Neoliberals & Our Troubled World

As a big idea fractures, what’s coming next?

The success of any political and economic order depends on how natural and commonsensical it seems. In today’s turbulent world, we see the cracks in a three-decade-old system – neoliberalism – that took shape in the US and then shaped most of the world, says historian Gary Gerstle in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.

The architects of neoliberalism, starting with Ronald Reagan, dismantled the system that sought to work out a compromise between capital and labour, and state and market. Neoliberals were convinced that regulatory controls stymied growth and innovation. It prized free global movement of goods and labour, was all for cosmopolitanism and globalisation.

Critics argue that this allowed elites and their allies, financial institutions of various kinds, to operate free of democratic oversight. Either way, the collapse of communism allowed neoliberalism to girdle the globe, with no need to dilute its principles.