1If you think of neoliberalism as a Vienna-Mont Pèlerin-Chicago express line, turbocharged by Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet, think again. Market Civilizations complicates this linear historiography, inviting readers on a sweeping journey through the ideology’s unexpected junctures, unlikely sanctuaries, and hybrid instantiations—from Japan to Brazil, from Russia to Iceland. This is not the familiar tale of neoliberalism as a Western ideological idée fixe marching inexorably from the Global North to the Global South. It is, rather, a story of localisation.
2Crucially, however, the book does not rest its claim to novelty on the now well-established observation that neoliberalism has been translated and hybridised in diverse settings—a point made with theoretical clarity by Ban (2016). Instead, Market Civilizations foregrounds the ways in which local actors have not merely adapted but also originated, reconfigured, and exported neoliberal ideas on their own terms—often in ways that would leave Milton Friedman and Frederich Hayek alternately bemused or delighted.
3With this volume, Slobodian and Plehwe trace the dense and reciprocal circuits of neoliberal exchange between North and South, East and West, excavating how these ideas have been co-constructed from within the political, cultural, and economic terroirs of places too often relegated to the margins of global intellectual history. The volume builds upon a trilogy of prior historiographical interventions in which Plehwe and Slobodian have played central roles: Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique (Plehwe et al., 2006), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009), and Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (Plehwe et al., 2020).
4At its core, Market Civilizations seeks to unsettle narratives that anchor neoliberalism to the familiar dramatis personae of the Western core, repositioning the rest of the world not as passive recipient but as active co-producer. Ambitious in scope and archival depth, the volume is structured in three parts—“Greater Cultures,” “Other Paths,” and “Radical Outposts”—comprising eleven country-focused chapters, framed by an introduction and conclusion that together offer a significant rethinking of neoliberalism’s global career.
5The first section, “Greater Cultures,” examines Japan, India, and Turkey, demonstrating how these nations developed distinctive neoliberal idioms in largely autochthonous fashion, drawing on domestic state traditions, religious frameworks, and ideological legacies. In contrast to the East European embrace of neoliberalism as a vehicle for Westernisation and industrial emulation, Japanese engagements with neoliberalism reflected a culturalist sensibility, stressing Western decline and asserting a vision of neoliberalism reconciled with communal values. In Turkey, neoliberal reforms were interwoven with indigenous interpretations of Islam, yielding a hybrid model that remains analytically and politically salient.
6The Indian case, particularly the rise of the Swatantra Party, is especially revealing—and strikingly contemporary. It offers a compelling illustration of upper-class elites appropriating a broad-based struggle against Nehruvian “socialism” and recasting it as a populist revolt against the bureaucratic state. Through a discourse centred on corruption, excessive taxation, and economic rights, they mobilised a rhetoric of righteous resistance ostensibly in the name of the common man, while in practice reinforcing elite interests.
7The second section, “Other Paths,” turns to Russia, China, South Africa, and Australia, spot-lighting the divergent local trajectories through which global neoliberal ideas have been appropriated, contested, and recast. As a scholar of post-communist transitions, I found the chapters on Russia and China particularly illuminating. Tobias Rupprecht’s contribution on Russia challenges the widespread notion that neoliberalism was simply imposed from without, via Western advisors such as Jeffrey Sachs. Instead, he traces its genesis to technocratic circles within the late Soviet Union, where local intellectuals engaged seriously with market liberalisation. Russian neoliberalism, as he shows, bore strong affinities with German Ordoliberalismus, privileging a robust, market-constituting state rather than the laissez-faire ethos of American models. Isabella Weber’s chapter on China, by contrast, reveals how neoliberal ideas were openly debated within the highest echelons of the Chinese party-state. Unlike in the Eastern Europe of the 1980s, where neoliberal thought collectives operated clandestinely, China’s reform debates were informed—though not determined—by direct engagements with Western neoliberal economists, including Milton Friedman. While neoliberalism never triumphed as a hegemonic paradigm in China, select ideas—particularly those inspired by the post-war German experience of price liberalisation—nonetheless found resonance among some officials seeking to expand market mechanisms without relinquishing political control.
8The final section, “Radical Outposts,” turns to Brazil, Guatemala, Montenegro, and Iceland. Jimmy Casas Klausen and Paulo Chamon’s chapter on Brazil is especially striking, charting the emergence of what they term “ultraliberalism”—a radicalised evolution of neoliberal ideology that blends global pop-cultural aesthetics and youth veneration with a militant market fundamentalism. This formation overlays Brazil’s fraught histories of racial slavery, clientelism, heteropatriarchy, indigenous dispossession, and semi-peripheral positioning in the global economy, producing a syncretic project in which the designated enemy is both the state and the entirety of progressive political liberalism, derided by its proponents as “cultural Marxism.”
9While elements of this radicalisation echo the authoritarian conservatism that Slobodian has previously identified at the core of neoliberal thought, the original architects of the movement—aristocratic, culturally elitist, and steeped in European traditions—would surely be taken aback by the populist, meme-driven spectacle of Bolsonaro’s Brazil or the techno-libertarian ethos of America’s Silicon Valley elites in the Trump era.
10In their concluding argument, Slobodian and Plehwe are unequivocal: neoliberalism is not a spent force. Far from receding into the annals of economic orthodoxy, it continues to mutate, adapt, and reassert itself—shaped by global structures but refracted through deeply local contingencies. Its trajectory is marked not by linear decline but by volatility and reinvention, making any simple periodisation inadequate. The political and economic conditions that gave rise to neoliberalism remain entangled with its afterlives, which continue to emerge in ever more variegated forms.
11There are, moreover, paths for extending the inquiry. As a scholar of neoliberalism in East-Central Europe, I would emphasise the analytical promise of mapping South–South transmissions and the increasingly visible South–North flows of neoliberal ideational traffic. The rise of Argentina’s Javier Milei, for instance, is already shaping discourses among American and German libertarian-conservatives, suggesting a reversal of conventional geographies of intellectual diffusion.
12Market Civilizations is a landmark contribution to the historiography of neoliberalism—not merely a map of its global sprawl, but an anatomy of its enduring adaptability. For scholars of political economy, globalisation, and intellectual history, this is indispensable reading. It compels us to grapple with the staying power of neoliberalism—not simply as doctrine, but as a global and local civilisation in its own right, forged not just in the seminar rooms of Mont Pèlerin, Chicago, or Virginia alone, but in the local struggles of the global periphery, too.
13The historical realities unearthed by this book, together with the entangled radicalisations of neoliberalism in contexts as varied as Orbán’s Hungary or Trump’s America, suggest that those who prematurely declared its demise in the wake of COVID-19 or amid China’s rise to counter-hegemonic status were mistaken. Neoliberalism has recently returned with renewed fervour, re-branding itself in “ultraliberal” garb, recruiting new allies, recalibrating its language, and pre-paring for another, more intensely geoeconomic confrontation. If you are looking for an obituary, you will not find one here. What Slobodian and Plehwe demonstrate is that neoliberalism thrives precisely on volatility, ambiguity and international friction. Its next chapter is already unfolding—more radical, more hybridised, and more corrosive of democratic norms and perhaps of Western capitalist power itself than ever before. The ride, it seems, is far from over.