Someone here at The Agonist once asked me to describe what this “neoliberalism” thingy I kept talking about was. So I rattled off the usual hot-button words like the Washington Consensus, the Chicago School of Economics, austerity, class-warfare, the Shock Doctrine etc. and then sputtered something along the lines of, “it’s like economic porn, you know it when you see it.”

Obviously, that was tongue in cheek, but at the same time an admission that it was actually pretty difficult to describe what neoliberalism is.

This two year-old conversation left me with one long-term brain nag.

Two weeks ago I was having a twitter conversation about the French historian/philosopher Michel Foucault. During the conversation an American intellectual and economic historian at the University of Notre Dame, Phillip Mirowski, came up. My interlocutor suggested I read his book on neoliberalism, “Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste.” 

After the conversation ended I went to google books, read the first few pages and immediately ordered it from Amazon for next day delivery. (No, it was not available at any local bookstores, I called around first before I went to Amazon.)

All I can say is this: go get that book. It’s heavy. It’s profound. You’ll get bogged down in theory. You’ll have a hard time breathing the rarified air. You will have to work to read it. It’ll make you reach for the dictionary thirty times, as I have already done so. It makes demands on you. It is a book of serious scholarly criticism from the real Left. Filled with hilarious bon mots and aperçus as it is it’s the multiple explanations of just what neoliberalism is and the dissection of its intellectual provenance that finally puts into words that hitherto inchoate gut feeling I was sputtering on about two years ago. Trying to understand how Hayek and Friedman led to Bernanke and how Hayek and Friedman and Rand gave us Greenspan and so much more. It’s an historians connect-the-dots whodunit on just how our finance and banking and so-called “efficient markets” gifted us this hideously opaque, protean post-modern dystopia of self-made entrepreneurs instead of a republic of citizens.

Really, go get the book.