 I think we'll make a start. Welcome everyone to this seminar on the morals of the market, human rights and the rise of neoliberalism. We're especially lucky to have Jessica White. She's come from the University of Western Sydney. She's here for a few weeks at Birkbeck. She is senior lecturer in cultural and social analysis at Western Sydney University in Australia and an Australian Research Council DECRA fellow. Her work integrates political theory, intellectual history and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights and humanitarianism. Her work has been published in a range of fora including contemporary political theory, humanity and international journal of human rights, humanitarianism and development, law and critique, political theory, radical philosophy and theory and event. Her first monograph, Catastrophe and Redemption, The Political Thought of Georgio Agamben, was published in 2013 and she's got a forthcoming book, The Morals of the Market, Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, which will be published by Verso next year. She's currently working on the project, Inventing Collateral Damage, The Changing Moral Economy of War. We're also very pleased to have Radda de Souza, who is a reader at Birkbeck. Radda is a writer, critic and commentator on third world issues and a social justice activist. She's practised as a barrister in the High Court of Bombay and taught at the Universities of Auckland and Waikato in New Zealand before coming to the University of Westminster. Sorry, I said you were at Birkbeck, sorry, at the University of Westminster. Radda will serve as discussant for Jessica's paper. I'll leave it to Jessica. First, thanks very much, Faisie. It's really wonderful to be here and I'm also extremely pleased that Radda has agreed to be the discussant. I can't think of anyone better to engage with this work and I hope that it's part of a continuing conversation and I want to thank you all for being here today. What I'm going to present is from the book that Faisie mentioned, The Morals of the Market, Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. I'll talk a little bit about that as we go along, but for now I will get started. In 1927, the leading Austrian school neoliberal thinker Ludwig von Mises published a scathing attack on European colonialism which he described as antithetical to all the principles of liberalism. Mises traced modern imperialism to the 1870s when the industrial countries abandoned free trade in order to compete for colonial markets in Africa and Asia. The basic idea of colonial policy in this period, Mises wrote, was to take advantage of the superior weaponry of those he called the white race to subjugate robin enslaved weaker peoples. Yet even as he criticised colonial imperialism, Mises argued that the British empire was different. She pursued grand commercial objectives, he argued, and her free trade policies benefited colonial subjects and the whole world. Writing with a nervous eye on anti-colonial movements from India to the Philippines, Mises warned that if independence damaged the integration of colonies into the world market and global circuits of trade, this would be, in his words, an economic catastrophe of hitherto unprecedented proportion. Despite his liberal scruples about coercive rule, Mises ultimately argued that political independence was of minor significance compared to the global extension of the market. European officials, troops and police must remain in these areas, Mises wrote, as far as their presence is necessary in order to maintain the legal and political conditions required to ensure the participation of the colonial territories in international trade. It must be possible to carry on commercial, industrial and agricultural operations in the colonies to exploit mines and to bring the products of the country by rail and river to the coast and then to Europe and America. That all this should continue to be possible is in the interest of everyone, not only of the inhabitants of Europe, America and Australia, but also of the natives of Asia and Africa themselves, he wrote. And I take this to be a fairly definitive statement of neoliberal thinking about colonialism and decolonisation in this period. Writing later during World War II, Mises acknowledged that the victory of the idea of the United Nations would lead to autonomy for the people of Africa and Asia. Yet he argued that there are today no such thing as internal affairs of a country which do not concern the rest of what he called mankind. So Mises and the neoliberals of this period, the mid-20th century, I argue sought to resolve two interrelated questions. In the immediate term, they wanted to prevent anti-imperialism in the colonies from morthing into anti-capitalism. Their next task was to devise legal and institutional mechanisms to constrain postcolonial sovereignty and to protect the international division of labour. Imperialism, the neoliberal thinkers argued, was not the highest stage of capitalism, as Vladimir Lenin had argued, but was the result of the politicisation of the economy. And it's this idea that I want to look at in more detail here. A central political innovation of the neoliberal thinkers was to recast imperialism as a phenomenon of politics, not of capitalism. Summing up the shared neoliberal perspective, the German neoliberal Wilhelm Röpke bemoaned that imperialism was in his words one of the sad results of the politicisation of the economy into which we lapse the more we increasingly abandon the principles of the market economy. Against postcolonial demands for economic self-determination, neoliberals argued that the competitive market was a force for what they termed civilisation, which would prevent political conflict, imperialism and war. In contrast to the economic planning that characterised post-war colonialism, they argued that separating political sovereignty from economic ownership would enable all parties to purchase raw materials of former colonies on the open market and therefore would render colonialism unnecessary. Breaking with the optimism, however, of 19th century laissez-faire liberalism, they argued that the future of the world market depended on an adequate legal and moral framework. In the context of decolonisation, they sought to develop the legal and institutional order that would restrain postcolonial sovereignty and secure the existing division of labour. So, what I'm going to do in the paper here is draw on research that I've done in the archives of the neoliberal Montpellarans Society, which are at Stanford University, and particularly research that I've done on their thinking about colonialism and the various papers that were presented on the topic of colonialism and morphing into the question of development in later decades. So, what I'll present here is sort of a little bit that draws on some of the work that I've done for my forthcoming book that Fraser mentioned, The Morals of the Market, Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. And in that book I argue that neoliberalism has been too readily understood as a narrowly economistic doctrine or as a form of economic imperialism as some have argued. And I suggest that this reading of neoliberalism as an overly economistic idea that reduces everything to homo economicus has led critics to miss the distinctive political theory and the morality that was central to the rise of neoliberalism. So, one of the book's key arguments is that the neoliberal thinkers from around the mid 20th century onwards played a central role in establishing a dichotomy between the market or civil society. As a realm of mutually beneficial, peaceful, free voluntary exchange on the one hand and politics as violent, coercive and militaristic on the other. And I argue that this dichotomy between violent politics and peaceful markets was later taken up by mainstream human rights NGOs who embraced central aspects of a distinctive human rights discourse that was developed by the neoliberal thinkers decades earlier. So, in the book I argue that the neoliberal thinkers revived a distinctive political argument for capitalism that was first identified by Albert Hirshman in his classic 1977 book The Passions and the Interests. There Hirshman uncovers what he calls the do commerce or sweetness of commerce thesis which he argues was conventional wisdom in the mid 18th century. Hirshman's account of the moral virtues of the market began with this sentence from the Baron de Montescu's spirit of the laws which Hirshman ultimately chose as the epigraph for his own book. It's fortunate for men to be in a position, a situation where though their passions may prompt them to be wicked, they have nonetheless an interest in not being so. For Montescu, those who pursued their interests through the market stood in a relation of mutual need and thus he wrote that the natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace. Now of course Montescu wrote at a time when world trade was violent and dangerous inseparable from colonial conquest and the slave trade. Karl Marx therefore mocked accounts of the pacifying virtues of commerce in his writings on the primitive accumulation of capital. After describing in garish detail the history of Dutch colonialism with its secret prisons, assassinations, bribery and enslavement, Marx remarks sarcastically that is peaceful commerce. Yet it was only when this violence came home from a European perspective with the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the social dislocation of the industrial revolution that belief in the sweetness of commerce lost its grip on the European imagination. By the 20th century Hirshman concluded that no observer could any more subscribe to this peaceful vision of the civilising and pacifying market. Subsequent defenders of the market, Hirshman argues, therefore borrowed instead from Adam Smith to make an economic argument for the virtues of the market for its greater productivity and ability to foster growth. In contrast to Hirshman's position I argue in the book that in fact the neoliberal thinkers in what were really the inauspicious circumstances of the mid 20th century sought to revive this political justification for the market. For Friedrich Hayek, the founder of the Montpellant Society, who described his own project as doing for the 20th century what Montesquieu had done for the 18th and for his neoliberal colleagues, the challenge was to revive the argument that a society coordinated through the competitive market would replace the coercion, conquest and conflict that they saw as endemic to politics with voluntary mutually beneficial harmonious social relations. The would guarantee individual freedom and rights. So what I want to look at in this lecture is specifically how this argument about the pacifying virtues of the market played out when it came to neoliberal arguments about colonialism in the face of rising anti-colonial movements and newly independent post-colonial states. At the 1957 meeting of the Montpellant Society the Stanford agricultural economist Karl Brandt summed up what I see as the neoliberal approach to decolonisation. The problem for an enlightened liberalism, he argued, was not how to rid the colonial areas of the white people, rather it was how to create as soon as possible conditions in the colonial areas under which the white people can not only stay but where more of them can enter the area as welcome partners and friends. Creating the conditions in which the white people could stay meant ensuring that their rights were protected and that their properties and persons were safe from what the neoliberals depicted as the predations of post-colonial masses and states. In the period of decolonisation the neoliberals therefore developed their own human rights discourse which was aimed at restraining the power of the post-colonial masses, their word, fostering market freedom and facilitating coercive interventions to uphold economic exploitation. The function of such human rights was to secure the conditions for the perpetual openness of colonial territories to the world market and to instill market discipline and submission. In advocating this vision of post-colonial friendship and human rights the neoliberals presented the world market as a space of mutually beneficial voluntary relations and in making this argument they had a key polemical target, Marxist theories of imperialism. Since the end of World War I, neoliberal thinkers, the people who would later form the Montpellant Society, had sought to dispel Lennon's argument that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Writing in 1914, Lennon described imperialism as a phenomenon of monopoly capitalism and the territorial division of the world into financial and industrial cartels and competing monopoly blocks. Lennon indited monopoly and violence as the reality that lurked behind the myth of the peaceful mutually beneficial exchange relations. Far from creating peaceful international relations of mutual understanding and benefit as the neoliberals contended, Lennon portrayed war and great power rivalry as endemic to capitalism. The neoliberals sought to rescue capitalism from this charge that it led to war and violence. Imperialism, they argued, was not a product of capitalism but of politics and of the pursuit of national glory. As early as 1919, the Austrian school economist Joseph Schumpeter, who was a participant in Ludwig von Mises' private seminar, rejected Marxist arguments and defined imperialism instead as an adivistic remnant of absolutist autocracy. In what Hirschman describes as an inversion of the sweetness of commerce thesis, Schumpeter argued that the persistence of pre-capitalist institutions and attitudes had reigned in the beneficial effects that should be expected of pure capitalism. Capitalism, Schumpeter argued, directs the productive activities that were once spent on wars of conquest into productive labour. In his words, a purely capitalist world order can therefore offer no fertile soil to imperialist impulses. The more capitalist social relations penetrated the economy in the mind, Schumpeter argued, the more anti-imperialism and pacifism would thrive. The problem was not capitalism itself he contended, rather the problem was that capitalism had not been strong enough to decisively alter the social structure or mentality of the pre-capitalist age, which he described as being marked by disaster-bound addiction to heroic antics. So just as earlier figures like Montesquieu argued that commerce was sweet and pacifying in an age where the slave trade was at its peak and when trade in general was still a hazardous, adventurous and violent business, the neoliberals of the 20th century sought to sanitise the capitalism of their time. An unrestricted competitive market, they argued, would replace violent conflicts over territory and resources with peaceful mutually beneficial commerce. The causes of conflict, they argued, lay elsewhere, not in capitalism but in the politicisation of the economy and the confusion between political sovereignty and the ownership of a territory's natural resources. This argument was made with the greatest force by the British economist Lionel Robbins, who is just up the road at the LSE. In 1939, as another war broke out, Robbins challenged Lenin's argument that the previous great war was an imperialist war, an annexationist predatory war of plunder for the division of the world and the partition and repartition of colonies. Robbins depicted war as inimicable to what he termed a great society based on private property in the division of labour and he argued that finance capital was a pawn of government and not a prime mover. In geopolitical matters he wrote, bankers are a pacific influence. If war was contrary to the interests of capital, Robbins argued, then its causes must lay elsewhere, in politics and especially in the existence of independent sovereign states. Not capitalism, Robbins wrote, but the anarchic political organisation of the world is the root disease of our civilisation. Robbins, therefore, depicted imperialism as a result of the abandonment of free trade and of what he called liberalism strict distinctions between territory and property. The German neoliberal Wilhelm Robbke, who was in the audience during Robbins' seminar and enjoyed it immensely, borrowed terms from Roman law to describe this idea of liberal peace. A liberal economy separates imperium from dominion, ownership from sovereignty, he argued, and it therefore prevents conflicts over resources. Referring back to the liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith, Robbke described the old liberal principle as that of the thorough separation between the spheres of government and economy, between sovereignty and the apparatus which provides material goods, between the imperium and dominion, between the political power and the economic power. So this idea is really central to the neoliberals, that a liberal economy separates the economy from sovereignty and therefore doesn't allow for any political control over resources. It was still a central article of faith for the neoliberal thinkers that a state that rules an area rich in natural resources does not own those materials which are owned by private individuals who may enter into mutually beneficial exchanges for their sale. Multilateral relations of trade, they argued, allow industrial nations to obtain raw materials by running their export chains through several countries, neutralising state borders and making the political rule of regions rich in resources unnecessary. The goal, as Quinn Slobodian puts it, was a liberal world in which nobody would mistake the lines on the map for meaningful marks in the world of dominion or ownership. In similar terms, Robbins argued that for cultivated Britons, the dominions of the empire was a ceremonial fiction, not a concrete reality. In a free trade economy based on the principle of the open door, he contended, any private investor can buy a country's materials on the open market on equal terms and so has no need to invest in conquest. Similarly, Mises wrote, it is of no advantage to an English buyer of Australian wool that Australia is part of the British empire. He must pay the same price that is Italian or German competitive pays. For the neoliberals, it was the confusion of sovereignty with ownership that made territorial control the precondition of economic exploitation and led to international conflict. Once states take over on an extensive scale the ownership of the material factors of production within their borders, Robbins wrote, the distinction between territorial jurisdiction and property disappears, and for that very reason, the fact of geographical inequality becomes a permanent cause of disharmony. So again, politics is the cause of conflict, not the market, which would enable all of this to happen without any conflict at all. But of course, in depicting the British empire as peaceful, Robbins obscured not only the great naval force that ensured its supremacy over its rivals, but also the genocidal violence wielded against indigenous and First Nations people in the process of establishing its distinctive white settler colonies. Also absent from his narrative was what Mike Davis refers to as the late Victorian Holocausts, by which British exploitation and commitment to Malthusian doctrines and free trade dramatically exacerbated the effects of climate to produce extraordinary famines, notably in India. In praising the peaceful trade of the British empire, Robbins engaged in what Jenny Moorfield calls an imperial politics of deflection that turns attention away from empire's violence by insisting on its fundamental liberality. Mises, on the other hand, was more explicit about the violence necessary to uphold peaceful commerce. The wars waged by England to expand her empire laid the foundation for the modern world economy, he noted, and had India and China not been forcefully open to trade, and I quote, Not only each Chinese and each Hindu, but also each European and each American would be considerably worse off. Given that the extension of the international division of labour benefits everyone, Mises argued, developed nations cannot remain indifferent to those who wish to maintain their independence at what he took to be a lower level of civilization. So Mises developed what I see as a just war argument for post colonial times. Any country that deprives others of access to its natural resources doesn't injure it to all of humanity, he argued, and can legitimately be compelled to trade. Mises therefore praised the opium wars that opened China to British trade. No barriers ought to be put in the way, even of trade in poisons, he wrote, it being up to each individual to restrain himself. The unequal and extraterritorial treaties imposed on China established a precursor for neoliberal forms of empire predicated on legally protected freedom of trade without formal territorial control. In a different context the challenge for the neoliberals was to conceptualize the institutional and legal conditions that would compel post colonial states to offer their resources on the markets terms. Although the neoliberal thinkers harked back to an earlier period of free trade, they also broke with the laissez-faire anti-imperialism of 19th century liberalism and criticized what they argued was the erroneous assumption that free trade would naturally bring harmony. Writing during World War II, Mises argued that while the earlier liberals had correctly recognized that there could be no conflicts between correctly understood interests, they had dramatically overestimated the ability of the masses to understand their own interests. In a typically aristocratic mode, Mises wrote that liberalism had failed because most men are too dull to follow complex chains of reasoning. If even the Germans had proved incapable of recognizing that their interests lay in market competition not conquest, he despaired, how, I quote, can we expect that the Hindus, the worshippers of the cow, could grasp the theories of Ricardo and Bentham. There's a lot of this kind of stuff throughout the neoliberal thinkers. The success of a liberal market, Mises argued, relied on an institutional and legal order to shape competitive entrepreneurial subjects. The essential feature of the advanced west was not its technique, Mises wrote, but its moral atmosphere. A competitive market would thrive only in a society that inculcated what Hayek termed the morals of the market and encouraged saving, capital formation, entrepreneurship and peaceful competition. The concern of the neoliberals was how to secure a legal and institutional structure that would foster this moral environment on which an international division of labour depended. The old separation of dominion and imperium had only succeeded on the international level, Robkib argued, because it was underpinned by the gold standard, which provided international economic integration with what he curiously termed a moral foundation. By removing currency from political control and insisting on tight money supply. For all its extraordinary achievements as he saw them, however, Robkib knew that this old liberal order was finished. In seeking a substitute for it, the neoliberals drew on the experiments in international government and supervision pursued by both the British Empire and the League of Nations mandate system. Long before the Covenant of the League of Nations created the concept of mandates, Great Britain acted virtually as a mandatory of European civilisation in countries whose population was, as the Britons believed, not qualified for independence, Mises wrote. In the wake of World War II, the challenge for the neoliberals was how to provide standards of civilisation for a world of independent states. Judged by Western standards, Robbins wrote, the appeals of traders and investors for protection against arbitrary confiscation, discriminating justice and administrative corruption have often had much justification. Only the establishment of binding international standards to constrain sovereignty would secure, he argued, against anti-social behaviour and war. World commerce required legal standards to secure an open door, prevent confiscations in discriminatory treatment of non-nationals, foster labour discipline and shape crucially entrepreneurial subjects. Faced with growing anti-colonial movements, the neoliberals sought to ensure that political self-determination did not enable the people of the former colonies to claim their natural resources as their own property, or to subject these resources to political control. They believed that the post war period must avoid a return to what Hayek called unfettered sovereignty and especially in former colonies. While states were necessary to enforce labour discipline and security, the neoliberals believed that these states had to be shielded from the demands of their own people and prevented from interfering with the market. What Hayek termed the taming of the savage, which was his account of the development of civilisation and the market, must be followed, he argued, by the taming of the state. That's his term also. What was necessary, according to Hayek, was a set of rules which defined what a state may do and an authority capable of enforcing those rules. The year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, Roche stipulated that a truly international order must be based on what he called fundamental liberty and equality of rights. For Mises too, the preconditions of an international economy were social, legal, constitutional and political. Against economic isolationism, the neoliberals defended what they framed as the interests of all of humanity. The problem of securing a liberal economy was not a technical question or one confined to economic regulation. Rather it required reshaping subjects and moral dispositions. No human cooperation and no lasting peace are conceivable, Mises concluded, if men put loyalty to any particular group above loyalty to humanity, moral law and the principle of every individual's moral responsibility and autonomy. At the 1956 meeting of the Montpellarans Society, devoted to the challenge of communism and the response of liberty, the German autoliberal Alexander Rostov praised what he termed the tremendous epoch making importance of the previous years' Bandung Conference. Held in the mountainous West Jarvan capital, Bandung, in Indonesia, the Asian African Conference saw representatives of 29 countries representing half the world's population travel to Bandung to build political and economic cooperation. The conference's final communique condemned the racial discrimination and denial of the fundamental rights of man in the existing colonies and declared that colonialism in all its manifestations was an evil which should speedily be brought to an end. At the same time, the communique stressed the urgency of economic development, including through foreign capital investment. Even more significantly for those committed to the cause of freedom, Rostov told his neoliberal colleagues, was that Western colonial imperialism was lined up for comparison with Soviet imperialism. To draw the advantages of this, he argued, Europe must liquidate what he called its shabby remnants of colonial imperialism. The Bandung Conference was marked by conflicts about the nature of imperialism and the significance of human rights. Despite the prevalence of the language of anti-colonial solidarity, Cold War splits were already evident and delegates from South Vietnam, Pakistan and then Ceylon argued that Soviet colonialism was a greater threat than the European variant. The Iraqi delegate also warned of the danger of jumping from the pan into the fire, declaring the new imperialism of the Soviet Union to be much deadlier than the old one. For Rostov, all this provided fertile ground for severing anti-colonialism from anti-capitalism. Rostov was distinctive amongst neoliberal thinkers in that period of decolonisation, in his conviction that colonialism was what he termed a bloody stain on the historic record of humanity, an endless chain of gravest crimes against humanitarianism. Along with his pragmatic concerns about the propaganda value that the Soviets were drawing from European colonialism, Rostov grounded his critique in natural law, which he depicted as the legal armory of the struggle for freedom in human rights. Rostov had little time for claims that colonialism was civilising. Whatever its benefits, in the form of technical achievements and the spreading of catacysms, reading and writing, he argued that these, and I quote, way lighter's feathers against the crushing weight of countless crimes, brutalities and inhumanities. Rostov denounced the colonial powers for trampling on what he called the human dignity of the colonial peoples, and he labelled their claims to be carrying out the white man's burden, pure hypocrisy. Rostov's indictment of colonialism would seem to be little different to Mises 1927 criticisms which I began with of the hypocrisy, robbery and enslavement that was perpetuated by colonial powers. Yet the embrace of sovereignty by post-colonial states had changed the terms of the neoliberal debate. In the great period of decolonisation, the neoliberal majority was preoccupied with the danger that independent post-colonial states would refuse to submit to their existing positions in the international division of labour. By 1951, when the topic liberalism in the underdeveloped countries first graced the agenda of a Montpeleron society conference, the neoliberals were increasingly anxious about the future of the market system. Emerging agendas of industrialisation, import substitution and economic planning and demands for economic self-determination were politicising the economy, they believed, and eroding the liberal separation of dominion and imperium. In a 1952 lecture at the San Francisco Public Library, Mises singled out the promise of the first prime minister of independent India, Nehru, that private businesses would not be expropriated in the ten years following independence. You can't expect people to invest if you tell them you will expropriate them sometime in the future, Mises retorted. Describing Nehru's fabian-inspired socialism as a step backwards, even from late British rule, Mises made clear that the correlate of faith in peaceful commerce was that any society that refused to acquiesce to its position in the world market could legitimately be forced to do so. If what he called resource rich backward countries refused access to foreign corporations on the market's terms, Mises asked rhetorically, can anyone really expect that the people of the civilised countries will forever tolerate this state of affairs? Mises ominously warned that the world was returning to a state in which it was not possible to access raw materials without conquest. World peace depends on unrestricted foreign investment, he argued, not on the Boy Scouts of the United Nations. In the UN itself, things were looking increasingly gloomy from a neoliberal perspective. As more states gained their independence, campaigns for legal equality soon morphed into demands for economic self-determination. With decision-making power in the Bretton Woods International Financial Institutions weighted towards wealthy states, the UN became the site for what one historian has called a strangely secluded and artificial version of the broader struggle for independence. This created a new relationship between the Human Rights Project and larger debates about development and the rights of peoples to sovereignty over their natural resources. In its final form, the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights embodies this new focus. It reads that all peoples, made for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources. In no case, it further stipulates, may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence. Realising the neoliberal's worst fears, delegates from recently independent states pursued an agenda of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, which sought to secure the inalienable right of sovereign states to freely dispose of their natural resources, including by naturalising foreign companies that had hitherto exploited them. Today's Human Rights, as formulated by the UN, Roepke wrote in a 1965 letter just before the Covenants, include the sacred right of a state to expropriate a power plant. The shift towards economic self-determination has often been viewed as displacing the individual as the subject of human rights in favour of proclaiming state rights against private capital. Yet the shift from a civil and political rights focus to an economic focus on self-determination cannot, I would argue, be easily mapped onto a shift from protecting the individual to empowering a state. This is especially so as the liberal approach to human rights, which sequestered the world economy from challenge, was supported by many of the world's most powerful states and licensed their interventions on behalf of their corporations. As Ependra Bakshi notes, the globalisation of liberal rights was always one directional. No major European American nation would subject itself to third world institutional scrutiny and critique of its human rights process and performance he writes. In a period of military coups and continuing exploitation, post-colonial attempts to secure their societies from outside intervention were not simply rationales for authoritarianism, even if at times they were surely that as well. For more radical anti-colonialists of the period, individualistic languages of dignity and liberty were the means by which neocolonialists distracted the people of the colonies from what Franz Fanon called their basic requirements, bread, clothing, shelter, in his words. What Rob Knox calls Fanon's stretched marxism, full-grounded race is the basis for the settler's entitlement to the material benefits of colonial capitalism. Yet Fanon also noted that in proposing to do justice to human dignity, neocolonialism addresses itself to the middle classes of the colonial country, to those who had been interpolated by its civilisational hierarchies and had sought to constitute themselves in the place of the colonial elite. While the West holds up both its economic system and its humanist superiority for emulation, Fanon argued, the people of the colonies must find their own distinctive parts. Fanon argued for new humanism, which would not be content with political independence. If the people of the former colonies were to create new political and human possibilities for themselves, he argued, they must stop honouring the notorious rights of the occupant, whose guarantees had been presented as the price for independence. By 1958, when the Montpellarins Society gathered in Princeton, Ludwig von Mises described the recent history of laissez-faire capitalism as very sad. While private investment had succeeded economically everywhere he despaired, politically it had succeeded only in a few civilised countries of Europe and America, while elsewhere it ended in expropriation, confiscation and anti-capitalistic policies that amounted to simple sabotage. Although less than 5% of foreign-owned firms were nationalised during the high point of decolonisation, some high-profile cases sent shockwaves through business circles, especially in the mineral and petroleum industries, and galvanised opposition to economic self-determination. Mises singled out the Egyptian nationalisation of the Suez Canal two years earlier as the turning point. The canal held a symbolic place in the neoliberal's imagination. Its opening in 1869 had fostered the expansion of international trade by allowing ships to pass between Europe and Asia without circumnavigating Africa. At the earlier Walter Lippmann colloquium, Mises had cited the canal as an example of what he called those works of vital importance that could only have been achieved by the largest of corporations. Mises did not mention the strict police control exercised by the British over the migrant workers who built the canal, but they played a starring role in the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's speech announcing the nationalisation. Egypt undertook to supply labour to dig the canal by Khurve of which 120,000 people died without getting paid. Nasser told his audience as Egyptian troops reclaimed the canal. He was making this speech as they were off reclaiming it. The canal company that Arab nationalist leader argued had been restored to its rightful owners, the Egyptian people who were fighting for political and economic independence against the domination of those he called imperialists and exploiters. To Mises, this blurring of sovereignty and ownership, as much as the leverage of control the Suez canal gave to those who wished to disrupt world trade, was a threat to the international division of labour and therefore to civilisation. Decolonisation was undermining the human right to trade, the neoliberals believed, and it was on the terrain of human rights to conclude that the neoliberals would launch their counterattack. In 1957, the men of the Montpellar on Society returned to the Swiss Alps where they had held their original meeting. It was here that the question of liberalism and colonialism was first placed on the agenda of the Montpellar on Society. By this time, the neoliberals had become increasingly defensive about the success of colonial rule. The problem, as the Dutch philosopher Economist Justice Meyer put it, was that the colonised wards had proven far less rational and amenable to civilisation than the liberal colonialists assumed. In his terms, they clung to their own customs, they lacked the IQs to embrace education and they were lazy and disinclined to work more than necessary to provide for their accustomed standards of civilisation. Faced with such intransigence, Meyer claimed that liberalistic colonialism is at its wits ends, and this kind of position was very common amongst the neoliberals at this time, this sort of aristocratic and racist sense that the previous civilising missions had failed. Yet he also rejected the conclusion that those who refused Western pedagogy should be left alone. This would all be very well in an integrated world, he argued, but given the commercial relations that had developed between countries granting self-determination to colonial subjects would dry up the resources of tropical war materials, oil and many things the rapidly progressing world cannot do without. Against the normative principles of a liberal humanitarianism, Meyer held up what he called an elementary law of self-preservation, which demanded in his words that the historically grown relations between colonial powers and their colonies should not be broken off abruptly without something sensible to take place of this. The question for the neoliberals, I argue, is what this something sensible would be that would take the place of colonial rule and secure the continued access to resources and cheap labour. For the neoliberals, sovereignty had never been the tell-offs of the civilising mission. Quite the opposite, their challenge was always to restrain popular sovereignty to prevent the masses from capturing the state and refusing the discipline imposed by the competitive market order. Freed of its relation to popular sovereignty and economic self-determination, the language of human rights offered them a vocabulary for pathologising postcolonial sovereignty, subjecting postcolonial states to universal standards and licensing transformative interventions to constitute capitalist social relations. It was again Alexander Rostov who saw this most clearly, and while Rostov has been depicted as the figure against whom neoliberal colonial policy has been constituted, it was in fact the case that he too very much shared this dichotomy whereby imperialism was a phenomenon of politics rather than of the markets. So he challenged Rosa Luxemburg's argument in particular and defined imperialism as a feudal remnant rather than a phenomenon of capitalism. Now, for Rostov and for Robke, the other German liberal, while they've generally been seen as critical of the disintegrating force of the market, they were very big defenders of the sweetness of commerce. And they argued that the optimistic rationalism of earlier days had underestimated the continuing hold of instincts, passions and feelings and the barriers that these posed to a liberal market. Robke and Rostov depicted imperialism and the rule of the passions as the result of what they turned in age dominated by mass movements and mass instincts. While Rostov attributed colonial imperialism to the warlike spirit of states, his real concern was not with the state per se, which he believed needed to be strong to de-politicise civil society. Rather, he traced the cult of the great Leviathan, not to Thomas Hobbes, but to Rousseau and the tradition of revolutionary popular sovereignty. As anti-colonialists such as Fanon embraced this Rousseauian legacy in their struggle against colonialism, as Peter Holwood has shown, Rostov positioned the philosopher of the general will at the origin of modern totalitarianism. Rousseau, Rostov wrote, explicitly and emphatically rejects any constitutional limitation on the totalitarian omnipotence of the state, any reservation of human rights of the individual. Rostov's attribution of colonialism to a tradition of popular sovereignty was central to the development of the great neoliberal dichotomy between the pacifying market and violent politics that would later inform attempts to contest totalitarian post-colonial sovereignty in the name of human rights. Now, just to finish, so in the book as a whole I argue that the neoliberals were very central to developing a distinctive idea of human rights, I'm not going to go into that in detail here, but I just want to finish by noting that in 1957, which was the same year as the neoliberal discussion of colonialism, Mises attributed mass poverty in Asia to the absence of what he called a legal and constitutional system which would have provided the opportunity for large-scale capital accumulation. And essentially what he argued is that the problem throughout Asia is the existence of an egalitarian morality which has been conducive to the expropriation of the wealth of private individuals and so therefore has blocked capital accumulation. And for the liberals as a whole, the neoliberals, this anti-egalitarian morality was the key barrier to the development of capital throughout the world. So Mises argued that liberal philosophy could triumph only within an atmosphere in which the idea of equality was very weak. What was needed in the East, he argued, was a cultural shift and a set of institutions to foster wealth accumulation amongst which they gave an important place to human rights. What the East Indies, China, Japan and the Mohammedan countries lacked, Mises wrote, were institutions for safeguarding the individual's rights. Mises and the earlier neoliberal thinkers prepared the ground for the focus on the legal and institutional preconditions of capitalist development that would increasingly become central both to neoliberal development discourse and to the practice of the international financial institutions in the subsequent decades. They also, I argued, developed an account of human rights as supports for a liberal market economy that would be embraced decades later by major human rights NGOs. Thank you. Thanks very much, Jessica, that was excellent. So we'll now hear from Radha. Okay, thank you Jessica for that wonderful presentation. And I can see now why this conversation was important to you as you highlighted. Just to clarify, I'm from the University of Westminster. And in January, there was a, my book that was released called What's Wrong with Rights, Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations. It's published by Pluto Press and Jessica came to a session at the Historical Materialism Conference where, you know, to discuss my book. And so now I feel very privileged to be able to return that compliment and to discuss your book. But I can see the synergies and I think one as academics, one of the most exciting things in academia is to find people, scholars from a certain bandwidth where we can actually talk and have a more nuanced conversation about various issues. And I think that's why I'm absolutely delighted to be here and to make these comments on the book and I'm looking forward to reading it. Now, I just want to just kind of open up this discussion of neoliberalism. One of the big mythologies or misleading understandings or whatever you want to call it of our times is somehow neoliberalism happened in 1989. And that somehow the world changed after 1989. And that is a historical view of neoliberalism. And I think what my work and Jessica's work does is to push back the timeline a bit and say, you know, hang on here, this was 1929 we are talking about, we are talking about, you know, something 1927 and 1950s and so on. So a period when, you know, it was not something that we thought about neoliberalism as something coming from then. And I think that's an important thing because if you go back to that moment when Mises was writing what was happening in the world, capitalism had collapsed, you know, because of the economic crisis, the First World War and all of that. And we find that liberalism too had collapsed and liberalism was attacked from the right and the left. And the left critique of liberalism was that this was, you know, anti people, anti working class, anti colonialism and all of that. And the right critique was what Jessica has just laid out, that was a critique of liberalism. But I think it is important at the present times when we are going through another moment of crisis to remember that it's when the right and the left start critiquing that you know that there is some major structural problem that we are living through and that things are not working. So if you see EU, the right doesn't like it, the left doesn't like it. So that means there's a fundamental problem. And I just want to flag that up as an important issue, you know, when things collapse then it collapses from all. And the left and the right come up with different answers and I think one of the challenges for us is to disentangle those arguments who is speaking for whom and why. So I thought I'll just flag that up as an issue and as a point. But I also want to flag up another I think fundamental issue. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to push Jessica's arguments to, you know, a deeper level if you like. And that is the relationship between capitalism and colonialism is a fault line in theory, in European theory, you know, whatever school that you want to, on the left, on the right. And I think this comes up both in the left in different ways and forms and it comes up in the right in the way in which Jessica has flagged up. What is the relationship between capitalism and colonialism? We know that the relationship between class and capital has been written about and talked about and there's a lot of things on that. But the relationship between capitalism and colonialism remains an important and significant theoretical issue that remains to be addressed. And I think the neoliberals, it was Lenin's argument that, and if you look at the debates between Wilson and Lenin, Woodrow Wilson and Lenin and I've written about this elsewhere. If anyone wants on the relationship between self-determination and imperialism and the debate was, is it a legal right or is it a political right? And Wilson says, no, it's a legal right. And even at that time during the first world war, the attempt to legalize things was already underway. Whereas Lenin says, no, this is not a legal question. It's a political question. It can only be resolved politically, not legally. So you can see that the two camps, one arguing that, you know, from the left that this is politics, primary politics needs to dominate and law and institutionalization as a solution for that. And one, so that is something that, and we can see how colonialism is very much embedded in neoliberal thinking right from the beginning as the stock has, it was never far away. Indeed, I would say that the whole development discourse that comes after starting with 1927 with Mises and then you have the League of Nations that convenes the Development Conference. Britain sets up the African Development Commission, the Commission for Development of East Africa, and then you have, you know, League of Nations actually convening conferences. And for the first time, the word development is used in that context when there is this turmoil, liberalism broken down, capitalism broken down, people trying to reconstruct something. That's the moment when it comes. And Rostow is also a foremost development theorist and his whole thing. So what are they trying to do? And to my mind, it seems that, and this again brings me to the third point about neoliberalism, which I just want to open up. And that is the old liberal thinking was that political freedoms were the conditions, essential conditions for economic freedoms. So you need political liberty, political organization, that's what the whole idea of democracy was about. You needed political freedoms. Neoliberals flipped that completely. And now you have Hayek, Friedman, Mises, all arguing that the economic freedoms are the conditions, necessary conditions for, you know, guaranteed political freedoms. That you need the economic freedoms if you want political freedoms. And that argument goes back right to the 1920s. And so, and these are very, and it completely flips classical liberalism because classical liberalism was of liberty, equality, fraternity. That is what you needed for economic freedom, free trade, you know, all of that. It flips that over. And the rewriting of liberalism is what we call neoliberalism. It's rewriting liberalism for the conditions of monopoly finance capitalism, as I say. So I think with those initial comments, I just want to, I'll just make one more comment on the territorial aspect because after all, the neoliberals also supported statehood and state autonomy. But for a transnational capitalism, for transnational corporations, transnational investments and finance, this legalization and institutionalization was absolutely essential because empires did not legalize systems. Empires were administrative systems. They relied on administration and not rule of law, as we would call it, as legal law students would call it. But for capitalism to have that autonomy from politics, which is what they were seeking, legalization and institutionalization was an essential condition. And statehood and autonomy of states comes together with recasting states because what happens in that period through these discussions and of course the establishment of Bretton Woods organizations and all of that, which are very, very neoliberal right from the beginning. We don't call it that, is to take the state as the basic economic unit. So states become shareholders in the World Bank. States become subscribers to the IMF and therefore become shareholders in a global economy and then become a unit of governance. And I think these transformations are quite fundamental and we are only now coming to realize and recognize how deeply embedded neoliberal thinking is with the current world order and the state of capitalism today. So I'll just stop there. Thanks very much. So your questions, contributions on the floor. We'll take a few and then Jessica will come back. Oh, wow microphone. Okay. So the idea of switching from political rights being the foundation that economics rests on to economics being the foundation that then political rights rests on. What happens to our assumptions about people then because don't we base the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity on some assumption about human beings. How are we changing then what we're assuming about humans and how does that play into human rights today? Great. Thanks. Thank you really. I had a couple of interconnected questions. The first was, it would be great to hear a little bit more about how human rights were conceptualized by mid 20th century neoliberal thinkers as well as similar to that last question what that legacy has meant for how human rights is going to practice and understood today. And as well as that, whether you see any possibility for reconceptualizing rights, particularly emphasizing more of economic, social and cultural rights as a tool to challenge neoliberalism. Thanks. You can ask any basic question if you want. But maybe Jessica can come back on those two. Thank you. The fabulous questions. The question of the flip. I absolutely agree with Rada about that. This is a really important thing. And it's very curious to me often I'm reading someone like Mises or even Milton Friedman. And I have to remind myself that I'm not reading Marx because they say things like, you know, we only have human rights because we have capitalism and human rights are simply the sort of codification. Of economic freedom and capitalist freedom where they differ is that they say this kind of freedom and equality is the only kind of freedom and equality you can ever have. So you get rid of the market economy and then there can be no kind of freedom and no kind of equality or no kind of no vision of the good essentially. Mises goes as far as say no sentiments of goodwill or sympathy between people. I mean it's pretty out there at that level. But it is really interesting in terms of what it means for the human. And one of the things that I think is really important about neoliberal human rights discourse is precisely the fact that it doesn't presuppose a natural human as the ground of human rights. So as you say it doesn't have this vision of the sort of inalienable sort of inherent rights bearing human. Instead it's very much a constructivist project. It's about creating the political and economic conditions in which a certain vision of rights can exist and can flourish. And so to me one of the things that means is a lot of the recent critiques of human rights are constructivist critiques. Sort of sort of fecodian in some ways critiques that show that there's in fact no natural man as the bearer of human rights that human rights only exist in a particular political and social context on the basis of political struggles. I mean I think that's self evidently true to use that terminology. But I don't think that it really has any purchase on neoliberal thought because they would be quite open about the fact that yes their vision of human rights is constructivist. It is about creating a particular circumstance in which those rights can flourish. They're not making claims about human nature. Interestingly to the extent that there is an idea of human nature underlying neoliberal thought particularly in its Hayekian form who thinks about this the most it's actually an egalitarian idea that has to be constantly suppressed in order to make the market work. So Hayek's idea of social evolution is that there's this sort of what he calls suppressed primordial instincts from a previous tribal existence which are suited to egalitarianism and sharing and that we always sort of want to lurch back into that. So he says all Marxism and all socialism adjust this return of these suppressed primordial instincts. So it is very interesting in relation to the human to the extent that there's a neoliberal theory of human nature certainly in its Hayekian form it's an egalitarian human nature. In terms of the question of human rights I think that I mean on the one hand I want to pass on a bit I've actually got a slide which I'll go back to if anyone is around there's an event on Thursday night at Birkbeck on neoliberalism and human rights that I'm doing with Joseph Slaughter from Columbia who's also visiting Birkbeck. We're going to talk a lot more about the more contemporary and particularly look at the 70s and 80s and the way these ideas were actually taken up by human rights NGOs. I won't go into too much detail here but what I would say is that it's really important for them that human rights are about restraining mass politics and restraining the state. That's essentially their role but they're also about inculcating a certain set of moral ideas as they see them which are about thinking of oneself as an entrepreneurial, acquisitive individual, breaking with those suppressed primordial instincts. Maybe I'll come back to the question of social and economic rights and other forms of rights because I see other people have their hands up. You talked about Robin's saying that finance capital is not the one that seeks the interiorist conquest but is co-opted by the political powers. I think you are also saying that because global capitalism is divided into nation states such that national capitalists are embedded in nation states. So competition between firms globally now takes on the form of nation states competition. So to that extent, do you think that the new liberals because they see the nation states as a source of conflict if one seeks to undertake protectionist policies, do you think that they will prefer a single, centralized global power that abolishes these power, disaggregated powers and centralizes? Thank you. That's a great question. Thanks for your talk. I was at an event that was happening at SOAS a couple of weeks ago and there was somebody who's written a book about the UN and its continuity in the days ahead. And there was a talk by an American diplomat before that as well at SOAS and it's this, when you spoke about what was lesser of the two evils it seemed like whether it was Cold War development or was it the imperial development. I'm wondering whether we can learn from that and look at whether we are in a period where there's again whether American imperialism is better or is Chinese investment in the days ahead something and where that resistance lies between those two schools of thought. Thank you. I might want to answer those questions because I'm going to take you back to the human. So maybe you want to answer those two questions. Maybe the one at the back there, yeah. So you talked a lot about the general failures of neoliberalism and the holes in that thought. But I was also wondering, because clearly they're based on, there's a lot of like arrogance and so on at the heart of it. Sorry, a lot of arrogance and so on. But what ideas could be taken from neoliberalism because the neoliberal age is kind of coming to an end right hopefully. So what kind of lessons do you think there are to be learned? Thank you. I'd rather just point out that also there was a question actually for George. Yes. Do you want to just come in on the human question? Yeah, I thought just for a second and then we'll go back to the question. I thought I will just add a couple of things to that and that is the word human as a prefix to write comes during this period. It's a post 1945, it starts to emerge during the world wars and then it comes. Before that in classical liberalism you did not have the prefix human. There was rights and rights included property rights and social political economic rights. And classical liberals saw these two things as very closely related. What the neoliberals do is remove property rights to their exclusive clubs and leave. Because don't forget societies like this Mon Perlin society. They operated like closed societies and property rights from 1945 until 1989. The focus was on property rights. That's what neoliberals focused on. They established the World Bank, they established the IMF, they established monetary systems, GAT systems, a whole raft of legal institutional systems recognizing property rights. When that was well in place and until then in the UN and other forums people talked about human rights, as if human rights has nothing to do with property rights. As if I can have cultural freedoms with no food on my table and this is the discourse. That is why we find after 1945 human rights becomes a very normative moral discourse and property rights is completely out of vision from these institutions. And I think that split is very much a neoliberal one and very much a very important part of neoliberal philosophy if you want to call it. So I just thought I'll throw that in then. Do you want to answer those questions? Yes. Or do you want to keep going or should I answer these few? Maybe answer those. Actually they all fit together well I think those questions. Because in a certain sense they're all about the neolibles in the state and how they understand the state and a world of competing states, a world of competing imperialisms, what's preferable. It's a really good question regarding would they prefer a single global state and at a certain level you would think that that would be the logic of their position. If Robbins is going to argue the root disease of our civilization is the conflicting sovereign states it would seem to lead in that direction. But what they tend towards much more is an idea of an international or a global federation in which the federation does have something like an overarching body state which is capable of reining in the independent powers. So in many ways and here I should step back we're talking about the neoliberals as shorthand but there were real differences between them over different questions. And so Quinn Slobodian for instance has talked about the neoliberals who were against the EU but obviously there were neoliberals who were very much in favour of something that looks a lot more like the EU than it does like a single state. And it particularly looks like the EU in terms of the role that say the EU played in Greece at the time of the referendum and the debt crisis there. That's the kind of role that they saw this overarching federation as being able to play depoliticising the economy, ensuring that whoever people voted for the economy was going to be protected and secure. In relation to the competing imperialism, I mean in a certain sense one of the things about doing historical research is that I'm sort of still back in 1927 at some point I sort of get up to the mid 1980s. But in relation to today I feel like there are other people who are much more expert at these questions. Obviously I have to think about them because this is the world that we're living in now and it gives a different purchase to these arguments. I mean I'm not so optimistic as to say that neoliberalism is over but I think that what is over is probably a certain form of unipolar world in which a particular moral discourse could stand in as a universal discourse. And that's open to challenge. Now clearly many of those challenges are deeply reactionary. And so the point Radha made about when something is being critiqued on the left and the right you know that there's a significant structural crisis. It's clearly the case both about neoliberalism and about human rights and it's something that I'm thinking a lot about at the moment about how do you critique human rights at a time when the right are critiquing human rights and do we revert to the position which has always been the liberal blackmail that human rights are after all the most we can hope for. Or do we continue to subject these liberal discourses to critique and I don't think there will be one answer that will hold in every context. I think it's a political question but because my context is that I'm writing a theoretical book about human rights I feel like I can do that. Thank you very much Jess. So I thought that I want to go back to the question of the human because without knowing very much about it it seems to me that there must be at least an implicit concept of human nature that's actually the neoliberals are pretty attached to. Because that's been one of the things that's made it so successful is that it's not just a kind of flip of the economic and the political but a kind of flip of the human and the political. And I think that what you mentioned for example in the classical liberal phase the idea of commerce being a civilizing influence that you could become fully human in a properly commercialized world. And that was competing directly with an alternative this much more Russoian notion that no actually you become properly human by being a member of a patriotic community committed to the collective good with strong civic institutions and norms and so on. And that is that struggle which is a kind of frontal confrontation I think in the classical liberal periods. And it comes to head with you see quickly in the French Revolution that the great declaration of the rights of human beings and the citizen. The right of man and citizens and the two are connected. So to be a true human being there you have to be a citizen. And the civil rights are oriented by these broad human rights. Whereas it seems to me that with the neoliberals the great achievement has been to cut the two off like for all the reasons that you said. And to be a true human being a properly human being one you shouldn't be persecuted by a nasty state or an oppressive kind of sense of the common good. You should be free from all of that. And you should be protected of that. Because human beings are vulnerable and they need to be protected. And that becomes a mandate for something that can replace a colonial power. The responsibility to protect. And it fits perfectly with that logic. And I think, so I just wonder if there isn't at least a concept of human nature that is grounded in the capacity to suffer, to be vulnerable to civic or mass interference. To have unlimited desires that should be cultivated and enhanced. At least something like that. Thank you for the talk. I have a question about the Montpelerine Society. For example, reading David Harvish or History of Neoliberalism, the Montpelerine Society sounds like this conspiratorial framework. On the right wing you have theories about the Frankfurt School that they control everything. To what extent can we actually say that the thinkers of the Montpelerine Society designed neoliberalism and it was this top-down intellectual project? Thank you. Thank you. Fantastic talk illuminating. What's the relationship between authoritarianism and neoliberalism? It seems that they go together. Was colonialism a form of authoritarianism that allowed for this neoliberal thinking to develop? Thank you again. Fabulous questions. I'll start with the human. Now I need to again say this thing about how different neoliberal thinkers had different conceptions of most things. The position about the suppressed primordial instincts is Hayek's. I do think it's very important that for Hayek the real human, the human nature is egalitarian. And that this accounts for some of the defensiveness of neoliberalism in contrast to what they see as the optimism of 19th century and liberalism in particular, that they're always working against human nature. And that's why they always need to be developing institutions that will prevent humans from realising this aspect of their nature that would lead them to egalitarian forms of social relations. But if we look at Mises, for instance, there is something that is more like what you're talking about. And in a certain sense he's one of the ones who has put the most thought into a sort of very basic anthropology that he then sees as being able to ground an entire market economy. And if there's one central axiom it's that humans make choices. And so what he takes from that is that because humans act, his major book is called Human Action, but you find that what's there is actually a very minimalist idea of human action, which essentially consists in choosing between one predetermined option and another. And it's also an individualised conception. So what that leads you to is an argument that the market actually enables people to realise their capacity to choose in a way that politics doesn't. So the civilising force of the market is very much there in so much as they argue. Mises argues you have this in Milton Friedman and in a number of them. What the market does is enable every individual to pursue their own choices, their own subjective freedoms so they have a subjectivist account of freedom and choice. So the market enables us to all choose. And they always use these ridiculously flippant examples about everyone can choose the colour of the shirt that they want. And obviously this becomes a lot more difficult when you're talking about everyone can choose whether they want a coal power station or not. Clearly it doesn't work. So they use these flippant individual consumerist examples. So if you had to give a sort of an idea of the human it would be a consumerist conception. And so politics because it relies on some kind of suppression of the conditions in which every individual could choose the colour of their own shirt is necessarily coercive. And so it necessarily works against the conditions in which every individual would be able to realise their human capacity for choice. So those things coexist in a curious way. Mises and Hayek are different. Mises is more utilitarian. Hayek is more on the natural law side of neoliberalism. But in a certain sense these two positions coexist in a curious way. And then there's the Chicago school that are more sort of positivistic but also take on aspects of this which leads to the Montpellant society because I can see the resistance to thinking of them as a sort of global conspiracy that made our world what it is. In a sense because what I'm looking at is more an intellectual history. I'm looking at them as intellectual figures and I get frustrated by the opposite feature of some scholarship on neoliberalism is that people talk about neoliberalism without ever reading the works of neoliberal thinkers in a way that I think at least once upon a time, certainly for political theorists it would not be acceptable to do that about liberal thinkers. So I wouldn't argue that they created the world in the sense that there was a template but I do think that they were very significant. They were very linked into financial networks. They did conspire, they conspired all the time. You look at the archives, there's like files and files and files of conspiring and that conspiring is about conspiring to get money, it's about conspiring to get the most significant business leaders along to their meetings but it's also like very minor conspiracies. Like when Rustov gave this paper that was the critique of colonialism, there's fabulous stuff in the Hayek archives where he and, I think it was Lord Peter Bauer that he was writing with but don't quote me on this, conspired to exclude Rustov's paper from the published proceedings because it was such an outrage and they said that no one would ever take them seriously if they published critiques of colonialism. So there were conspiracies and I think that they were very significant in reviving an intellectual conception of liberalism and in transforming liberalism and breaking with certain presuppositions of laissez-faire and developing what they saw as a new liberal project for a post world order and particularly for an order where the masses as they saw it were on the rise and responding to this phenomenon and in terms of authoritarianism, yes I think that neoliberalism has a deep propensity towards authoritarian rule precisely because of this question of how you restrain the masses, how you prevent the repressed primordial instincts rising up and if you can do that just through human rights and a sort of EU style regime great, but if you can't and you need Pinochet, so be it. Yeah. More questions. Can I ask the question? I mean I just want to pick up on this conspiracy thing and as you have done archival work, I thought I will just flag up this thing, you know here and that is, I mean you know there is, yes there is, they were to my understanding, I mean they were a closed society they were very closely tied to corporations, ran corporation, you know all those big corporations and there was that nexus and correct me, I mean I haven't done archival work so I will leave that to you to answer and the other thing was they quite consciously placed people in bureaucracies so there is a whole way of organising which is and they see this as a legitimate way of organising you have your people in the bureaucracy, you have your people in the universities a lot of chairs are set up by them as the Chicago school was set up by you know some of these leading people and so you have a whole new conception of organising which I find interesting because it's, at the same time the left was trying to promote a completely different way mass mobilisation, mass, you know as a, but I think some and I was wondering if what you have found in your research about these networks and about these you know connections which they seem quite conscious and doing it quite consciously Good question Other questions Sorry we should do something about that I have one final question If you could just say something about the future of neoliberalism you've researched into the history of it where do you think based on your research into the history of it where do you think it's prospects lie and can you give us any hope I was fine until the last minute It's not my strong point Just in relation to Rada's question I mean it's interesting I'm sure if there were a member of the Montpellant society here and they still exist and they still publish and they still meet they would say you know the focus on them the idea that they were a powerful conspiracy is ridiculous Hayek couldn't get a job in the Chicago School of Economics because Milton Friedman and others thought his actual economic work was rubbish Mises never got a job in the United States because he was such a cantankerous guy who condemned everyone including his fellow Montpellant society members who he once accused of being a bunch of socialists and stormed out So on the one hand there were clearly arguments and disputes between these people but on the other hand there was a strong orientation to elites and that's how they very much differed from this kind of the mass politics of the left at that period where they were very conscious about the fact that their role was to cultivate certainly economic elites and at that stage in the 1940s those who they thought of as intellectual elites also if you look at the Montpellant society now I have to say even on that terms there's not a lot of intellectual elites around there's a lot of guys with money but there's sort of a bit of a shadow at the level of intellectual production of even these people who were always propagandists as much as they were intellectuals in terms of where neoliberalism is going I mean it's interesting on the one hand like if you look at this the Montpellant society aspects of them are horrified by Trump and by what they see as a new populism and they would also use that language on the other hand one of the things that's come out of my research when I talk about the morals of the market is identifying a very strong commitment to a sort of a racial politics to what they called western civilisation and an idea that western civilisation was bound up with competitive markets that needed to be imposed across the world also a very strong social conservatism and moral conservatism and I think that in the age of Obama and perhaps if we'd ended up with Hillary Clinton there was a tendency to think of neoliberalism only in its more sort of cosmopolitan strand to think of neoliberalism as Obama and sort of opening up of sort of political possibilities through market consumption so for those who were able to consume but there is this other strand of neoliberalism which is much more explicitly racist much more authoritarian or in sort of very concerned about breakdowns of families and moral norms and these kinds of questions so I see that we're seeing that strand of neoliberalism coming to the fore that doesn't mean that everything is neoliberalism but it does mean I think that we should be a bit wary of being too hasty in proclaiming the death of neoliberalism particularly given the kind of economic policies that people like Trump and Bolsonaro and people are pursuing so hope I think also there is resistance to neoliberalism I hope that it is successful and that it is the one that is not the very reactionary kinds of resistances that we're seeing today I do think that we're in interesting times with all of the sort of conflict that that can create and I don't think we know what is ahead of us and I hope that it's not worse and that we're not sitting back here looking at this as the glory days but I think that probably it's up to all of us to try to ensure that that's not the case Join me in thanking