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Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it.
"Cornelissen's Neoliberalism and Race is a game-changer. In its pages, we find early neoliberals working for the British Colonial Office and their successors wrestling with the twilight of empire. Cornelissen's brilliant and relentless analysis will convince you that even when they claim to be race-blind, neoliberals are always talking about race." —Melinda Cooper, author of Family Values
"Historians are called upon to identify how and why a biologically rooted-language of race has reemerged in this political moment. Moreover, why has this racialized language reappeared at the very moment when the neoliberal order is said to be over? Cornelissen's Neoliberalism and Race offers a provocation for historians to get to the root of these questions." —Whitney McIntosh, Society for U.S. Intellectual History
"Neoliberalism and Race offers us a compelling opportunity to reflect again on the ways in which the dominant political economy of the past half century is not only materially, but also ontologically entangled at the discursive or ideational level with the problem of race, racialization and dehumanization. Lars Cornelissen has provided us with that deep epistemic and textual form of critical analysis that we can wield in opposition to the post-racial and race-blind forms of neoliberal justice, equality and human rights speak that claim the possibility of a world free from relations of domination through recourse to market freedoms." —Hasret Cetinkaya, Ethnic and Racial Studies
"Lars Cornelissen's Neoliberalism and Race is a brilliant and timely intervention that expertly recasts the neoliberal tradition in a new light. Through meticulous readings of a wide cast of thinkers, Cornelissen exposes the ways race structures the neoliberal project as a whole." —Siddhant Issar, Ethnic and Racial Studies
"The great virtue of Lars Cornelissen's Neoliberalism and Race is that it demonstrates thoroughly how the neoliberal project has been centrally about reconfiguring and re-energizing earlier structures of racial and colonial domination, demolishing the assumption that neoliberalism could be written about as if it were racially neutral, or even racially progressive." —Arun Kundnani, Ethnic and Racial Studies
Introduction
1. Liberalism or Barbarism
2. A Listless and Dejected Mass
3. Born Empire Builders
4. Race Is History
5. A Wonderfully Secret Code
Conclusion
Notes
Index