100 books like The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order

As post-Cold War globalisation seems to face its fate, I always go back to this book as it offers lessons on the perils of taking for granted economic rationality. The 19th-century liberal order crumbled, and fascism emerged as a solution. In the same vein, is far-right populism a reaction against the consequences of neoliberalism?

Although he does not bring to the centre stage the impact of ethnic-religious cleavages, such a shortcoming only made me wonder whether his riveting account of modernity applies nowadays.

I love Anderson’s narrative about the formation of nations in the 19th Century and what he calls print capitalism, promoted through books and newspapers. A market organised around the same language fosters both the economy and the very much-needed feeling of community required to organise the state and foster industrial capitalism.

More than four decades after its publication, the book remains thought-provoking as it makes me ask whether a single language suffices to hold nations and markets together.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire makes claims so bold, and so revolutionary, that the book was banned in much of the Global South during the era of dictatorships in the 70s.

One of the central ideas was this: The oppressed are as capable and as intelligent as their oppressors. They need not be treated as requiring “help” or “guidance,” which are dynamics that can lend themselves to inequitable power constructs.

This worldview, in which one group of people is needed in order to “save” another group of people, is the intellectual foundation from which we’ve built systems of oppression throughout history. If one person’s liberation is dependent on another person’s choice, they can never be equals.

This is the book upon which we built Resilient Coders. 

I loved The Sum of Us because it tells the political and economic history of race relations and investment in public infrastructure, benefits, and services in a readable and accessible manner. 

McGhee recounts shocking stories of the ways that, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, hundreds of communities across the United States—governed by White people—chose to close or bulldoze public amenities like pools, parks, and campgrounds rather than desegregate them.

This is a sad story of the way that a generation of White Americans cut off their own nose to spite their face. In the decades since, more and more local amenities because privatized and fee-based, making it harder for poor and working-class people of all races to enjoy their communities.

In a time when industrial policy is no longer taboo, even in the West, I would recommend this book to remember the pivotal role that state policies play in promoting development.

More than being the result of self-made people, crucial innovations like the smartphone result from the research backbone that the state provides.

The book is, therefore, thought-provoking as it debunks myths of state decline during the so-called neoliberal age, although recognises that private firms have acquired excessive power.

Hacker and Pierson argue that “plutocratic populism,” their term for what currently ails the United States and other democracies, is the latest solution to a structural dilemma in modern democracy.

Conservatives are regularly determined to protect wealth and privilege but need to win over voters who typically lack wealth and privilege to elect them. That means a continual effort to craft appeals that, in effect, disguise their aims.

The recent turn to populism means relying on non-economic issues – race, nativism, and various culture war issues concerning sex and gender most potently – to attract voters to support parties whose first allegiance is to the economic interests of elites.

This strategy can also lead, at times, to attacks on democracy and voting as well. 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1990s saw the model of democratic capitalism prevail. Thirty years later, democracy is being questioned, and capitalism has been threatened by growing inequality.

Martin Wolf’s book provides a deep study of the underlying causes of this worrying development, something I very much appreciate. For all its flaws, Wolf argues that democratic capitalism remains the most promising economic model to provide individual freedom and shared prosperity, but it will require a revisiting of the concept of citizenship to foster a shared belief in the common good.

Cultural Backlash is aimed at sorting out the roots of the recent rise of what the authors call authoritarian populism, which is much the same thing as plutocratic populism.

They locate its origins in a backlash against the social consequences and policies that grew from socio-economic shifts that began in the 1960s and 1970s.

These include, obviously enough, the sexual revolution and changing gender norms, the civil rights movement and the increasingly multi-racial and multi-cultural character of modern societies, and the turn toward values that Inglehart, decades ago, termed post-materialist.

The book is distinguished by the vast amount of quantitative data it presents and deploys to illustrate its central argument.  

We don’t learn African American history in this country, nor do we learn anything about our economic history. (Imagine how much better we’d understand our country if we did.)

This book presents cooperatives as the act of resistance that they in fact are, and offers a strong rebuke to the argument that cooperatives are a European phenomenon too far removed from our own national experience to take root here. Not only has cooperative thought taken root here, those roots have sprouted whole forests. 

For those of us struggling to find in our history economic models from which we can build a more equitable and inclusive future, this book is a must.  

This is the philosophical bedrock of the modern struggle for economic justice. It’s a cornerstone of my own book, actually.

“To sustain your existential identity,” writes Haaglund, “is to lead your life in light of what you value.”

Freedom is the ability to sustain that existential identity. It means having more time than that which you need to survive. The more time you have to live your life in light of what you value, the freer you are.

A society in which an entire class of people can spend their entire lifetimes working and remain poor is not a free society.

And yes, it’s a philosophy book, but it’s clear and accessible.