CANCELLED: CES: The Habsburg Empire as a Model for the World Economy: Neoliberals and the Dream of Double Government
Date and Time
Location
New Directions in European History Study Group
SPEAKERQuinn SlobodianAssociate Professor of History, Wellesley CollegeThis talk presents the first part of a book-length argument that neoliberalism was an answer to a global question: how to organize the world after empire? It shows how the vanished Habsburg Empire became a lost object of identification for neoliberal intellectuals and why its dissolution set the frame for their understanding of decolonization in the twentieth century as a whole. At the core of the neoliberal Habsburg imaginary was the separation of economics and politics—and the realms of dominium and imperium--that allowed for what F. A. Hayek called “double government.” For Austrian neoliberals, the non-identity of political and economic units in the Habsburg Empire offered a model for world order beyond the nationality principle, a vision that neoliberals would seek in forms of supranational governance from the League of Nations to the UN, from the GATT to the WTO, and from a renewed Lex Mercatoria to the field of International Economic Law.