Ten Theses on Race and Neoliberalism

The body of thought commonly known as “neoliberalism” has been subjected to much scrutiny. Its critics have reconstructed its development, identified its leading lights, uncovered its theoretical precursors, and traced its political impact. They’ve argued convincingly that neoliberalism is less a specific policy package than a coherent political-philosophical school of thought that first emerged in the 1930s and that matured in the decades following the world wars. They’ve also argued that in spite of its internal complexity and heterogeneity, neoliberalism nevertheless coheres around a number of core ideas, conceptual principles, and lines of argument.

Once we view it not as some kind of vague ideology but as a well-defined tradition of thought, we can begin to trace the way neoliberalism was purposefully assembled by several generations of thinkers, intellectuals, and activists. Such prominent theorists as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Milton Friedman, and James M. Buchanan were only its most well-known champions. But they were themselves part of a well-organized and carefully curated network of like-minded thinkers, constituting a movement that explicitly understood itself to be advancing a coherent intellectual and political project. The beating heart of this project was the Mont Pelerin Society, an international network of neoliberal thinkers that was founded by Hayek in 1947 and that has remained its most decisive intellectual lodestar ever since.

Although much has been written on the subject of neoliberal thought, thus far little has been said about its relation to the category of race. And although several scholars, including Quinn Slobodian, Jessica Whyte, and Arun Kundnani, have taken some decisive steps in this direction, we’ve yet to see a systematic account of the way neoliberals have thought about, defined, or theorized race.

I’m currently writing a book that aims at filling this gap in our understanding by offering a systematic intellectual history of neoliberal thinking on race. The book seeks to show that far from being a “colorblind” tradition that has paid the subject of race little to no heed, as many of its critics have suggested, neoliberalism has in fact had much to say on the topic. I trace the layered and complex history of neoliberal approaches to race and assess what its significance is for neoliberal thought at large.

My hope is that this knowledge will be valuable not only in scholarly terms but also, and especially, in equipping anti-racist thought and praxis with a better understanding of how neoliberalism has helped shape the forms of racism that continue to blight our societies. After all, dismantling those racisms requires that we ask where they’ve come from historically, which ideas and arguments sustain them, and how they interact with the dominant politics of our time.

Below I share some of my key findings, presented as ten theses on race and neoliberalism. My aim is not to provide an exhaustive summary of my argument or to go into much detail on any particular subject. The theses are framed as short, general observations. If they lack in detail it’s because they’re intended not as definitive statements but as invitations to further study. They are attempts at contouring; essays in provocation.

(1) Neoliberalism contains several more or less robust theories of race

Neoliberalism, like any branch of liberal theory and indeed any coherent body of thought, concerns itself with a wide variety of different subjects. Far from merely being an economic doctrine concerned only with the free market or individual liberty, neoliberalism is in fact a highly varied, complex, and often internally inconsistent tradition of thought.

It’s unsurprising, then, that neoliberal thinkers have between them addressed a staggering variety of problem fields. The neoliberal tradition contains more or less robust theoretical approaches not only to the concept of liberty, the free market, or so-called rational choice, but also to such seemingly disparate issues as ontology, the nature of knowledge, constitutionalism, the history of ideas, human rights, the family unit, religion, warfare, and, indeed, race. Differently put: race has always been a formal concern of neoliberal thought.

Even a cursory glance at the history of neoliberal ideas shows that many neoliberals have written, often at great length, on the subject of race. For some neoliberals, the question of race was of great historical and philosophical concern. Ludwig von Mises, for example, who was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society, addressed the question of race across several of his books and argued as late as 1957 that, historically speaking, white Europeans had been more successful at building a civilization than any other racial group. The French philosopher Louis Rougier, also a first-generation neoliberal, likewise tried to theorize how race, culture, and what he called popular ‘mentality’ related to civilizational achievement. He did so across a number of writings, including a book published as late as 1971.

Other neoliberals primarily approached race as an economic problem. This includes Gary Becker, for example, who in the 1950s wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the economics of (racial) discrimination. Becker’s chief aim was to understand how discrimination functions in the economic domain, and his primary focus was on the relation between white and Black communities in the United States. In the decades to follow, several of his neoliberal colleagues likewise came to study the economics of discrimination and this resulted in a number of papers and books with such titles as “Minorities in the Market Place” (by Harold Demsetz), “Capitalism and the Jews” (by Milton Friedman), A Theory of Racial Harmony (by Alvin Rabushka), or Race and Economics (by Walter E. Williams).

Especially prolific on the subject of race was Thomas Sowell, who was affiliated to a prominent neoliberal think tank and who joined the Mont Pelerin Society in the early 1980s. Sowell dedicated much of his exceptionally prolific career to studying the subject of race and published widely on the subject, including such books as Race and Economics (1975), Markets and Minorities (1981), Ethnic America (1981), The Economics and Politics of Race (1983), Race and Culture (1994), and Intellectuals and Race (2013). Across these various books, and many more besides, Sowell addressed the issue of race from a wide variety of angles, touching upon the economics, politics, history, and psychology of racial belonging. His is arguably the most subtle and comprehensive treatment of race to have come out of the neoliberal tradition.

The same can’t be said, however, for the works of Charles Murray, who co-authored the highly controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve. Murray was already orbiting the neoliberal movement when that book came out, and finally joined the Mont Pelerin Society in the year 2000. In recent years, he has continued pursuing his pseudo-scientific research on race, presented most recently in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class(2020) and Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021)

Race, in short, has always attracted the attention of neoliberal thinkers. To many in the neoliberal movement, race was (and remains) a prominent concern, worthy of lengthy historical and theoretical analysis, even though this has clearly taken on a number of different guises over time.

(2) Neoliberalism systematically trades in racialized ideas

One of the difficulties with studying racial discourse is that the category of race does not always openly announce its presence. Racial thinking regularly enters the stage in disguise, dressed in more or less coded terms.

Some philosophers of race, such as the late and great Charles W. Mills, have come to call concepts, ideas, or arguments that have been coded this way “racialized.” This term communicates that such ideas reproduce the logic and effects of racial division even though they don’t appear to be straightforward instances of racism or race science. In other words, a text or theory can engage in racial thinking without explicitly signaling that it is. And this is also true of many neoliberal texts and theories.

What then are some examples of racialized ideas that the neoliberal tradition contains? One is the firm belief, which is shared by most neoliberals and is indeed one of the tradition’s grounding assumptions, that modern ‘Western’ culture is superior to all other cultures. According to this argument, which Jessica Whyte has explored in detail, over the course of history the ‘West’ (by which is meant Western Europe and the English-speaking world) developed a cultural tradition that is, by objective standards, better than all others. More specifically, neoliberals argue that the West is better at generating wealth, safeguarding individual liberty, upholding the rule of law, and widening freedom of choice. This line of reasoning quickly lapses—as indeed it often does in neoliberal texts—into an exercise in hierarchically ordering different cultures. And this, of course, is a textbook example of a racialized idea.

Another example of a racialized idea that frequently surfaces in the neoliberal tradition is the argument that democracy isn’t a suitable form of government for non-Western people. On this view, for democratic rule to work a whole system of checks and balances needs to be in place first, because in the absence of such a system self-government lapses into tyranny. Crucially, however, these checks and balances don’t just include legal or political institutions, such as free elections or the rule of law, but also a specific set of cultural attitudes, such as respect for private property, faith in the free market, and individualist values. Since robust forms of these attitudes tend only to be found in Western societies, many neoliberals argue, democracy can’t be expected to function anywhere else. Non-Western peoples, for them, are more or less doomed to live under non-democratic rule.

Neither of these claims needs to rely on the terminology of race in order to function, but each clearly presses a racialized distinction between “the West” and “the rest” into service. The language of race can’t always be discerned on the surface of these arguments but it does make up a crucial undercurrent, decisively influencing the flow of neoliberal thought.

(3) Neoliberal ideas routinely reproduce racial stereotypes

Racial (or racist) stereotypes fall under a specific category of racialized imagery, in that they’re relatively easy to recognize and tend to stay more or less stable over time. Especially when they are presented bluntly, stereotypes can function as stubborn racist canards. Yet they can also fulfill more subtle roles, especially when they’re woven more delicately into what otherwise appear to be scientifically credible arguments.

Neoliberal thought is rife with examples of racial stereotypes. Sometimes these are presented with no measure of subtlety. In a short but especially lurid 1965 piece on “The Problem of the Negro,” for instance, the prominent neoliberal economist George Stigler argued that the average Black person in the United States wasn’t interested in education and didn’t want to work hard. For Stigler, this, and not the existence of anti-Black racism, served to explain Black people’s lower economic status.

The argument that laziness, a lack of frugality, or bad educational attainment are the root causes of poverty and deprivation is one of neoliberal thought’s most common staples. Variations on this claim can be found in virtually all neoliberal approaches to problems of economic development, poverty, or income inequality. In the eyes of most neoliberals, the poor owe their poverty less to structural or systemic factors than to their own shortcomings or deficiencies.

Neoliberals also commonly reach for stereotypes that relate to entire cultures. One stubborn trope that returns again and again in the neoliberal tradition is that Islamic culture is fundamentally at odds with principles of individual liberty, private enterprise, and indeed democratic self-rule. Such prominent neoliberals as Ludwig von Mises, Louis Rougier, and Deepak Lal have all variously claimed that Islam encourages submission rather than enterprise, traditionalism rather than curiosity, and hierarchy rather than individuality. This, they conclude, has rendered Islamic societies stagnant and backward.

These and various other stereotypical images are such regular features in neoliberal writings that they’re best understood as a structural component of neoliberal thought. They’re less its outer ornaments than its foundational supports, a series of presuppositions that serve to ground a whole slew of other neoliberal beliefs.

(4) Neoliberals often disagreed over questions of race

Although many neoliberals have addressed the subject of race in their work, it’s not the case that they’ve produced anything like a unified or homogeneous neoliberal position on this issue. Stronger yet: the neoliberals often disagreed amongst themselves on questions of race. And while specific patterns can certainly be discerned across their various conceptions of race, the neoliberals were also often at odds over the particularities of what race is, how it functions, or what precise impact it has on history, development, or economic performance.

At times, these disagreements were largely implicit, residing at the level of conceptual discrepancy. For example, while many early neoliberals, including Ludwig von Mises,  believed that race is a biological phenomenon that determines a population’s capacity for economic performance at the level of genetics, later neoliberals such as Thomas Sowell explicitly challenged this position and argued that racial belonging has no basis in biology and is exclusively a cultural phenomenon. More recently, Charles Murray’s work on race once more reintroduced biological essentialism into neoliberal thought when it revived the claim that racial differences are rooted in genetics and are more or less immutable.

At other times, these disagreements were more explicit and could even get fairly heated. For example, when Milton Friedman presented a paper called “Capitalism and the Jews” at the 1972 Mont Pelerin Society conference, he was met with sincere criticism from some of his neoliberal comrades. The paper had drawn upon Werner Sombart’s notoriously antisemitic work on the history of capitalism and this evoked a fierce response from Herbert Frankel, who, like Friedman, was of Jewish descent. In a reply published several years later, Frankel accused Friedman not only of whitewashing Sombart’s racism but also of himself perpetuating racial stereotypes about Jewish people.

It’d be wrong, then, to present the neoliberal movement as having developed a single unified or internally stable theory of race. It’s more accurate to say that for them, race was a strategic object of contention, a field of disagreement, and that neoliberal thinking on this subject has notably shifted over time.

(5) Neoliberalism has influenced the development of wider racial discourse

Like any school or tradition of thought, neoliberalism is in part a product of its time. The problems that occupied the neoliberals, and the solutions they offered in turn, derived much of their meaning from the historical context in which they were formulated. This is no less true of the problem of race.

Crucially, however, neoliberals were not merely the passive recipients of broader intellectual trends. Rather, their work actively influenced the way race was conceptualized more generally. By taking up and developing existing lines of argument in particular historical contexts, by coining new terms with which to theorize racial belonging, or by latching onto ongoing, high-profile debates on the issue of race, the neoliberal movement has made a number of crucial contributions to the trajectory of 20^th-century racial discourse.

One wider discursive shift to which the neoliberal movement contributed, for example, occurred in the wake of the Second World War. In the decades following 1945, a new social-scientific consensus emerged which held that, in biological terms, humanity is not divisible into distinct racial groups. Race, in short, is not scientifically speaking real. Yet, as many philosophers of race have pointed out, this did not spell the end of racial discourse, much less of racism. Rather, the terms in which race was dominantly conceptualized shifted, and a biological way of understanding race made way for a cultural one. Cultural belonging, rather than genetic heritage, now became a key means of racial differentiation and exclusion. And the crucial point here is that, as Arun Kundnani has also argued, the neoliberals actively contributed to this shift, helping to assemble a robust theory of cultural differences that neatly mapped onto this emergent culturalist conception of race.

A more insidious example of neoliberalism’s impact on racial discourse revolves around the revival, in the final decades of the 20^th century, of a slew of pseudo-scientific debates on race and intelligence. A person’s IQ, a small contingent of psychologists and social scientists came to argue from the 1960s onwards, depends to a considerable extent on their racial background, biologically defined. They added that by studying different groups’ IQ scores it’s possible to calculate the relation between race and mental capacity and forever settle the vexed question of intellectual—and indeed racial—superiority. One of the key effects of this debate, of course, was that it led to the revival of biological essentialism, which sees race as a biological phenomenon that significantly impacts people’s capacities and abilities.

Perhaps the most notorious contribution to this pseudo-scientific debate on IQ was the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which claimed that intelligence is to a considerable extent determined by racial heritage and that, for this reason, IQ differentials can’t be fully remedied by means of political intervention. Crucially, that book was co-authored by Charles Murray, who was to join the Mont Pelerin Society six years after its publication and who has since published several other books rehearsing his position on the connection between race and intelligence. Following the publication of The Bell Curve, numerous prominent neoliberals, including Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Kenneth Minogue, and Richard Posner, publicly came to Murray’s defense, praising his courage if not necessarily every one of his conclusions. In this way, the neoliberal movement left a firm imprint on what became known as the ‘bell curve wars.’

Murray was not the only neoliberal to participate in the revival of race science surrounding IQ, however. Sowell himself had already made a number of original contributions in the 1970s and 80s. And although he did not endorse the biological essentialism of figures like Murray, Sowell did present their pseudo-scientific speculation as legitimate and valuable empirical research and cited their writings lavishly. In this way, he helped whitewash their work as a respectable form of social-scientific study.

Although there is some historical irony in the fact that the neoliberal movement contributed first to the eclipse of the biological conception of race and then to its revival, the pattern that emerges is that neoliberal thought has left a firm imprint not only on the terms in which public debates over race were waged at particular historical moments but also on the very issues that were their focus.

(6) The neoliberal tradition systematically trivialises histories of racial violence

Aside from formally theorizing the category of race and from more covertly using racialized ideas, the neoliberals have also engaged at length with histories of racial violence. Many of them have offered systematic accounts of colonial history, for instance, as well as the transatlantic slave trade, racial segregation under Jim Crow laws, and South African apartheid. Although their approaches to these histories vary amongst themselves, what they have in common is that they tend to trivialize or downplay the racial violence that’s been absolutely foundational to the history of Western capitalism.

The neoliberal approach to the history of colonialism stands as a particularly forceful example of such trivialization. For most neoliberals, the age of European colonial rule over parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas was, in moral and historical terms, ambiguous. At very different times, such influential neoliberals as Herbert Frankel, Peter Bauer, and William Easterly have all argued that while the ideas of racial superiority and the undeniable violence that often accompanied colonial expansion were clearly wrong, colonialism also came with many boons. Colonial rule, they’ve claimed, brought technological, medical, educational, and economic innovation, as well as such “Western” values as individualism, respect for private property, and the rule of law. Because, in their view, its advantages have unequivocally outweighed its disadvantages, colonialism’s “balance sheet” was positive.

On the issue of the slave trade, most neoliberals have taken a more principled position, condemning the institution of slavery outright and in no uncertain terms. Yet even here a noticeable sense of ambivalence has occasionally crept in. Some neoliberals who have addressed the history of slavery, including Thomas Sowell, Peter Duignan, and Lewis Gann, have presented the history of the Middle Passage as riven with many complexities and ambiguities. Duignan and Gann even went so far as to claim that it’s hard to assess the overall moral impact of the slave trade, asserting in a 1984  book that the economic and cultural effects of the slave trade were not all negative, as it introduced many parts of Africa into the world market and in some instances stimulated economic growth. Sowell, for his part, has argued emphatically against the notion of reparations, reasoning amongst other things that it may well be the case that the contemporary descendants of slaves are better off than they would’ve been had the slave trade never happened.

It’s crucial to repeat that neither of these lines of argument straightforwardly denies the centrality of racial violence to the West’s history. Rather, their aim is to diminish its importance, to suggest that perhaps the history of racial subordination may be forgiven or brushed aside as a relatively minor blemish on the West’s otherwise stellar historical record.

(7) Neoliberal thought has frequently defined itself in opposition to anti-racist movements

It’s often been observed that the neoliberal movement has tended to define its intellectual and political priorities in opposition to the various political movements it rejects. Neoliberalism has always been a combative school of thought, presenting itself as liberty’s champion in the face of its many supposed assailants.

Although neoliberalism’s most stable and enduring enemy has without doubt been socialism, this has never been neoliberalism’s only nemesis. Over the decades, the subjects of its critique would shift along with dominant intellectual trends. As old enemies disappeared and new ones emerged, the neoliberals would adjust the chief targets of their opprobrium accordingly. And, crucially, many of the new opponents it accrued this way over the course of the 20^th century were anti-racist movements.

Perhaps most emblematic of this pattern was the way the neoliberal movement turned against decolonization in the decades following World War Two. Although they saw the end of the empire as more or less inevitable, most neoliberals argued that the way decolonial movements understood their struggle was not only misguided but also dangerous. One figure they criticized with singular vehemence was Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana and a prominent anti-colonial philosopher. They were also fiercely opposed to other post-colonial politicians, such as Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, as well as broader anti-colonial and anti-racist movements such as the négritude movement and, some decades later, the movement advocating a New International Economic Order.

In more recent years, neoliberal thought has once more adjusted itself to shifting public trends and has come to speak out against some of today’s most visible anti-racist movements and theories. Some neoliberals, like Richard Posner, have targeted Critical Race Theory, while others, like Charles Murray, have set their sights on the Black Lives Matter movement. And although their specific criticisms aren’t necessarily shared by all of their neoliberal comrades, there undoubtedly exists a pronounced and widespread antipathy to contemporary anti-racism among today’s neoliberals.

(8) The neoliberal movement has absorbed many prominent racial agitators

Network building has always been at the very heart of the neoliberal project. As some have argued, neoliberalism is as much an intellectual movement or thought collective as it is a tradition of thought. And if the neoliberal movement’s habitual opposition to anti-racist movements tells us something about its intellectual and political priorities, then so too does the fact that it’s routinely platformed—or even absorbed into its ranks—prominent racial agitators.

One especially (in)famous example here is Enoch Powell, who, as Robbie Shilliam and Arun Kundnani have both pointed out, was an active member of the Mont Pelerin Society when he delivered his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968. And while this speech all but ended his career as a prominent member of the Conservative Party, his neoliberal colleagues saw no reason to distance themselves from his thinking. Instead, they continued to invite him to attend the MPS’s annual meetings, where he spoke in 1968, 1972, and 1974.

The same is true of Keith Joseph, one of Margaret Thatcher’s closest allies and founder of the Centre for Policy Studies, a prominent neoliberal think tank. Like Powell before him, Joseph scuppered his own political career when he gave a speech in 1974 in which he appeared to make a case for eugenics. But while this speech torpedoed his chances of winning the Tory Party leadership, which went to Thatcher instead, it did not diminish his standing in the neoliberal movement, which continues to this day to revere Joseph as one of Britain’s most ardent champions of neoliberalism.

In more recent decades the neoliberal thought collective has continued to provide an intellectual home for prominent right-wing firebrands. Such internationally notorious figures as Charles Murray, Václav Klaus, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Peter Thiel have all orbited around or even been integrated into the MPS, which has given them many opportunities to speak at its regular meetings.

The neoliberal movement likes to project an image of itself as intellectually courageous, willing to debate all ideas regardless of how ‘politically correct’ they’re deemed to be. In practice, however, this “courage” extends much more flexibly to right-wing ideas than, for instance, to anti-racist or socialist ones, which are tendentially brushed aside as inherently authoritarian. This dynamic inexorably pushes neoliberal thought rightward, steadily rendering it a particularly prestigious platform for ideas of racial exclusion.

(9) Neoliberal politics has proved easy to merge with nationalist agendas

Stepping outside of the realm of ideas and into the field of actually existing neoliberal politics, it is plainly the case that the neoliberal agenda, especially in its conservative-liberal guise, has proved easy to merge with nationalist, exclusionary, and xenophobic discourses. All over the world, political elites that have spent decades rolling out and consolidating neoliberal reforms are now making common cause with activist movements and political parties on the extreme right.

As many have pointed out, this has generated a new modality of neoliberal politics, one that synthesizes neoliberalism’s ruthless prioritization of the interests of capital with calls for stricter immigration controls, a rise in xenophobic (and especially Islamophobic) discourse, increasingly lurid culture-war posturing, and a rapid erosion of civil and political rights. Across the globe this new mutation of neoliberalism has manifested in a variety of different ways: Brexit is one of its faces, and Trumpism is another. But the administrations of figures like Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, and Viktor Orbán must also be seen in this light, as must many more diffuse or ephemeral political movements.

It’s not so much that this convergence between the neoliberal establishment and the far right is a simple marriage of convenience, or a temporary alliance that happens to be opportune to political elites all over the world. Rather, this convergence has been able to come about in large part because the neoliberal tradition itself has always had a much stronger affinity with the conservative and indeed xenophobic right than with the center, let alone anything to further to the left. Racialized stereotypes, ideas of Western supremacy, imperialist fantasies—these have always constituted neoliberalism’s intellectual stomping grounds. And thus the coming together, in recent years, of racially inflected nativism and neoliberal statecraft represents less the death rattle of the neoliberal age than its latest manifestation.

(10) Neoliberalism is constitutively racialized

Taking all of the above into consideration, it’s plain to see that race is one of the key problem fields around which neoliberal thought has been assembled. Questions surrounding not only the true nature of race but also its history, its relation to climate or culture, and its ability to stir political unrest have always sat high on neoliberals’ intellectual agenda. Differently put: as a project and a tradition of thought, neoliberalism is constitutively racialized.

It is crucial to be precise here. To say that the neoliberal project is constitutively racialized is not to say that neoliberalism can be reduced to a philosophy of race, that all neoliberal ideas ultimately collapse into racialized ideas, or even that any individual neoliberal authors are racist. Each of these claims might merit debate, but the point being made here is more specific: it’s that certain ideas of race, and certain racialized ideas, have always sat at the heart of the neoliberal tradition, have been built into its foundations, and have molded its internal logic.

It should be self-evident that although neoliberalism is constitutively rooted in racialized foundations, these don’t make for its only defining feature. Neoliberalism is also constitutively anti-socialist, constitutively individualist, and constitutively Eurocentric, amongst other things. To draw attention to its racialized logics is thus not to suggest that racial ideas overwhelm neoliberal thought in its entirety, holding it hostage or condemning it to side with racism by default. It’s to suggest that racialized ideas are woven so tightly into the fabric of the neoliberal tradition that it’s not possible to remove them without definitively altering that tradition and rendering it unrecognizable.

There’s one crucial political implication to be drawn out here. If race was never a mere afterthought or conceptually peripheral for the neoliberal movement, it can’t be an afterthought for neoliberalism’s opponents either. Concisely put, if neoliberalism is constitutively racialized, our critique of it, as well as the alternative imaginaries we articulate in its stead, must be constitutively anti-racist.

Concluding thoughts

As I noted at the outset, the intention behind the ten theses offered here wasn’t to offer an exhaustive account of neoliberal thinking on race but to invite further study. My chief contention, then, is that we need to revisit the neoliberal tradition and approach it through the lens of race. This task points in two directions. It requires, in the first place, that we map the various ways in which the neoliberal movement has thought about, theorized, or invoked the category of race. We must pay attention to the moments at which neoliberal thought has sought to problematize race and situate these in relation to the various other problems it’s sought to address. We need, in short, a cartography of neoliberal constructions of race.

Yet since the category of race often exceeds the signifier of “race,” and routinely travels in coded form, this task also requires that we look beyond the moments at which neoliberals explicitly invoke it. We must equip ourselves with a conceptual toolkit that’s sensitive to race’s more subtle appearances and that can identify racialized ideas even when the language of race is nowhere to be seen. Here, philosophers and historians of race have a lot to teach neoliberalism’s critics.

A critical appraisal of neoliberalism’s constitutively racialized foundations is long overdue. Today, when neoliberal reason once again threatens to slide into racially coded authoritarianism or naked white supremacy, and with climate catastrophe that neoliberal elites had no small part in engineering on the horizon, the stakes could scarcely be higher.

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