"We people of the Anglosphere need to learn the peculiar use among German-speaking economists of the Latin word ordo (‘arrangement’), as in der Ordoliberalismus. The historian Quinn Slobodian’s fascinating book is the place to learn. [...] The main danger to free markets in a democratic age, the ordoliberals believed, is populism. Populists want the rewards right now, this afternoon. As Slobodian sees it (channelling the ordoliberals), socialism and other populisms breach the boundaries between market and government, which the ordoliberals regard as sacred and prudent. The populist is not willing to wait for the market to enrich us all, as it has since 1800 by increasing real income for the poorest by 3,000 per cent. The ordoliberals, by contrast, counsel patience. [...] We should reflect on maintaining a form of liberalism that has made us rich and free. You can do it, class, by attending to this brilliant, scholarly book."

"Neoliberalism has many histories. Milton Friedman, the Chicago school, Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan’s market revolution, IMF structural adjustment, and shock-therapy transition programs for the post-Communist states are all fixtures in the narrative of the neoliberal turn. [...] Globalists, from Wellesley historian Quinn Slobodian, is important because it provides a new frame for the history of this movement. For Slobodian, the earliest and most authentic brand of neoliberalism was from the outset defined by its preoccupation with the question of world economic integration and disintegration. In the 1970s, neoliberalism’s proponents would help unleash the wave of globalization that has swept the world. But, as Slobodian shows, their advocacy for free trade and the liberalization of capital movement goes back to neoliberalism’s founding moments in the wake of the First World War. [...] Slobodian gives us not only a new history of neoliberalism but a far more diverse image of global policy debates after 1945. [...] It is a measure of the success of this fascinating, innovative history that it forces the question: after Slobodian’s reinterpretation, where does the critique of neoliberalism stand?"

"Slobodian’s book is excellent history. [...] While his own leftwing politics are not hidden, he is careful in sticking to the facts, and in trying to present the neoliberals’ own understanding of their project fairly, even as he also makes his own opposition to it perfectly clear. He has a big story, which does indeed shed important light on neoliberalism. If we think of it as a project of anti-democratic statebuilding at the international level, we come to see and understand many things that would otherwise be obscure. [...] Slobodian says, unusually for a historian, that much can be learned from political scientists, who have studied some of these questions with greater intensity than historians. [...] He exploits sources and synthesizes historical developments over decades in a way that political scientists stand to learn a lot from. It is an exciting book and deserves to do very well indeed. That’s not to say that the book’s account is perfect or comprehensive. [...] Put differently, the strength of the book and its limitations both run in the same direction. It offers a fresh and exciting new vantage point on an important set of global developments, drawing on important and under-utilized archival resources. It also implicitly pushes back at the romanticism of ideas that is core to the standard story of neo-liberalism. [...] Yet this perspective, however new and important, is radically incomplete if it is taken (as some less-careful readers might take it) as a complete history of globalization, and as evidence that international institutions represent in their totality some kind of grand neo-liberal plot. It would be better to say that they are in part the product of neo-liberal plotting – but also of the plots and plans of Keynesians, empire building bureaucrats, business lobbyists with narrowly defined interests and a myriad of other actors."