Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian review – zoning out

Bertolt Brecht famously advised his allies on the left not to “start from the good old things, but the bad new ones”. It is a maxim that has guided various activist-writers over the years, wherever they have sought to identify and expose the latest mutations and dreamworlds of capitalist development. In recent decades, figures such as Naomi Klein and the late Mike Davis have kept this tradition alive, unearthing the “bad new” innovations, ideas and technologies that are restructuring the world around us on behalf of capital. Klein looked to the US policies rolled out in Iraq or post-Katrina New Orleans in search of an overarching economic logic. Davis mined the cityscapes of Los Angeles and Dubai for clues as to the latest forms of repression and exploitation.

Historian Quinn Slobodian’s fascinating Crack-Up Capitalism is in a similar vein, only with a distinctive twist: his case studies are chosen for having already been explicitly championed by libertarians and neoliberal intellectuals. Anti-democratic and authoritarian cities and regional experiments of the past 45 years – from Singapore to Somalia, from Liechtenstein to Honduras – are scrutinised less for how they function economically, and more for how they fuel the imaginations of reactionaries and market fundamentalists. This is a history of contemporary ideas – specifically those that seek to protect capitalism from the interferences of democratic politics – that is interwoven with a geography of the various territories on which those ideas descended.

Slobodian’s story begins in and often returns to Hong Kong, which offered an inspirational policy model to figures such as Milton Friedman in the 1970s. This was partly on account of its exceptional levels of economic growth over the previous years, but more importantly, its unique constitutional underpinning. As a remnant of 19th-century British imperialism, it possessed all of the legal and infrastructural conditions for markets to thrive, but little of the democratic baggage that western capitalism had accumulated during the 20th century. As such, Hong Kong was exemplary of a distinctive territorial unit of which Crack-Up Capitalism offers an intellectual history: the economic “zone”.

Such zones come in various legal and political forms. In Slobodian’s metaphor, they “perforate” the conventional economic and political tapestry of nation states, with the declared aims of attracting investment and unleashing enterprise. This is typically achieved via a combination of tax incentives, deregulation and major imbalances between the rights of capital and those of labour. The suspension of political liberties is also a frequent part of the armoury. Canary Wharf is a comparatively innocent example of a pro-market zone in action; Dubai, a more threatening one. The idea of “freeports”, backed by Rishi Sunak as chancellor, is another manifestation of the zone as a policy ideal.

The book also explores the more outlandish, utopian visions. A radical strand of libertarianism, focused increasingly on the possibilities afforded by the internet and inspired by the likes of Murray Rothbard and William Rees-Mogg, took off in the 21st-century United States. Men (and they are all men) such as Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan and Friedman’s son, David, provide Slobodian with a litany of exotic and bizarre details. We find David Friedman maintaining the fictional persona of a medieval duke who eats only with his right hand. Here’s Srinivasan, hoping to move entire political communities into the digital cloud.

Some schemes remain at the level of science fiction. Others, such as the economist Paul Romer’s vision of neo-colonial “charter cities” (zones in the global south that are governed by technocrats in the global north for purposes of economic development), have been put into practice. One thing that ties them all together is an antipathy towards the liberal, democratic nation state, which in some cases tips into fanaticism.Another is a belief that corporations offer important lessons for politics. If entrepreneurs can create and run giant businesses, why shouldn’t the same be possible for polities? Admiration for the corporate form meshes with a zany cult of feudalism, producing the ambition to abandon the nation state in favour of thousands of city-states, colonial trade routes and private armies.

At times, the flurries of biographical, intellectual and historical anecdote accelerate to blizzards, and the sheer volume of material can become overwhelming. I occasionally wished for less showing and more telling, as the underlying thesis is a genuinely perspective-altering one. For instance, Slobodian casts the post-cold war moment in a new and surprising light. The liberal triumphalism of the 1990s led to excessive focus on how power was shifting upwards, to multilateral institutions, trade blocs such as the EU, and the “global economy” itself (Slobodian’s 2018 Globalists details the history of this ideal). But the book shows that the triumph of the free market didn’t represent the death of national sovereignty, so much as its shattering into smaller, less accountable, potentially more oppressive pieces. “Third way” politicians were happy to make the analogy between states and corporations, as expressed in metaphors such as “UK plc”. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so shocked to discover that, as this was going on, ideologues on the right were pursuing a more literal dissolution of politics into economics.

This is also a book about the new dominance of Asian capitalism. Among those who learned from the success of Hong Kong was the state that would soon repossess it: enterprise “zones” have become a central part of Chinese planning and governance. For libertarian observers, wedded to capitalism but not democracy, the shortage of political rights in places such as Singapore is a feature, not a bug. Once modern European nation states cease to provide the dominant economic model, all sorts of new possibilities open up, in which the legacy of merchant-colonialism combines with dizzying technological and infrastructural innovations. This exuberance began to reshape Tory thinking in the 1980s, with the Thatcherite wing of the party routinely pointing to east Asian zones as evidence of what Britain or London should become.

The virtue of bringing a historian’s eye to this topic is to show us that, while the “crack-up” of the nation-state paradigm has occurred only in the past 30 or 40 years, each different route to fragmentation has been shaped by accidents and violence (especially those of empire) accrued over centuries.

There’s no doubt that Crack-Up Capitalism is a critique of the authoritarianism and exploitation that, paradoxically, passes for “liberty” in the seminar rooms of conservative thinktanks and on libertarian message boards. But it is also an important historical corrective to the myths, fantasies and occlusions that have allowed dystopias such as Dubai to be presented as models for “the west” to learn from. Many of the men whose manifestos and dreams Slobodian surveys simply don’t know what they’re talking about. One wonders if they ever wanted to learn in the first place.

• Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.