UW-Madison Associate Professor of History Giuliana Chamedes guest hosts the WORT radio station show “A Public Affair” and interviews Quinn Slobodian.
In his newly released book, Quinn Slobodian follows the journey of radical libertarians as they search for a place for capitalism to operated without being hindered by democracy. He joins guest host Giuliana Chamedes to talk about Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy and what it can tell us about the future.
Crack-Up Capitalism follows the most notorious radical libertarians—from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel—around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism. Historian Quinn Slobodian leads us from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world’s oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy.
Quinn Slobodian is the Marion Butler McLean Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College and will join the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University as a professor of international history in January 2024. He is also an associate fellow at Chatham House and co-director of the History and Political Economy Project. His previous book is Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. His work has also been featured in the New York Times, Guardian, and New Statesman.
Listen to the episode HERE.