular sovereignty. First formulated in the 1930s and
meticulously refined since, neoliberalism defined itself
against totalitarian “others” left and right, and warned
of “the road to serfdom” (Hayek [1944] 2001) under
Keynesianism. Following Slobodian (2018), “we can
understand … the Geneva School as a rethinking of
ordoliberalism at the scale of the world” (11–12). It is
here where the encasement of global capital commences, and
from which the breakdown of Keynesianism, democracy, and
other liberal premises follow.

Geneva School neoliberals reconciled the tension

between the world economy and the world of nations
through their own distinct geography. Their global
imaginary was sketched by erstwhile Nazi jurist Carl
Schmitt in 1950. Schmitt proposed that there was not
one world but two. One was the world partitioned into
bounded, territorial states where governments ruled
over human beings. This he called the world of
imperium, using the Roman legal term. The other was
the world of property, where people owned things,
money, and land scattered across the earth. This was
the world of dominium. The doubled world of modern
capitalism coalesced in the nineteenth century….
Schmitt meant the doubled world as something negative,
 an infringement on the full exercise of national
sovereignty. But neoliberals felt he had offered the
best description of the world they wanted to conserve.

(Slobodian 2018, 10)

To Hayek, capital mobility is the iron right of capital,
which “inheres to a unitary economic space of dominium
rather than the fragmented space of imperium—yet it
requires the political institutions of imperium to ensure
it” (Slobodian 2018, 123; emphasis added). As the
neoliberal encasement of capital assumed supreme rule,
“the principles of the separation of powers, human rights
and popular sovereignty [came to] possess a merely relative
value” (Dardot and Laval 2019, xxii). Where some see a
return to classic liberalism (e.g., Gerstle 2022), critical
studies agree that there is a vital difference between
limited liberal government and its unlimited neoliberal
reincarnation: “Dominium is not a space for laissez-faire
or noninterventionism but is instead an object of constant
maintenance, litigation, design, and care” (Slobodian
2018, 12).
Encasing dominium via imperium has led to the rollout (Peck
and Tickell 2002) of novel economic institutions,
collectively rolling back preexisting political
institutions. In this regard, I mention three developments.
First, the global institutionalization of central bank
independence (Polillo and Guillén 2005) assured that
financializing capitalism not only attained “independence
from executive power”; it also entailed “independence
from … the popular will” (Dardot and Laval 2019, 42),
seeing central banks effectively become the “fourth
power” of government (Vogl 2017). Second, ongoing
neoliberalization gave way to the constitutionalization of
private law, overriding constitutional law and public
lawmaking. Again, dominium trumped imperium, via imperium,
for “it is the liberal principle of the ‘balance’ of
powers that is sacrificed” (Dardot and Laval 2019, 37).
Third, besides the rule of private law, neoliberalism gave
way to private regulation, oversight, and courts—
transforming territorial states from rule makers into rule
takers. Next to the establishment of international
organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) as
familiar faces of neoliberalism, an alphabet soup of
private organizations came into being—the IASB, IOSCO,
5
ISDA , and so on (Büthe and Mattli 2011)—setting the rules
governing global capitalism without public oversight, as
established legislative power sidelined itself. The same
can be said about the establishment of private arbitration
courts, where international investors can sue sovereign
governments (tellingly, not the other way around),
bypassing established judiciaries (Van Os 2018).
The wider encasement of capital, anchored in dynamic blends
of uni-, bi-, and multilateral state action (Fernandez and
Hendrikse 2020), with free ports and special economic zones
following the same territorial-state-escaping logics as tax
havens (Slobodian 2023), occurred alongside the neoliberal
rollback of the metropolitan welfare state. Governments and
public institutions came to mimic indebted for-profit
corporations under logics of audit, austerity, competition,
and valorization (e.g., Engelen et al. 2014), seeing
citizens turning into customers while being nudged to think
like entrepreneurs. Accordingly, what remains is a
restrictive idea of liberalism: with competitive markets
progressively cornered by a few corporate giants across
sectors (Philippon 2019), if not wholly dissolving into
centrally planned Big Tech monopolies under platform
capitalism (Birch 2023), what remains is the global
encasement of rent-seeking capital, and hence a staunch
defense of private property.
Added up, neoliberalism has progressively corroded liberal
democracy in the metropole, alongside the international
architecture within which it was embedded. In parallel,
although the non-West was anticipated to embrace liberal
democracy, neoliberal reforms across “the Global South”
often consolidated illiberal regimes (e.g., Hadiz and
Robison 2005), plugging their domestic economies into
globalizing neoliberal capitalism without democratic
reforms—foreshadowing the breakdown of democratic
capitalism worldwide. As the new millennium advanced, it
became increasingly obvious that politically illiberal
regimes were perfectly compatible with the economic diktats
of neoliberalism, while across the West the realization
mounted that the end of history had not quite turned out as
imagined.

Neo-illiberalism?

Vestiges of the neoliberal order will be with us for

years and perhaps decades to come. But the neoliberal
order itself is broken.

(Gerstle 2022, 293)

If the good news is that neoliberalism has had its day, the
bad news is that a vastly neoliberalized world remains. As
described elsewhere (Hendrikse and Fernandez 2019),
6
contemporary capital resides offshore, the world of
dominium proper—private, tax-free, invisible, untouchable
—impenetrable to non-multinational businesses and your
average millionaire. It’s the exclusive, extraterritorial
domicile of billion-dollar corporations and their owners—
an imperial citadel built out of the sovereign tissue of
capitalist states, exactly as Schmitt imagined.
Resultantly, economically decapitated states, shackled in
their own sovereignty with their territorial integrity
progressively decomposed (Slobodian 2023), increasingly
resemble neo-colonial dominions. Across these
neoliberalized landscapes—or “in the ruins of
neoliberalism,” to use Brown’s memorable title (2019) —
liberal democracies increasingly are nonexistent, emptied,
or in trouble.

[T]he lure of autocratic governance is not the

precinct of the nativist right. It has been pioneered
and perfected by the very architects of
neoliberalization.

(Swyngedouw 2022, 65)

As neoliberal technocracy increasingly gives way to

illiberal autocracy and oligarchy, both in the metropole
and beyond, the liberal commentariat is finally awakening
to the fact that the marriage between democracy and
capitalism is over and the liberal order is seriously ill
(e.g., Dunt 2020; Wolf 2023). Where these accounts have
blossomed since the votes for Brexit and Trump, habitually
pointing to illiberal “others,” they neglect how
neoliberalism systematically un-democratized and
illiberalized their cherished order. This penultimate
section sets out how neoliberalism has on its own terms—
from within—made way for political illiberalization, and
questions whether neoliberalism was not inherently
illiberal to begin with.
The votes for Brexit and Trump fueled the idea that
conservatism had assumed a “Leninist” drive to undo the
established order (Hendrikse 2021). Beyond the rhetoric of
rupture, however, in power those forces typically doubled
down on neoliberal economic policies, while taking aim at
the political institutions of liberal democracy housing
“enemies” and “traitors” inhibiting “the will of the
people”—not undoing but accelerating neoliberalism’s
illiberalizing tendencies (Hendrikse 2018). Where liberal
democracies come in variegated setups, the 2010s made clear
that those frameworks are not necessarily anchored in law,
but are often tied together by conventions, norms, and
procedures which can be ignored. Likewise, the ways in
which political illiberalization unfolds vary: where the
likes of Orbán and Modi decapitate liberal democracy in the
name of democracy, US Republicans do it in the name of
liberty (Cooper 2021). These projects have been typically
carried out by radicalizing center-right parties,
discarding their centrism (Ali 2015) for more extremist
friends, like the US paleoconservatives (Cooper 2017) and
paleo-libertarians (Slobodian 2023). With the right blowing
up the center (Graeber 2020), a mainstreaming far right
assumed the role of “challenger,” targeting a supposedly
progressive neoliberal status quo by nonstop culture wars
and moral panic.
Accordingly, the world has entered a twilight zone. Where
some argue that neoliberalism “has grown increasingly
illiberal” (Davies 2020, 240), others warn that its
successor “might be deeply illiberal” (Gerstle 2022,
289). Where some see “the post-neoliberal horizon” give
way to “neo-statism” (Gerbaudo 2021, 2–3), others argue
that neoliberal accumulation regimes have been ditched for
libertarian-authoritarian variants (Benquet and Bourgeron
2022). Yet others proclaim neoliberalism alive and kicking,
at most agreeing to a Bonapartist “ill neoliberalism”
(Huijzer 2021) rather than a “neo-illiberalism”
(Hendrikse 2021). Even if liberal constitutionalism
dissolves (Halmai 2021), to point toward illiberalism risks
giving Janus-faced (neo)liberalism a free pass, as
“policies that curtail liberal rights and liberties may be
instrumental in sustaining the liberal form of the state.”
That said, even Marxist accounts cannot escape pointing
toward illiberalization, as capital progressively relies on
“illiberal states” in “a world increasingly ungovernable
by liberal means” (Alami et al. 2023, 4, 10, 7),
confirming that liberalism’s “political institutions”
are “always potentially—and are now actually—
liberticidal” (Lordon 2023).
Whatever neoliberalism’s status, its devastating effects
can be viewed as a managed autogolpe, a self-coup of sorts,
now hiding behind the attempted coups of its “others.”
Trump’s attempted coup in the heart of empire was followed
by a rehearsal in Brazil, underscoring close linkages
between far-right actors (see Laruelle 2020 on Russia and
far-right connections across the West). There is no
shortage of variegated illiberal(izing) regimes trapped in
a world order trying to escape another interregnum (Babic
2020). And still, all these regimes have their place in a
neoliberalized world order encasing and deploying global
capital. Where “populists” take aim at the multilateral
edifice of neoliberalism—seeing the EU break up, the WTO
stalled, or NATO “brain-dead”, in the words of Emmanuel
Macron—a right-wing challenge taking aim at
neoliberalism’s aforementioned private institutions
governing financialized capitalism has yet to be
discovered.
Where classical liberalism was nominally geared toward
general progress, and Keynes’s new liberalism advanced
public good over private right, neoliberalism commits to
the common good via the supreme rule of economics. This
brings us to another vital difference between classical
liberalism and neoliberalism. Where classical liberalism
separated the political and economic domains, leading to
limited government and unlimited accumulation,
neoliberalism—although having split the world in two along
Schmittian lines—considers all domains shaping social life
in economic terms: “We are everywhere homo oeconomicus and
only homo oeconomicus” (Brown 2015, 33). Defined as “the
pursuit of the disenchantment of politics by economics”
(Davies 2014, 6), neoliberalism “tends to totalize” and
“integrate all dimensions of human existence” (Dardot and
Laval 2014, 3).

Ultimately, everything can be treated in economic

terms, including state, law, democracy, leadership,
and civil society.

(Davies 2017, 18)

Crucially, if we understand liberalism “to denote

virtually all non-totalitarian forms of politics” (Bell
2014, 705), then neoliberalism reveals some illiberal
tendencies, leading some to speak of “neoliberal
totalitarianism” (Chauí 2022). To paraphrase Margaret
Thatcher, where economics is the method, the aim is to
change the soul (Hendrikse 2015). This has led Demias-
Morisset (2022) to challenge the idea that neoliberalism
constitutes a liberal model, for it “appears to be a model
of a shift away from liberal democracy and a simultaneous
advance of neoliberalism and illiberalism” (93). Indeed,
if neoliberalism’s core logic is hostility to liberal
democracy, and its intended effect is political
illiberalization, then neoliberalism’s “liberal” nature
is derived from its name and its (initial) association with
liberal democracy—not because it is liberal as
conventionally understood.
In any case, the logical endpoint of an inherent illiberal
neoliberalism is a complete escape from political
liberalism. Here we enter the domain of libertarianism,
occupying the far-right corner of the neoliberal family.
Although it can be debated whether an embrace of
libertarian-authoritarianism constitutes a break with
neoliberalism, given that libertarians like Ludwig von
Mises informed neoliberal reason from the start, “the
singular feature of libertarianism is that it defends an
ethical approach to liberty without any regard for its
effects on the common good” (Benquet and Bourgeron 2022,
107).

[L]ibertarianism resembles a view that liberalism

historically defined itself against, the doctrine of
private political power that underlies feudalism. Like
feudalism, libertarianism conceives of justified
political power as based in a network of private
contracts. It rejects the idea, essential to
liberalism, that political power is a public power, to
be impartially exercised for the common good.

(Freeman 2005, 107)

Added up, notwithstanding the question of whether a

mutating neoliberalism is threatening to turn illiberal,
has turned illiberal, or was inherently illiberal to begin
with, I argue that neoliberalism has been constituted in an
ideological and political gray zone where liberal and
illiberal(izing) institutions, logics, ideas, and practices
coexist. After decades of relentless neoliberalization,
neoliberalism’s compatibility with its “other” has
become increasingly legible. It is therefore worthwhile to
reconsider neoliberalism’s liberal credentials by
revisiting the premises and achievements of modern
liberalism. In this regard, history shows that modern
liberalism has foremost functioned as the core ideological
ordering rationality of globalizing capitalism, with most
liberal premises anything but sacrosanct across time and
space, but merely functioning as capitalism’s ideological
veil. Ideologically defining itself against Keynes’s
allegedly illiberal new liberalism, neoliberalism has come
to recycle and enhance the conservative-cum-reactionary—
and hence illiberal—pull within modern liberalism,
dressing up in its name and implanting itself within
liberal-democratic frameworks, cynically celebrating “the
end of history” while systematically undoing most of the
institutional penchants and ideological premises
conventionally associated with liberalism.

Conclusions

Post-fascism finds its niche easily in the new world

of global capitalism without upsetting the dominant
political forms of electoral democracy and
representative government…. Sans Führer, sans one-
party rule, sans SA or SS, post-fascism reverses the
Enlightenment tendency to assimilate citizenship to
the human condition.

(Tamás 2000)

In the year 2000, a time when Hungarian prime minister

Viktor Orbán was still considered a liberal and Bill
Clinton was still in office, the Romanian-born Hungarian
philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás published an arresting
diagnosis without speaking of neoliberalism, identifying
“a cluster of policies, practices, routines, and
ideologies that can be observed everywhere in the
contemporary world” (Tamás 2000). By the year 2018, in
contrast, by which time Orbán had long since proclaimed
himself illiberal and Trump had put “America first,” the
Irish commentator and writer Fintan O’Toole argued that
Tamás’s “post-fascism” was over:

To grasp what is going on in the right now, we need to

reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase
of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialed
is fascism…. Forget “post-fascist”—what we are
living with is pre-fascism (2018).

Whether speaking of neoliberalism or its neo-illiberal

“other,” it is somewhere along this shift that
neoliberalism’s illiberal tendencies turned more explicit
and brazen. Of course, although echoing tenets of
twentieth-century fascism, this does not imply a wholesale
rerun. For one, as Moira Weigel (2023) argues, contemporary
(pre-)fascism works through digitally networked rather than
mass movements. Traveling via clouds and smartphones, the
2010s have been shaped by digital logics of “hyper
politics” (Jäger 2022), whereby the core logic of
contemporary capitalism—mass surveillance (Zuboff 2019)—
squarely contradicts the protection of individual freedom
i.e. the core premise of modern liberalism. As democracy
has been “stripped of protections against its worst
tendencies” (Brown 2019, 86), today “the alliance between
capital and the mob” (Arendt [1951] 2017) is synthetically
fabricated on digital platforms enclosed by radicalizing
billionaire-class factions who enjoy and exert absolute
rule (Hendrikse 2021). Tellingly, Western far-right
narratives are imported into Chinese social media “to
paradoxically criticize Western hegemony” (Zhang 2020, 89)
and justify the superiority of China’s illiberal model
(Vukovich 2019), confirming a global illiberal challenge to
a troubled liberal world order. As this chapter has sought
to illuminate, we have been here before.
Following geographers Colin Flint and Peter Taylor (2011),
imperialism is a continuous process shaping modern
capitalism, conditioned by (ideal-type) epochs of hegemony,
“implying an open world-economy,” and empire, which
“involves the closing off of part of the world-economy
from rivals” (95). From this perspective, the present
moment mirrors the hegemonic demise of classical liberalism
and Pax Britannica, giving way to interstate rivalry,
illiberal alternatives, and liberalism’s decline and
renewal. Where British hegemony gave way to competing
formal imperialisms, and hence empire, the new-cum-
neoliberalism under US hegemony is today fracturing, with
the consensual multilateralism that undergirded centrist
neoliberalism giving way to more coercive unilateralisms,
seeing the open world economy partially closing, with
mounting US-led Western sanctions aiming to contain Russian
aggression and China’s technological acumen. In
particular, Silicon Valley’s Big Tech platforms—having
been born as a commons out of massive New Deal public
investments, with the Internet privatized and enclosed
under neoliberalism (Tarnoff 2022; Varoufakis 2023) —have
become central to contemporary geopolitics (Hendrikse et
al. 2022), seeing the United States reassume more political
control over their development, with the ultimate aim to
secure another “American century.”
As a consequence, the prospect of escalating wars between
“competing imperialist states” looms increasingly large
in this late-capitalist interregnum, with its outcome, as
before, likely to determine “the particular pattern of the
world accumulation of capital for a whole period” (Mandel
1986, 17). That said, it remains to be seen if liberalism
will live on. For one, the key contenders shaping the
twenty-first century are state capitalism (Alami and Dixon,
2020; Fernandez et al. 2023)—led by China—and an
increasingly libertarian-authoritarian capitalism brewing
across the US-led West. There is common illiberal ground
between these apparent (ideal-type) opposites. For whether
public government erodes under libertarian private power,
or private corporations dissolve under statist public
power, the outcome is a liberal eclipse of hitherto
separate public and private domains. Again, neoliberalism
has not been an innocent bystander along the illiberal road
to serfdom:

The politically fatal dimension of neoliberalism …

has been its refusal to distinguish between a
‘political’ and an ‘economic’ realm … But as
liberal institutions decay, this eventually results in
a situation of rampant clientelism, in which cent[er]s
of power and of money collapse into a single
undifferentiated elite.

(Davies 2020, 240)

Although many far-right nationalists initially pretended to

escape neoliberal dogmas during the 2010s—offering a
change in style rather than content—growing protectionism,
a raging pandemic, and the return of war on the European
continent have accelerated economic change in the 2020s,
giving way to illiberal consolidations (Hendrikse 2023).
Where the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine gave way to
“Westen unity” to allegedly uphold liberal values, the
West’s 2023 carte blanche for Israel to “defend itself”
against Hamas revealed a liberal void, seeing supposed
“centrists” cement reactionary reflexes across a West
stripped from its liberal pretensions. Geopolitics aside,
and besides political libertarianism threatening to give
way to a return of feudalism, ongoing economic debates
equally question whether the spectacular ascent of digital
platforms points to a “techno-feudal” future (Durand
2020; Morozov 2022). These discussions point to an eclipse
not of (neo)liberalism but of capitalism itself. But if
modern capitalism is dying (Wark 2019), then it makes sense
that modern liberalism—born alongside it—will die with
it.
Where the rise of modern liberalism hardly constituted a
progressive project, today’s prospect of a liberal eclipse
is not necessarily a bad thing. Given that the Western-
dominated world order has been inherently associated with
colonialism and imperialism, particularly outside the
metropole, a less liberal and Western future could be a
welcome development, although contemporary non-Western
anti-imperialism equally cloaks “reactionary and
ultranationalist projects” (Zhang 2023), consolidating
rather than upending neo-illiberalism. Put differently, if
liberalism cannot be anything more than a spineless
ideological cover for a capitalism that has long past its
ecological due date, then more redistributive and/or
sustainable illiberal alternatives should be taken
seriously (it remains to be seen if a future Pax Sinica can
actually move beyond capitalism).
That said, we should not forget the “extraordinary
flexibility” of modern liberalism, with its remarkable
capacity to keep “learning from its antagonist” (Losurdo
2011, 343), much as neoliberalism has been able “to
exploit threats to its survival as opportunities for
expansion” (Jessop 2016, 417). Indeed, the present
illiberal challenge presents itself as being opposed to the
status quo, rather than being neoliberalism’s illiberal
fortification. This is another scenario to consider: not
demolishing the neoliberal citadel encasing global capital,
a consolidating neo-illiberalism could instead finalize the
breakdown of modern liberalism within which neoliberalism
has been born. Apart from burying liberal democracy for
good, this might include the further demolition of the
territorial integrity of modern states, giving way to a
premodern world of “graduated sovereignties” (Ong 2006)
in a postmodern jacket (Slobodian 2023), arguably leaving
little space for liberal renewal. That said, as “the
incompetence of the bourgeoisie has itself become a
historical force” (Lordon 2023), perhaps future liberal
renewal can only be realized through present
illiberal(izing) means, reconfirming the extent to which
liberalism relies on its “other” to sustain itself.
In closing, let us recall that the liberal quest for
individual freedom emerged out of the struggle for
universal citizenship (Tamás 2000), with liberalism and
socialism historically wedded (Hobsbawm 1962) in a shared
belief in reason and science, as well as a common belief in
a more equitable society currently on offer. For to encase
is to preserve, making contemporary neo(-il)liberalism a
staunchly conservative project, suggesting that not
everything classified and recognized as liberal (Bell 2014)
is necessarily liberal. The problem is that capitalism
itself is anything but conservative, periodically upsetting
social relations while demolishing the very institutions
once created to support it. Just as “liberal democracy
cannot be submitted to neoliberal political governmentality
and survive” (Brown 2003, 46), capitalism cannot survive
without technological revolution—today not only
threatening to undo the established political order but
also itself (Varoufakis 2023). However grim the future
might look, as the proverbial “gift that keeps on giving”
it thereby continues to offer prospects of social
transformation for the many, not just the few.

“As the citizens of the fin-de-siècle tapped their

way through the global fog that surrounded them, into
the third millennium, all they knew for certain was
that an era of history had ended. They knew very
little else.”

(Hobsbawm 1994, 559)

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Notes
1 The notion capitalism only became popular in the 1860s
(Hobsbawm 1975, 13).
2 Revealing a mounting crisis of classical liberalism, during the late
nineteenth century “orthodox observers” saw that “political and
economic elements were no longer clearly separable and the state
played an increasingly active and crucial role both at home and
abroad. Heterodox observers analysed it more specifically as a new
phase of capitalist development” (Hobsbawm 1987, 59), which
would become known as imperialism—a new term which “exploded
into general use in the 1890s” (60) (see Hobson [1902] 2018).
3 For more on the intersection of illiberalism with other “isms,” see
the chapters by Edmund Fawcett (conservatism), Takis Pappas
(populism), Julian Waller (authoritarianism), and Anatol Lieven
(authoritarianism and nationalism) in this volume.
4 Laruelle distinguishes illiberalism from “nonliberalism.” The
former is understood as “postliberalism,” that is, “an ideology
whose exponents are pushing back against liberalism after having
experienced it” (2022, 115–116). To Laruelle, China is nonliberal as
opposed to illiberal, as its “citizens never experienced a period of
liberal dominance” (2022, 116). One can debate whether China’s
post-Mao opening up to the world economy does not square with a
partial embrace of economic liberalism, or neoliberal logics (Dal
Maso 2019), and whether Xi’s China is not returning to a more
illiberal past. More importantly, for the sake of parsimony I do not
differentiate between illiberal, nonliberal, and antiliberal—and
consider China an illiberal regime (Vukovich 2019). For more on
China, see the chapter by Eva Pils in this volume.
5 These are the International Accountancy Standards Board, the
International Organization of Security Commissions, and the
International Swaps and Derivatives Association.
6 As indicated, the global contours of today’s offshore world took
shape in the late nineteenth century. A century onwards, this vast
extraterritorial legal space has become capitalism’s core operating
system to transact capital flows, register businesses, and encase
ownership—executed by corporate services providers residing in
financial centers worldwide (see Fernandez and Hendrikse 2020).