Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-up capitalism, the much-anticipated sequel to his bestseller Globalists is, in one respect at least, just like its predecessor – both are books that many geographers wished that they had written (Slobodian, 2018, 2023). That none of us did, however, should be seen as an opening, rather than some missed opportunity, an invitation to explore the spatiality of ideas, projects and policy designs in motion, in constitutive contexts and in relational connection. On this score, Crack-up capitalism, like Globalists before it, is innovative, incisive and in methodological terms highly suggestive. It presents an arresting account of the role of zones (special economic zones, enterprise zones, opportunity zones and such like), read as localized carve-outs from territorial governance norms, often with deregulationist intent, as anti-democratic accelerators of capitalist development. This book, again like Globalists before it, exemplifies a distinctive approach to the historical geography of neoliberal ideas, rich with methodological implications. In this vein, the following commentary begins by briefly juxtaposing Crack-up capitalism and Globalists, before posing two further questions: Firstly, what does it mean, to reference an everyday geographical term, to document (in fact dramatize) the ideas behind zoning experiments, to ask where they came from? Secondly, what does it mean, to borrow Crack-up capitalism’s signature metaphor, to think of zones in terms of ‘perforations’, voids or holes ‘punched’ through the fabric of state space?
If Crack-up capitalism and Globalists both represent creative contributions to a ‘spatialized’ variant of ideational history, they also demonstrate different sides of this emergent genre – and different ways to think and write about the geography of ideas. In Globalists, Slobodian explored transnational spaces and arenas of hierarchical power mostly ‘above’ the scale of national-state, unearthing a hitherto-untold story of neoliberal globalization pivoting around the work, beginning a century ago, of the Geneva school. By contrast, Crack-up capitalism operates more horizontally and multi-locally, a whistlestop tour around a diverse selection of zones (and quasi-zones), its more potted histories having been written for a trade-book audience and pivoting from the closing decade of the last century. Whereas Globalists was about historical depth, probing the organic evolution of a complex ideational project over time, Crack-up capitalism attends instead to geographical scope and reach, mapping recurrent moments and echoes across space.
Globalists was concerned with the construction of ‘voice’, in the Hirschman (1970) sense, following the long-range efforts of a serious-minded and determined thought collective with their schemes to insulate the market from democratic control. Crack-up capitalism, in contrast, is focused on successionist schemes, deregulationist designs and in some cases outright fantasies of ‘exit’, pushed by a motley array of fundamentalists and fringe thinkers, eccentrics and extremists, some key theorists and true believers, and more than a few actually-existing crackpots and kooks. While both books are guided and enriched by spatial metaphors, these too are quite different in form and apparent function. The central metaphor in Globalists was that of ‘encasement’, the effort to construct a technocratically embedded international order insulated from political meddling and interventionist scheming from below. In Crack-up capitalism, on the other hand, the recurring metaphor is that of ‘perforation’, the means by which ‘capitalism works by punching holes in the territory of the nation-state, creating zones of exception with different laws and often no democratic oversight’ (Slobodian, 2023: 3). Globalists addressed visions of strategic pre-emption, constructed ‘over the heads’ of nationally scaled actors and institutions. Crack-up capitalism tackles projects of localized succession, those that seek to undercut nation-states and regulatory norms through the production and promulgation of ostensibly deregulated, void-like spaces that in a sense sit between the domestic and the offshore, while being neither.
Fluently written with an eye for the absurd as well as the unsettling, Crack-up capitalism is not only a great resource for those of us who teach these things, it also seeks to engage, educate and even entertain a much wider public. Generally foregoing ‘the alarmist gravity characteristic of most academic writing on neoliberalism’ (Burgin, 2023: 144), it pokes a little fun at projects and protagonists that sometimes seem to invite satire, especially where they overshoot, over-promise or come to nothing (see also Craib, 2022). On the other hand, there is no lack of seriousness in the animating themes of the book, concerned as these are with the ongoing erosion and circumvention of democratic institutions, social entitlements and legal protections. This said, one of the consequences of what is a vivid selection of cases is that less attention is afforded to those more everyday, routinized practices of zoning that long ago ceased to be particularly exceptional, ‘special’, or for that matter remotely imaginative. Documented by activists and ethnographers, these sites of intensified exploitation are now reckoned to employ, in aggregate, more than a million workers (see Adunbi, 2022; Neveling, 2024).
Crack-up capitalism is a different kind of book, however, and legitimately so. It puts the tools of intellectual and ideational history to work on the dreams and designs of a generation of ‘market radicals’, connecting these to a diverse selection of actually existing zones and almost-zones. The book’s central contention, that ‘capitalism works’ by puncturing and undercutting the nation state (Slobodian, 2023: 3, emphasis added), is a provocative one, especially since the story here is largely narrated through the words, schemes and imaginary projections of those market radicals themselves. Its fluently told story is ‘made all the more enticing by the suggestion that [this] has been happening offstage’ (Harris, 2023: 58). But how are the connections made between these schemes and the schemers ostensibly ‘behind’ them, between the plans of ideational actors and the play of events on the ground? With these questions in mind, this commentary now turns to matters of epistemology and methodological practice before moving in the direction of the ontological and conjuncturally political.
The ideas behind
There are many ways to construct ideational histories (not to mention ideational historical geographies). As Jackson (2022: 985) has observed with respect to the increasingly rich literature on the ideational histories of neoliberalism, the most travelled paths tend to proceed from the ‘inside out’, beginning with the origination and formation of ideas before moving out to wider spheres of influence. Oftentimes, this will begin with key thinkers and foundational texts, or in the case of the seminal body work on the Mont Pèlerin thought collective (after Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009), with a more sociological understanding of processes of interaction, dialogue and institution-building. The metaphor of the mountain spring is rather apt here, since inside-out accounts typically depart from the more rarified heights of ideational innovation and intellectual exchange before descending, in due course, to the murkier waters of the lower reaches, where various cross-currents and obstacles might be encountered. The narrative structure of Globalists bears some resemblance to this, as Jackson points out, centering as it does Geneva School thinkers, prior to tracing various tributaries across what becomes an extended watershed.
The (sharp) contrast that Jackson draws with this style of inside-out analysis, for which there is a venerable tradition in intellectual history, is with those quite different treatments that work instead from the ‘outside in’, beginning with the conjunctural complexity of the social world, prior to sifting and parsing heterogenous sources of causation, for instance in the shape of Offner’s (2019) Sorting out the mixed economy or Rogers’ (2011) Age of fracture. Confronting as they do the specificities of particular cases, sites or situations, staying closer to the ground and often venturing deep into the weeds, it is no accident that these accounts often prove to be more skeptical or subversive of ‘structural’ arguments and epochal formulations; notably, they are less likely to endorse received (meta)narratives of big-N Neoliberalism. In principle, to work from the outside in might resemble the peeling away of the layers of a proverbial onion, so as to reveal some inner essence or core, but in practice these accounts tend to be associated with more complex, multidimensional and contingent accounts of historical change (within which the ideational is but one thread). From this ground-level perspective, the tall peaks of ideational origination are less visible, if they are visible at all. The contrast here is with those long-range views from above, the farsightedness (indeed clear-sightedness) of which is not just a matter of being above the fray, but a side-effect of using ideational schemes themselves as devices through which to read the world below.
That Crack-up capitalism is rather difficult to classify according to this two-fold schema testifies to its methodological originality. The approach is neither inside-out nor outside-in, but instead tends to move, smoothly and expeditiously, between real-world cases of zoning and the designs and schemes of ideational protagonists – its implicit method suggesting something akin to a wormhole sensibility. Slobodian (2023: 20, 7) is comfortable, for shorthand purposes, to index ‘neoliberalism’ to the quite specific terms defined by the Mont Pèlerin Society and its penumbra of free-market think tanks and secondhand dealers in ideas, while subsequently casting his net rather more widely across the somewhat-overlapping netherwords inhabited by libertarians, Austrian economists, anarcho-capitalists and other travellers on the ‘capitalist right’. Diversity, in fact, is a notable characteristic both of the (geographical) selection of cases and of the sampling of thinkers and theorists, the latter being a sundry bunch of individual(ist)s married to an overlapping assortment of ideas, convictions and commitments (concerning decentralized, deregulated and state-lite modes of economic governance; a general disdain for democratization and redistribution), as opposed to an identifiable class, club, (thought) collective or de facto network. This said, even as the ideational origins of zoning are far from singular, Slobodian demonstrates the existence of a broadly shared imaginary – one sustained by folk tales, a certain utopianism mixed with recycled prejudices, invented mythologies and caricatured renderings of the idea (or ideal) represented by Hong Kong or Singapore or Dubai, along with fantasies of small-state replication, of ‘two, three, many Hong Kongs’, or a ‘world of Liechtensteins’. Slobodian’s wide-ranging narrative does not present as a centric one, as if all roads lead (back) to Mont Pèlerin, and to the peak organizations and boldface names of the neoliberal revolution. In an echo of its polycentric object, the book introduces readers to an array of lesser-known (but no less colourful) characters, such as Leon Louw, Oliver Porter, Lew Rockwell, Hans-Herman-Hoppe, Alvin Rabushka, Michael van Notten and Spencer Heath MacCallum. These names are not to be found in the CliffsNotes version of neoliberalism, but like a version of the parlor game Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon, this supporting cast of second-tier actors, as things turn out, is rarely more than a couple of connections away from a Mont Pèlerinian principal like Friedman or Hayek.
Jackson (2023: 994) has recently reflected that the Mont Pèlerin thought collective was ‘almost too perfect a case study for those of us who cannot resist a deep dive into the mental universe of elite intellectuals’. Along with this tends to come, rather predictably, a certain whiff of ‘elite manipulation from above’ (Burgin, 2023: 146), even as Crack-up capitalism descends not only to the foothills but also to less-travelled sites on practically every continent. For all the work that Slobodian does in deflating libertarian fantasies and debunking neoliberal hubris, there is nevertheless a more-than-latent claim that the loose family of animating ideas described here really makes a difference – downstream, out there, and in the wild. The most significant actors identified in the text are thinkers, theorists, visionaries and architects, a far cry from the faceless ‘middle-managers’ and organizational enablers that Neveling (2024: 44) fingers in his more materialist reading of the political economy of zoning (see also Orenstein, 2019). And while the conceit that zones are uninhabited ‘blank slates’ is correctly challenged in Crack-up capitalism, little is heard from those working or living there. But again, this is a different kind of book, one of the many achievements of which is to demonstrate the remarkable tenacity of the idea of zones, and the enduring preoccupations of market radicals with enclave projects and exit strategies of different kinds.
A quite distinctive challenge faced by historians of neoliberalism is that there is, if anything, a rude surplus of ideational materials, an excess supply of prefigurative theory claims, plenty of which can be shown to be broadly congruent with the subsequent flow of events and patterning of facts on the ground – some consequentially, others more tangentially, coincidentally or spuriously. Now, there are conspiracy facts as well as conspiracy theories, of course and stories like the one about Margaret Thatcher slamming Hayek’s Constitution of liberty on the table while declaring, ‘This is what we believe’, are not apocryphal (see Feser, 2006). To be clear, Crack-up capitalism is not a work of ideational determinism, nor are straight-line associations or short-cut claims made about supposedly determinate sources of causality or agency, although wormhole methods do have a tendency to reduce the distance between ideas and outcomes, skipping over mediating influences. Against this, one of the significant accomplishments of the book is its dogged pursuit of the social life of ideas – even half-baked ideas, habits of mind, articles of faith and flawed designs – so much further into the world, beyond the more conventional focus on ‘big’ ideas and transformative projects.
In their generative critique of orthodox treatments of neoliberalism, Connell and Dados (2014: 120) call out what they see as a common tendency to ‘separate neoliberal theory from neoliberal practice’, equating the former with ‘pure neoliberalism [but] practice as its always-imperfect realization’, echoing the familiar division between the supposed heartlands of knowledge production in the Global North and receiving grounds in the Global South. Crack-up capitalism can be read as a constructive response to this critique, both in its marshalling of geographically diverse cases and in its concern with the intermingling of recurrent designs, staged experiments and real-world experiences. This far-reaching diversity speaks to the way in which wormhole strategies facilitate explorations of non-contiguous connections of various kinds – between distant sites, between thinkers and translators, and between vernacular theories and prosaic practices. In skilled hands, this is an effective and provocative narrative strategy. More ground can be covered, more rabbit holes explored. But the trade-offs are unavoidable, since there is no getting around the fact that the contextualization and conjunctural positioning of each case-cum-situation must be abbreviated, their sometimes-confounding complexities streamlined and stylized, some of the idiosyncrasies ironed out. Every author has to confront these choices, of course. But when it comes to the politics of zoning, the explanatory risks are elevated because decontextualization and essentialization are themselves neoliberal tactics. Hence the apparent paradox that zoning is a disarmingly simple idea – even an ‘innocent’ one, according to some tellings (see Hall, 1982a, 1982b) – that has nevertheless been sutured to promiscuous technologies of exploitative rule that have become formulaic, almost to the point of standardized mass production, even as the social outcomes and political-economic effects, including attributions of ‘success’ or otherwise, remain anything but guaranteed. As it was said of some of the so-called success stories when enterprise zones were first rolled out, the ‘special cases [of zoning] have prospered for very particular reasons of history, location and international politics’ (Goldsmith, 1982: 439–440), details that were airbrushed in selective and self-serving mobilizations of this ‘bad idea’, which Anderson (1983: 317) read in real time as a case of ‘geography as ideology’.
These questions around the enabling power of ideas and mobile designs in the face of uneven and unpredictable outcomes remain challenging ones. In dialogue with Slobodian’s intervention, there is an invitation to economic geographers, urban planners, ethnographers, institutional political economists and others to reciprocate with projects that variously work from the ground up, across relational comparisons, outward from conjuncturally situated cases and so on, complementing genealogical investigations, process tracing, pattern diagnosis and spatialized approaches to intellectual history. In providing a compelling model of the latter, Crack-up capitalism has not only hailed but found a wide audience, eliciting thoughtful responses in the financial and business media, as well as provoking reactions from the market-fundamentalist fringes (proof, surely, that the book has hit some of its targets). But for critical social scientists, the constructivist puzzle remains: ideation matters, but never mechanically or predictably, so how to specify, and to assign explanatory weight to, this or that idea, in this or that situation? As Whyte (2023: 1026) frames it, ‘how we should best understand the relation between crack-up capitalism as a description of the world and as ideology, or, put differently, between the political economy of contemporary capitalism and the contingent development of libertarian ideas’.
Punching like a state
Accounting for the geography of zones is more than a cartographic matter. Ostensibly local ‘exceptions’ to the national territories in which they are located, they also all over the place. Fully half of the world’s zones are in China, where it is not uncommon for them to be stacked on top of one another (see Anguelov et al., 2024), but they are also found elsewhere in Asia, in Latin America, increasingly in Africa, as well as in Europe and North America. Zoning has been widely appropriated for neoliberal ends, but its antecedents in China, for example, go back to the revolutionary period, while some trace their European origins to the age of the city states. There are even coffee-table versions of these recovered historical geographies (see Charter Cities Institute, 2023). The zonal imagination, moreover, seems to be both practically boundless and barely imaginative at all, defaulting as it commonly does to idealized tales of Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai (see Ebner and Peck, 2022). The stories that are told and the sites visited in Crack-up capitalism capture these elusive geographies extremely well, but there is nevertheless a certain price to be paid for traveling in the company of a self-serving class of market radicals, with their schemes to liberate markets and enterprises by ‘punching holes’ in territorialized state structures and social settlements. Not least, it raises the question of who, exactly, is throwing those punches, in what directions, to what ends.
Somewhat at odds with the metaphors of perforation, holes and voids, and the implication that zoning is something that happens to states, orchestrated by mostly external actors fighting the cause of free-enterprise, is the fact that these projects are typically authorized and activated by states. Or as Orenstein (2019: 264) puts it, ‘the zone is a state space’. This is not to imply clear-cut boundaries around the state, or that state actors and non-state actors are separate species. But it is to locate zoning, unambiguously, in the ongoing churn of institutional contestation and state transformation. To speak of the absence or withdrawal of the state is, of course, no less of an ideological conjuring trick than the misdirection that is the hidden hand, or the magical summoning of spontaneous market forces. The consequence is to obfuscate the form and function of zones, especially in their neoliberal form, since as spaces of intensified statecraft and models for regulatory transformation these are not exceptions to but in fact ‘tools of the state’ (Slobodian, 2023: 236, emphasis added).
Zoning, in common with strategies like austerity, can be thought of as a form of punching down, as a downward projection of state power in the service of regulatory transformation. And rather like austerity too it is partly accomplished through the mobilization of ideas, images and imaginaries. In connection with the British experience, Wetherell (2016: 287) has observed that, ‘[b]y the middle of the twentieth century, few would have denied that a single national economy, one that was governed and calculated by political elites, and that stretched taught over territories like a fitted sheet, was one of the defining characteristics of modern nation states’. Needless to say, this uniformly ‘flat’ vision of evenhandedly omnipresent government is itself an ideological projection, at odds in many ways with the realities of uneven regional development and entrenched patterns of inequality. Meanwhile, in what has become the home of zoning, China, it is questionable that zones should be read exceptions to (or holes in) an otherwise general pattern of homogenous state spatiality, just as their defining characteristic, as instruments of the party-state, is clearly not the absence of governmental power. Across these contexts, zoning is but one of the technologies deployed in the ongoing sociospatial transformation of the state. The shape of these interventions may display certain family resemblances (a reminder, once again, that ‘neoliberalization’ is a term better applied to processes and practices of transformation, not an end state or for that matter, holus bolus, a kind of state), but they are nevertheless creatures of context, displaying heterogenous outcomes and patterned geographies.
Slobodian is certainly not oblivious to any of this, although the existential presence of the state more undercurrent than dominant narrative in Crack-up capitalism. To Massey (1982), he attributes the observation that, even in their Thatcherite form, ‘zones were experiments in statecraft more than economics’, although there is a risk of understatement in the reminder that ‘there were ways that the state remained in the zone in the era of globalization’ (Slobodian, 2023: 45, 96). The (particular) story of the enterprise zone, which features at the beginning of the book, serves as a case in point here, illustrating as it does the wayward travels of this portable idea, first into the corridors of governmental power in London and then out into the circuits of transnational policymaking. It was Peter Hall, planning professor, then a Labour Party member, and even a ‘marxist of sorts’, who in 1977 hatched the idea of the enterprise zone, ostensibly as a thought experiment (‘a model, and an extreme one’) floated as a ‘drastic last-ditch solution’ to the real-world problems of late-Keynesian urbanism in the UK, premised on the belief ‘that we must start from the world as it is [rather than] some fantasy of the world as we would like it to be’ (Hall, 1982a [1977]: 417–418; 1982b: 443). This extreme idea was somewhat opportunistically seized upon, as Slobodian recounts, by the Conservative Party whilst still in opposition, and subsequently as a project of the first Thatcher government, before racing across the Atlantic. In the United States, it would be taken up in different ways, (predictably) finding enthusiastic advocates among the free-market think tanks, but also demonstrating a degree of crossover appeal. This said, in their Reaganite form as strategies for ‘greenlining the inner cities’ (Butler, 1981), enterprise zones were denounced by the AFL-CIO as ‘a localized version of “trickle-down” economics’, and by other critics as an economically naïve and politically disingenuous distraction from deindustrialization, attacks on the social wage, and the fiscal crisis of the state (Harrison, 1982: 424).
As ‘weapons of the strong’ and de facto state strategies (Neveling, 2024; Orenstein, 2019), zones have played instrumental roles in leveraging (uneven) processes of regulatory transformation. In a world that now contains in excess of 5,000 active zones sited in getting on for 150 different countries, the record of ‘success’ remains a remarkably sparse one. Yet the case for zones continues to be made, in some form or another (the lexicon having been stretched to include opportunity zones, promise zones, charter cities, free cities, private cities and more), and not just by advocates on the ‘capitalist right’. If nothing else, this apparent failure of the free-market imagination speaks to the narrowness of what is left of the neoliberal mind, coupled with the plasticity of late-neoliberal governance, with its demonstrated record of ‘failing forward’, in the frustrated pursuit of an unattainable destination. But as these interventions continue to fail over and over, even on their own terms, the fact of their peculiar staying power itself demands explanation. The persistence of zoning experiments testifies, surely, to the balance of political forces and to the strategic interests of states, along with a ready supply of expedient rationales, combining utilitarianism with a residual utopianism, courtesy of their more cerebral advocates. ‘History shows that there is always another fantasy island on the horizon’, Slobodian (2023: 201) observes. No doubt true, but one of the lessons of geography is that the horizon itself is unreachable.
