In 2017, as part of my doctoral research, I visited a Belgian archive to study the papers of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS). An influential international network of free-market thinkers, the MPS was founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek. It is still going strong.

As might be expected, I began my research by reading the first paper that was ever presented at an MPS meeting: a welcome address by William Rappard, a high-profile Swiss diplomat, to open the inaugural conference. It contains this passage:

The fact is that the economic man on whom Adam Smith based his arguments was, like himself, a Scotchman who preferred to work and to save rather than idly to enjoy idleness. […] Had he been reared among the sun-baked race of Arabs who prefer leisure to work, security of the lowest scale to the insecurity of initiative and therefore equality to liberty, would his semi-tropical economic man not have led him quite consistently to preach a very different doctrine?

This gave me pause. I had read dozens of books from the neoliberal canon but, outside of the occasional reference, did not think neoliberals had much to say about race.

Yet here was a high-profile MPS member speaking very forthrightly about race. What is more, Rappard’s appeal to race was by no means casual or cursory. His claim was, in effect, that Adam Smith, the great Scottish philosopher of the free market whom the MPS regarded as its patron saint, had left no room in his worldview for racial difference. Had he done so, Rappard was saying, Smith’s conception of economic man would have looked very different. The implication was that a renewed philosophy of freedom, one more suitable to meet the challenges of the twentieth century, would have to account for race.

As I made my way through the archive, evidence accumulated that neoliberals were more concerned with racial themes than I had first realised. I soon found that many MPS members were dogged supporters of European colonialism, especially in Africa. I found that many neoliberals believed hot climates could explain the relative poverty experienced in what they called ‘underdeveloped’ countries. And I found that the MPS counted many prominent racial agitators amongst its members, including Enoch Powell, Ernest van den Haag, and William F. Buckley Jr.

I decided that this topic needed systematic study. The outcome of this effort, Neoliberalism and Race, is now out.

The Argument

My main argument in Neoliberalism and Race is that neoliberal ideology is constitutively racialised. By this I mean that race fulfils such a crucial function in the neoliberal worldview that if it was somehow to be emptied of its racial themes, neoliberalism would lose its coherence as an intellectual and political project. Neoliberal thought, in other words, cannot be divorced from its racial dimension without defacing it beyond recognition.

To avoid being misinterpreted, the argument is not that neoliberalism is overwhelmed by, or can be reduced to, its racial themes. Rather, race has always preoccupied neoliberals, both as a formal theoretical problem and as a salient political issue to which their philosophy needed a response.

Across five chapters, I discuss how neoliberals theorised race in relation to a range of themes, including world history, national development, Europe’s colonial project, cultural belonging, civil rights and Black Power, immigration, and intelligence. As the book shows, neoliberalism was able to accommodate a variety of different conceptions of race, which were not always theoretically compatible with one another. Crucially, however, those theoretical disagreements that did exist never prevented neoliberals from reaching shared conclusions on matters of policy. Indeed, most neoliberals were fiercely opposed to racial justice campaigns and anti-colonial or anti-racist movements.

In mapping out how neoliberals have approached questions of race, I pay attention both to ideas themselves and to the networks that facilitated their circulation. This is particularly important when studying neoliberalism, which was always a highly networked intellectual movement, one structured around a well-organised, globe-spanning web of think tanks, research institutes, publishing presses, and other likeminded organisations.

Indeed, one of the book’s key arguments is that if the neoliberal movement frequently forged alliances with other movements on the conservative right, shared views on race and colonialism often served a bridging function. In Chapter three, for example, I map out the many linkages that existed between the early neoliberal movement and the British Colonial Office, where a large number of neoliberal economists worked. In Chapter five, I explore the relation between neoliberalism and the eugenics movement, showing that two founding editors of the Mankind Quarterly, the most notorious post-war eugenics periodical, were also affiliated to neoliberal networks.

My hope for the book is that it convinces readers that neoliberalism was never a ‘colourblind’ philosophy, one that had no time for or interest in racial themes. Instead, concerns over race have always pervaded neoliberal ideology, sometimes explicitly and spectacularly and sometimes in more coded ways.