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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
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- [00:48]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
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- [01:20]
Marshall Poe
I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBM Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:26]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh. Today I'm on honored to be speaking with Dr. Lars Cornelison about a recent book that he has published with Stanford University Press. The book is called Neoliberalism and Race and it just came out a few months ago and it's a very topical issue. Everybody's talking about neoliberalism these days. Everybody's talking about race and immigration these days. So I think we have a lot to talk about with Lars. Dr. Lars Cornelison is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in the History of European Ideas, Constellations and Modern Intellectual History. Lars, welcome to New Books Network.
- [03:10]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Thank you very much for having me.
- [03:12]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Before we start talking about this wonderful book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, tell us about your field of expertise and more importantly, why did you decide to write a book about neoliberalism and race? Where did the idea of this book came to you?
- [03:26]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Oh, thank you so much. So my name is Lars Kon Edison. I am based in the United Kingdom. I am a researcher of neoliberalism and have been for over 10 years now, ever since I started my PhD. I work for an independent research funder based in London, but I also lecture in politics in Manchester. I started researching neoliberalism as part of my PhD and neoliberalism here refers to a tradition of thought that really emerged in the 1920s and 30s. So during the first and during the period between the first and second world war and was an effort, an attempt by a group of economists and philosophers to kind of revive classical liberalism in the wake of the Great Depression, which sort of in advanced capitalist societies had really meant that classical liberalism had been, was widely considered to have failed and to be a philosophy of government that would produce economic crisis. So it was the period in which social democracy and socialist Stenkinsian thought sort of came to the fore as the main dominant kind of philosophy of government. So there's a group of economists that decide they want to restate classical liberalism for the 20th century. And these people we would now, or neoliberals, so they developed a whole tradition of thought. They were active over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st. They're still very active today. And it's that tradition that I began studying during my PhD. My PhD really was on the philosophy of neoliberalism. I have a background in philosophy. I used to study philosophy. I used to study political philosophy in particular. So that's how I learned about neoliberal thinkers in the first place. But over the course of my PhD, I kind of retrained as a historian as well as a philosopher. So I'm kind of a historically oriented historian of neoliberal thinking and neoliberal thought. I came to be interested in the topic of race as it figures within neoliberal thoughts. As I was doing my PhD, I couldn't initially really focus on that because you know how it is, you have to finish your PhD and you have to sort of just get it over with. But then once I'd finished the PhD, I thought to myself, I've come across this concept of race a few times in these important books by Neil Bull thinkers, and I think there's something there that needs to be studied more. At the same time, there were political developments happening across the advanced capitalist world that proved to me that this was really particularly topical and timely topic to think about. In the UK, where I'm based, in 2016, in a referendum that people voted to leave the European Union, this is known as the Brexit referendum. In the United States, Donald Trump was elected for his first term as president. And the kind of broader public discourse surrounding this really told a story of this is the end of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was when globalization was riding high and all parties across the sort of political spectrum were sort of advocating free market enterprise. But now what we're seeing is the rise of a new form of nationalist right wing populism that is sweeping neoliberalism aside. And I thought to myself, that isn't correct. What I'm seeing around me, these forms of nationalism that are informed by kind of racist sentiment sometimes and that have these kind of ideological conceptions of nationhood and belonging, they existed in neoliberal thought as well. So I was not convinced by this dominant narrative that the kind of new resurgence of racism meant the end of neoliberalism. I thought, there's something else happening here. Neoliberalism has a much more complicated relationship to race than that. So I decided to study it. It took me, you know, six years to do so and many archival trips and many sort of books later, but here we are. The book Neoliberalism and Racist. It's the outcome of that project.
- [08:03]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Thank you very much. This was a great, great explanation. Especially I really enjoyed it, enjoyed it when you put neoliberalism into context. Because if you ask different economists or historians or political historians, they will all come up with a Different definition of neoliberalism. And I think you have actually touched upon a lot of important points which hopefully we'll get to unpack as we go ahead. Rise of nationalism and racial theories. I mean, racism, even that you mentioned. A lot of people might think it's a new trend, but as you show in the book, these two are intertwined. But the question I have is why do you think that this idea of race has. It's more recent historians like you and others, I know you and one other historian whom we talked about before this pod, before we started recording, who've been writing about the idea of racial theories in neoliberal economy. But why do you think race has remained this blind spot or it has rarely been critically studied in the literature or history of neoliberalism?
- [09:08]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Yeah, there's a few works coming out now that are rectifying this issue. The best book to have come out in the last few years on this is Arun Kunani's book what Is Anti Racism? Which is a book that traces the history of anti racism over the 20th century. But it also spends a lot of time talking about the racial elements in neoliberal thought, which is just an excellent book. But up until that point, up until the last maybe five or six years, this remained a blind spot, really, a sort of gap in this literature. I think there's a few causes for this, but one of them certainly is that the critical literature on neoliberalism developed relatively late. So the broad understanding of when neoliberalism as a kind of political and economic theory became dominant is that its first electoral victories in the advanced capitalist world were with Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and then shortly thereafter, Ronald Reagan. And then this became a kind of wave that swept capitalist societies. The critical literature took decades really to catch up with that and to realize what was behind this revolution. I'm not saying that there wasn't really good scholarship on this ideology that sort of sat behind Margaret Thatcher, for example, in Britain, Stuart hall, the brilliant cultural theorist. Stuart hall was sort of on top of what neoliberal ideology was about from the start. But there wasn't a systematic body of critique that really sort of dug into the deeper layers of neoliberalism until the mid-2000s, which is when this scholarship really took off. One of the big influences on this literature developing was David Harvey publishing a short book called A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which is a very good book. And another was that Michel Foucault's lectures at the College de France were published in 2008 in English for the first time, which also develops a sort of critical analysis of neoliberalism. And was very. She developed in 1979, but wasn't translated until decades later. Very perceptive, very productive in terms of telling scholars in the present what to look out for. So this created a kind of flurry of new research. But the problem with that research was that it was catching up, and it was trying to sort of get the basics right about what neoliberalism is, and it was letting its research agenda be shaped by the neoliberalism as it existed then. So, you know, this was the period of the global financial crash of 2007, 2008. It was the period in which leaders all over the world were in power who were a sort of gentler form of neoliberalism, if you like. So, you know, Barack Obama is a very good example of this. So that is what the scholarship is focused on. What that caused is that scholarship really mostly focused on the economic theory and the political theory that comes out of neoliberalism. And it was asking itself, what does neoliberalism want the state and government to look like in order to be able to support free markets and free enterprise and individual rights and rights to private property and so forth? So there was a lot of really great scholarship on neoliberal economic theory. Its position on monetarism, for example, its position on monopolies, that sort of thing. But what was left out of this research was the much broader scope that neoliberal ideology has always taken from the start. So neoliberalism is a philosophy that doesn't just talk about economic theory, that doesn't just talk about what the state should look like. It also has comprehensive theories about culture, about family life, about the rule of law, about world history, and also about race and racism and colonialism, which are the themes that I speak to. So this is a shift that has been happening in the past five or six years where scholarship has really started to look into these other topics that neoliberalism has always spoken to. I think a second factor in this remains, unfortunately, that race and racism continue to be a blind spot in general for critical scholarship. There is, of course, an enormous amount of excellent scholarship out there on race. There's critical race studies, there's black Marxist theory, there's black feminism, all of which have got brilliant theories and understandings of what race is and how it can work subtly as well as kind of explicitly. But the broader scholarly mainstream, I think, is still a bit behind on this. And in particular, There tends to be a somewhat one dimensional understanding of what racism is. And when it appears, which is an understanding of racism, that really looks for moments of individual prejudice where I might dislike another individual on the basis of their skin color or on the basis of their heritage. But what that doesn't make room for is forms of racism that are a lot more subtle than that and that don't actually make an appeal to race at all, or to biology or to the sort of superiority of one group over another. And it's really these sort of subtle, much more subtle configurations of racism that you need to have a good understanding of if you want to study an ideology like neoliberalism. Particularly because the mature phase of neoliberalism, as I like to call it, really happened in the decades after the Second World War. And during that period, historically, the broader public was very wary of the language of race because the experience of fascism had taught capitalist societies to be worried when the language of race sort of makes an appearance. So that didn't mean that racism disappeared. It meant that racism had to take on different forms and had to become more subtle in its expression. This is also true for neoliberalism. And that means that if you want to study neoliberalism during this period, you have to have a much more subtle understanding of how racism can work and which sort of concepts, ideas and arguments to look out for when you're studying it.
- [15:58]
Morteza Hajizadeh
I think it's. You put your finger on a good point about that idea of race or definition of race, and how it manifests itself differently depending on the people, or if it's in a more complex structure like an economic ideology called neoliberalism. You also mentioned the idea of civilization. And both von Mises and also Hayek had ideas about race and also they had ideas about progress in civilization. And I think they also had these racial biased ideas of which, let's say I'm using air quotes, race is more civilized or less civilized. But can you tell me a little bit about their ideas of race, whether similar or different, and how did it lead to this racialized conception of the idea of civilization?
- [17:00]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. So Ludwig von Mises and Hayek are two of the most influential early neoliberal philosophers. They're both Austrian and they started their career in Vienna before the outbreak of the Second World War. And then both of them have to leave a moves to London to the London School of Economics. And Mises also has to leave. He goes to the United States in the first instance because they have to flee Nazism. Essentially, they work in a tradition that is known as Austrian economic theory, which emerges in the early 1870s as part of what in the technical literature on the history of economic thought is called the marginal utility revolution, where economic theory reorients itself around a different understanding of what economic value is. And the Austrians have a very particular place in that history, in that they have a much broader philosophy of history and philosophy of civilization, within which their philosophical conception of economic value is only one component. The other marginal utility thinkers, such as Jevons, have a much narrower conception of value. And this is relevant because both Mises and Hayek are working within this tradition, which understands economic theory and economic philosophy to be only a small component of a philosophical worldview. And what that means is that both of them are thinkers who are not just interested in capital theory or the nature of, for example, monopoly or the nature of trade. They both formulate philosophies of world history, of societal order, in Hayek's case, of a philosophy of knowledge. Hayek did his PhD on the sort of science of the brain and epistemology. So they are both thinking through societal order and world history, and as part of that, are developing a critique of socialism that they sort of became famous for. What's different about these two thinkers who knew each other extremely well? Hayek was a student of Mises, and they were lifelong friends. What's different between their works is that a part of Mises worldview is that it actually has a theory of race. So he never wrote a book about race. He never spent, you know, entire pages and pages and pages talking about it. But it does recur throughout his life. And, you know, he wrote books for a good 60 years. And his ideas about race are sort of woven into that body of work from the start until the end. And he had a very straightforward idea of race that you would expect from somebody who's writing in the 1920s, which is that race is something that is your biological inheritance, that comes from your genetic background, and that is essentially written into your being at birth. So he calls it that which is innate in you as an individual. And it also means that you can distinguish between racial groups on a sort of global scale. He does very explicitly criticize racist philosophies. He rejects Nazi race philosophy, and he rejects the theories of revile racists like Arthur de Gobineau, who's known for theorizing racial superiority. But he says very explicitly and also repeatedly, the fact that there is these bad theories of race in the world doesn't mean that we can just get rid of race theory altogether. In fact, race theory is very important if we want to theorize world history. So he makes room within his philosophy for a theory of race that can account for the genetic and biological inheritance that we receive as part of our racial background, without falling into the trap of thinking that one race is biologically superior to another. Where that gets him is that he thinks, for example, that some races are biologically better prepared for social cooperation or for capitalist economic systems than other races. And where that ends up is that he believes that the European race ended up developing capitalism over the course of the modern period and the Industrial Revolution because as a racial group, it was predisposed towards that type of cooperation, and other racial groups would not have been able to to develop capitalism. Hayek does not do any of this. He does not think about race in these terms at all. In fact, race is really a gap in absence in Hayek's work. He talks about it extremely rarely. It is there. There's a few mentions of it throughout his body of work. It's very rare. He talks occasionally in the 1940s, during the second World War, about what he, at that point in time, calls racialism, which was the common term for what we would now call racism. And he says this is a bad thing. The Nazis have a kind of racialist philosophy of Aryan superiority, and we should reject that. But at the same time, he is not critical at all of racial segregation in the United States, for example, which continued until the 1960s. And in fact, he thought that the United States, at that point in time, even while the Jim Crow laws were still in effect, was a beacon of liberal, progressive Western society. So I think what that tells us is that he simply didn't care that much about race. He didn't care enough about race to think that racial segregation somehow violated the principles of liberalism. So Mises and Hayek have a very different relationship to the concept of race. But what I argue in my book is that that doesn't prevent them from converging on what I would call a racialized conception of history, which sees civilization as a kind of spectrum that leads from savagery, which is the term that they use, to high civilization. And they frequently say quite explicitly that what they mean by high civilization is European culture, and what they mean by savage cultures are both prehistoric cultures, but also during the 20th century, what they would consider to be less developed cultures, such as black African cultures or Native American cultures. They are quite explicit about this. And this is a theory of world history. That thinks that the progression from the state of savagery to the state of civilization is one that essentially occurs when a culture develops a better capacity for individual freedom and a recognition of individual rights and property rights. So they believe that western culture ended up being this pinnacle of civilization because it developed and then embraced liberalism, essentially. They are also worried that this civilization can break down at any point. And a really key component of their critique of socialism was not just that they thought it was economically inefficient or that it was a bad way of organizing your economy. They believed that if socialism was to be embraced, it would cause the downfall of European civilization. They called it civilizational retrogression. And they would say quite explicitly, if we in the western world or what they called the Western world are to embrace civilization, before long we would live like savages. We would live in a hand to mouth existence and we would be no better than the savages that are sort of roaming the steppes of Asia. And it's these kind of highly racial and racialized configurations and sort of stereotypes that always come with their theory and philosophy of civilization. And I am interested in the book, in how these two thinkers who have a very different relationship to the concept of race itself, nevertheless end up with the same understanding of civilization and what they call Savitri. Well, I was down on my last.
- [26:24]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Dollar Then I started saving because the.
- [26:26]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Bank said fiscal restraint is what you're craving so I put my earnings in.
- [26:29]
Morteza Hajizadeh
A high yield account Let the savings compound and the interest mount I'm optimizing cash flow putting debt in check now.
- [26:36]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Time is my friend and not a pain in the neck and we've got.
- [26:39]
Morteza Hajizadeh
A little cash to rebuild the old deck.
- [26:42]
Marshall Poe
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- [27:09]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [27:12]
Marshall Poe
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty.
- [27:16]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Liberty, Liberty Liberty Savings.
- [27:18]
Marshall Poe
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- [27:20]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Excludes Massachusetts.
- [27:21]
Marshall Poe
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Dr. Lars Cornelison
With credit cards on the app?
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Marshall Poe
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- [27:49]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Experian.
- [27:52]
Morteza Hajizadeh
It's quite interesting that a lot of what you just discussed we can actually see these days with what's happening in New York with Zoram Hamdani winning the election. But there was a lot of false information spread against him. But there was also a lot of racially biased caricaturing of him relating it also to economy. He calls himself a democratic socialist, of course, but there was a lot of racial abuse, slanders and caricatures being spread about and still on Twitter is filled with that. And you can see how that new liberal thought is still full at play. Play there.
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Dr. Lars Cornelison
Yeah.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And when you talk about this idea of civilization being this spectrum according to neoliberalism or Mises, let's say that's also where they play with the idea of the myth of lazy native and they use it as a tool, as a racialized tool in the neoliberal development theory. Am I right?
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Dr. Lars Cornelison
Yeah, that's right. So I, I use the concept of the myth of a lazy native, which I take from Syed Hussein Alatas, to think about how the neoliberals that in the sort of decade following the Second World War were really first thinking through the concept of economic development and what they at the time would have called underdevelopment. So what's important about this group of neoliberals is that they developed a close relationship with the British Colonial office. During the 1940s and 50s. The Colonial Office at this point in time was focused on the concept of development. It came out of a sort of set of shifts that occurred within British colonial philosophy around the 30s, which wanted the aim of colonialism to become not sort of just naked exploitation as it had been, but the so called development of the colonial world in order to prepare it for independence. You know, British colonial officials were very aware that colonialism was coming to an end and that the horizon of empire would be this sort of slow secession of colonial territories. Neoliberals played a key part in this because they actually occupied quite key positions within the Colonial Office research infrastructure. So let's say the network of research commissions within the Colonial Office that focused on colonial economics was heavily populated by what we would now consider to be neoliberal thinkers. And some of those people were commissioned to do very important pieces of research by the Colonial Office. Some of them were economic advisors to Controllers in East Asia or in the Caribbean. And some of them were on these sort of commissions and research funding networks is really what they were. But the net result of this is that they were essentially thinking through what development means from the perspective of colonial economics. And they were trying to think about what it might mean to stimulate development in these parts of the world that were on the brink of independence. So where does the trope of the lazy native come in? Well, it was a very convenient way for neoliberals to argue why are nations in the global south, former colonies, but also non colonized societies, so poor compared to the West? They rejected the idea that European colonialism was to blame, which was an argument that was being put forward very strongly at the time by anti colonial thinkers, really sort of captured later in the, in the, in the decade by Walter Rodney, who wrote the book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. But this was an argument that was already being put forward at the time. And neoliberals didn't like this because this suggested that Europe was to blame for the poverty experience elsewhere in the world, but also that things like foreign aid or maybe even colonial reparations would be a, a sort of normatively justified response to the history of colonialism. Instead they, they essentially argued, no, these parts of the world are poor because the local culture and the indigenous population is lazy or not productive or superstitious or bound to all sorts of religious practices that prevent them from developing as rapidly as western culture has been able to. There was a focus for a few years on Indian economic development in particular, which by this point had already achieved independence, but which was under political control by the Indian National Congress, which was a sort of socialist party. The neoliberals were very worried about this and they didn't like the five year plans that the National Congress was putting forward. So they went to India and they started talking about alternative models of development. And they said things like, you know, one of the reasons that India is underdeveloped is that, is that local culture reveres cows and so that prevents the rearing of cattle and that in turn prevents its agricultural economy from becoming as productive as it should be in order to be able to reach the next step age in economic development, which would then help the country to develop. So you can see there already that the myth of the lazy native quite easily slips into a set of other stereotypes about how local populations are too superstitious or too religiously motivated in order to be able to develop as fast as, as they should. But the, the ultimately I think the key argument there was the one about laziness. It comes in all sorts of terms. There's terms like indolence, there's terms like unproductive or torpid. So there's a range of these words, all of them very unpleasant, that get thrown around in order to explain why former colonial populations have not been able to achieve their rates of development that you've seen in Western capitalism. And at the end of the day, I think it's simply an attempt to deflect attention away from colonial extraction and from the fact that colonialism was a way of siphoning wealth from that part of the world into the capitalist world. And to suggest that the only path forward for these countries is to embrace capitalism in the same way that the Western world did, and to forget about the past, and particularly about colonial exploitation.
- [35:32]
Morteza Hajizadeh
This is the perfect segue to my next question, which is that colonial exploitation, part of the reason that the west did well in terms of when they accrued wealth was because of that exploitation and imperialism. And people like Hayek or Mises are completely negligent of that. They completely ignore that. And I guess they use that cultural explanation that you alluded to as a way to detract attention from the colonial histories of those countries. And is that the reason? Or let's say, and they were also supportive of authoritarian governments in some of those post colonial societies. Is that why they advocated that authoritarianism as a necessary condition to economic development in postcolonial societies?
- [36:20]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Yeah, that's a great question. You're right that not all neoliberals thought about colonialism at all. Some of them did, and some of them were also vaguely critical of it. There is a few neoliberal thinkers who during the 40s and 50s, do develop a criticism of European colonialism, but on moral grounds. So they argue that colonialism is morally indefensible, even though they do think that in a grand world historical sense it was a good thing and that it helped colonial societies develop faster than otherwise they would have. But overwhelmingly during the 40s, 50s and into the 60s, which is when the kind of decolonial tide really sweeps the world, neoliberalism is heavily, heavily arrayed against anti colonialism. And there's a few neoliberals that argue that anti colonialism is the biggest threat to the capitalist order at the time. The reason they think this is that of course we're talking about a context in which the Cold War is sort of carving the world into two main polar powers and then a kind of non aligned movement in the Middle the Soviet order and the capitalist order. And what the neoliberals are worried about is that anti colonialism is going to ferment socialism and communism in former colonies, which is not wrong. There were a lot of anti socialist movements that were socialist or nationalist in their orientation. But the neoliberal's response to this is to say, okay, anti colonialism is a problem and we need an alternative philosophy of colonialism that can articulate a kind of response to that. So they develop a defense of colonialism which, which really takes off in the 1960s and becomes quite a prominent part of, of neoliberal ideology at that point in time. During this period, they are concerned that independence movements are going too quickly and that some countries that are gaining independence in Africa, for example, and in the Caribbean are at risk of embracing a form of nationalism that will go against the interests of, of the Western capitalist world and in that way could cause problems both for capitalism and locally and are going to prevent economic growth from happening in these countries. You have to think about this in the context, for example, of the Suez crisis, where the nationalization of the Suez Canal really does disrupt global capitalist trade routes. So there is a real sense in which nationalist governments can do a good bit of damage to global capitalist value chains. What they are worried about in philosophy and theory and how they argue that independence movements are harmful is that these countries, these former colonial countries or sometimes sort of late colonial countries, are simply not ready for democratic self government. And they argue this on the basis that in order for democracy to function properly, it has to be embedded within a broader system of liberal checks and balances, by which they mean things like the rule of law and the protection of private property and individual rights. They don't mean civil rights. Importantly, their main focus is private property rights. And in the absence of those checks and balances, and more importantly, in the absence of a broad culture, a broad political culture, but also a broad religious and sort of mental culture that embraces these liberal values, democracy quickly becomes the tyranny of the majority. So they are worried that in countries that are decolonizing too fast, without these liberal checks and balances being in place, the result is going to be authoritarianism, which rejects liberalism. So their response, or their preferred alternative is to say, okay, if these countries have to become independent from former colonial empires, then it would be preferable to have a liberal authoritarian regime that is able to put these liberal checks and balances in place than it would be to have a not liberal democratic regime, because that is just going to wreak Havoc on its opportunities for growth. There's a few neoliberals that are supportive of the Franco regime in Spain for this reason, because there is a kind of philosophy of economy that draws upon liberal principles there. And famously, in the 70s, the neoliberals become supportive of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. And the arguments that they develop in defense of the Pinochet regime is exactly this. They say in Chile and in sort of Latin American culture in general, there is no respect for the rule of law, and there's no respect for free market private property rights. And therefore, what we need is a liberal dictator who is able to usher in a period of sort of market economic reforms. And only then can these countries transition to a democratic regime and more.
- [42:11]
Morteza Hajizadeh
The same thing also happened in South Africa, Right, in southern Africa, when they supported the white minority rule in southern Africa to reconcile liberal ideas.
- [42:25]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Yeah, that's right. So in this period, there's a few sort of last holdouts of white supremacy in southern Africa. There's, of course, apartheid South Africa, which isn't dismantled until the 90s. But there's also what at that point in time is called Rhodesia. This becomes Zimbabwe. Rhodesia is not an apartheid society at this point in December. It is a wide minority rule society. And some neoliberals, particularly a small group of them that developed a defense of Western colonialism, become invested in this sort of holdout of white minority rule in Rhodesia, because they are concerned that if a country like Rhodesia too quickly becomes democratized, then the black majority is going to either commit violence to the wide minority out of racial hatred and out of a history of oppression and out of revenge, or is going to disrupt any possible hope of economic development that exists in those societies which, in their view, are exclusively linked to the presence of white European settlers. So they think that it's white settlers that are capable of promoting economic growth, and it's only if they stay in power that prospects of growth can be maintained. And if these societies were to democratize too fast, they would become dictatorships, black dictatorships, essentially. So one of the ways that they try to reconcile this with their belief in kind of liberal ideals is that they think that instead of there being a color bar which gives the vote to white people but not to black people, there should be a culture bar, which is an argument they derive directly from Cecil Rhodes, in which black people with high enough education to be able to sort of make enlightened decisions for themselves should be given a vote which would maintain a white majority in terms of voting rights, but which would gradually expand voting rights to also encompass some elements of some elite elements of the black population. Of course, this doesn't happen, but what I find interesting about these arguments is that they present a kind of test case in the present for what were, up until then, historical defences of European colonialism. And as soon as they apply to white minority rule in the present, you can really see that these arguments are deeply, deeply invested in the racial superiority of white culture in the sort of south of Africa.
- [45:27]
Morteza Hajizadeh
I'd like to talk also about Thomas Sowell, who was an important. He was on the left, but then he became more or less a conservative. And we talked about how neoliberals conceived of race and the idea of culture and civilization. And he also had an important role in those discussions, I guess, because he himself was also black. And I'm keen to know his theory of race, how his theory of race kind of differed from others and from that genetic determinism and also structure racism. He didn't believe in the structure of racism. And you also argued that his use of the term culture, the word culture, sort of depoliticizes the idea of racial inequality, which he didn't really believe in. Can you talk about his ideas of race?
- [46:18]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Yes, I'd love to. Thomas Sowell is a very interesting figure. He is the thinker in my book that I had to grapple with the most and that I had to. Whose arguments I really had to sit with the most. He is the furthest that you can be from a sort of racist thinker in the way that some of the other characters in my book very clearly were just reprehensible people who believed that apartheid wasn't so bad. So what really isn't a thinker like that in some of his works? He's quite a subtle thinker. He is still alive. I think he's in his mid-90s now, and he is known, particularly in North America, as a black conservative. There's a tradition of black conservative thought in sort of American political history that he is typically understood to be one of the later attributes for. He himself denied that he was a conservative. He considered himself a classical liberal. But what I tried to do in my book is read him as a neoliberal, which I think he is. He studied at the University of Chicago, which is a famous bastion of neoliberal thought. He studied under Milton Friedman and he studied under George Stiegler, and he took a set of neoliberal ideas that were quite well established by the time that he did his PhD in the 60s and applied them To a set of questions that some neoliberals had spoken about, but never really with a lot of systematic rigor, including that of race. So he has a very broad set of themes that he writes about, and one of them that he keeps coming back to is race and racism. So his understanding of racism is that the concept of race has typically been used to explain differences in wealth between either different groups within a country or different societies in sort of global context. And he identifies two main sets of argument or traditions of thought on this question that he both rejects. One of them is biological essentialism, which is the kind of age old racist idea that your biology and your genes determine how well you perform economically. This is an idea that some other neoliberals certainly subscribe to in some form or another. And the other is the idea, which comes, particularly in the United States, out of the civil rights movement and then out of the sort of more radical arm of that, which is the black power movement, that certain groups are disadvantaged within society by structural racism and discrimination and the state causing the unequal allocation of resources through things like segregation or sort of formal or informal color bars. And Sowell says neither of these two theories is a good explanation of group differences in wealth. Biological racism or biological esotericism can't be true, because there are sharp differences in income for particular racial groups over the course of history. And that means that biology can't determine your economic performance, because if that were the case, then those differences couldn't occur historically. And structural racism isn't correct because it ignores the fact that people, themselves, individuals and groups create their own wealth. And also historically, there have been groups within a whole range of societies that were heavily discriminated against, Including Jewish groups, for example, across much of history, but also certain groups of former slaved, formerly enslaved black communities in the United States that did experience a lot of racism and discrimination, but that didn't prevent them from becoming rich. Therefore, structural racism also can't explain group differences. Stowell's alternative to these two theories is that he says the real difference between racial groups is their different cultural attitudes. And those cultural attitudes come from centuries old traditions of cultural beliefs and values and. And sort of mentalities and behaviors that typically travel with the group when they migrate. So you can look at black communities in the United States and trace some of their cultural attitudes back to African communities that they may have been taken from violently during the transatlantic slave trade. But you can also look at Latin American groups in the United States that have come from, for example, Mexico or Argentina. And you can trace their cultural attitudes back to Latin American sort of Spanish background cultures. His idea is that it's really these cultural attitudes that explain the difference between their group behaviors and therefore that can explain the the different levels of wealth that they end up with. And this can explain why black communities tend to be poorer than white communities, because white communities come from a sort of Anglo Christian tradition and black communities have less of those values. And it also allows him to argue that structural racism is while he thinks it, it can exist, he certainly doesn't deny that racism exists, is not an important factor in keeping groups or so what he rejects very explicitly is the idea that political solutions to racism can be effective. He's specifically thinking of programs like affirmative action or sort of diversity hiring quota and those kinds of programs because all that those do is to make sure that there's diversity within the workforce. But they do nothing to improve the cultural attitudes of the groups that are not themselves managing to keep up with richer groups. And so instead you need policy to attend to those cultural values and you need to make sure that the poorer group in society are given an opportunity or are incentivized to develop good work habits, good values such as hard work and self sufficiency, but also patriarchal family life. And it's not until those cultural attitudes are addressed that those wealth inequalities between different groups can be addressed. And therefore policy interventions are never going to be successful unless they are preceded by cultural interventions. Meet the computer you can talk to with Copilot on Windows Working, creating and collaborating is as easy as talking. Got writer's block? Share your screen with Copilot Vision to help spark inspiration and use Copilot voice to have a conversation and brainstorm ideas. Or maybe you need some tech help with Copilot Vision. Copilot sees what you see. Let Copilot talk you through step by step guidance so you can master new apps, games and skills faster. Try now@windows.com copilot hey friends, it's Karamo, talk show host, life coach and your next best friend. You just don't know it yet. I'm hosting a new podcast called Started on Brotherhoods. 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- [55:19]
Morteza Hajizadeh
These thinkers had these ideas about race, but it was, I guess, Charles Murray who kind of gave it a scientific veneer. And he came up with this idea of Bell Curve and introduced biological race science into neoliberal discourse. Can you tell us a little bit about his contribution? I'm using that word in a negative sense, of course. His contribution of how did he, let's say, gave it a scientific veneer to this idea of race in neoliberal thoughts.
- [55:51]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Yeah, thank you. That's another great question. Charles Murray is known for publishing the bell curve in 1994, which is co authored with Richard Herrnstein, which is important because Herrnstein is the person who, out of the two of them had a sort of long standing background in intelligence and IQ research, was also late in his life explicitly in favor of eugenics. He wrote a paper just before he died. He died in 1994, just before the Bell Curve came out. He wrote an article that was published after his death saying that eugenics should be revived or at least should become part of policy discussion. Again. Charles Murray himself wasn't familiar with race science or with eugenicist ideas or with intelligence research until the late 1980s when he started working with Herrnstein on the project that became the Bell Curve. But he had always been interested in what I would consider to be broadly eugenicist ideas surrounding demographic trends and fertility rates and essentially which groups are reproducing at which rates. And he was always concerned about the wrong people having babies, essentially. So Murray is also quite well known as a kind of conservative thinker, but is also, like Thomas Sowell, who is his personal friend, not typically read as a neoliberal. One person who has done good work on Charles Murray as a neoliberal thinker, as Quinzela Borean, who's also just published a book that speaks to this theme. But he is, and he was a neoliberal. He belonged to the sort of network of neoliberal think tanks that continue to be a really important frontline and neoliberal ideology. And he also was friends with a lot of neoliberal thinkers and used all of the concepts that come out of the neoliberal tradition to think through his arguments. What he did in the Bell Curve and in a sort of series of books and articles that he published since then, including a handful of books that were published in the last five years, is to use insights from race and intelligence research in order to revisit, let's say, long standing neoliberal lines of argument. So it's a familiar neoliberal motif that the welfare state is bad and that it creates the wrong incentives for the population because it makes it so that workers no longer have to work very hard in order to be able to get an income or to provide for their family. Instead they can just be lazy and get an income from the state. And so this erodes the kind of family values and these western cultural attitudes that produce the correct kind of culture. They would have called this the moral hazard of the welfare state, by which they meant it disincentivizes hard work by providing people with a sort of basic income regardless of how hard they work. This is a familiar neural argument been around for decades and decades. What Murray and Herrnstein did in the Bell Curve was to use a long standing tradition of IQ research, which goes all the way back to 19th century Eugenics and the work of Francis Galton, the person who coined the term eugenics, to argue that another aspect of the welfare state that has not remained, that has not been very widely criticized, is that by making it possible for poorer communities to draw an income from the state without having to work very hard, is also that they are able to reproduce at higher rates than otherwise they would. So their fertility rates are higher than they would be in a society in which somebody who can't provide for themselves cannot reproduce and have as many children. So he's worried that lower class communities are having too many babies. One aspect of this is that also, Murray and Herrnstein argue, lower class communities tend to also be low intelligence. And that means that if their fertility rates go up and the fertility rates of higher class individuals go down, the aggregate intelligence of the population also goes down because low intelligence people are having more babies than high intelligence people. And that means that on aggregate IQ levels go down. This is a extremely well established motif in eugenics. It goes all the way back to the early 20th century. It's a term that in that tradition was called dysgenesis, which is the opposite to eugenics. Eugenics meaning good breeding and dysgenesis, meaning bad breeding. And it simply means that the genetic quality of the population is going down. This is the term that Murray and Herrnstein used explicitly. They called these trends that they were describing, dysgenic trends and they said it's putting downward pressure on the aggregate intelligence level of the population. So where we are with this is that they have revived, or let's say revisited, the existing neoliberal critique of the welfare state through a set of concepts that come out of the eugenics tradition that makes the argument that the welfare state is not just bad morally and culturally, but also genetically. It makes the quality of the population at a genetic level go down.
- [62:17]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And currently a lot of white nationalists all over America or even in Australia. It's not a big, huge trend here in Australia, but you can see it's been influenced by what's happening in the United States. They still use some of those arguments that, you know, if you give handout to the poor strata of society, they would just, you know, read of more, more. More poor people, let's say. And some of them are. Some of these discussions also are intertwined with racial bias. When they talk about, you know, African communities here. I'm talking about Australia, but I'm guessing it's more or less the same trend everywhere in, in the world. What was the. So we talked about individuals, neoliberal individuals, but there were a lot of neoliberal institutions as well, formal research institutions or societies that advocated themselves. Were they also receptive to this race science or ideas of race? And if so, what does it tell us about their ideological commitments?
- [63:27]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Yeah, that's a great question. So neoliberal thought, which, as I've already explained, I would conceptualise as a tradition of thought, is really very, very large. You know, you're talking about thousands and thousands of people that belong to this tradition in one way or another. There's a few quite high profile philosophers that are relatively well known, at least in academic circles, which would include Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell and Charles Murray. But there's also hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of people that work at these smaller institutions, some of which are quite influential, some of which less so. The most influential and most well known institutions would be think tanks, which were really a key feature of the neoliberal tradition, which didn't invent think tanks, but certainly was extremely reliant on think tanks in order to be able to sort of not just spread its ideas, but also insert them directly into policy. One of the most influential ones in the United Kingdom would be the Institute of Economic affairs, which was founded in the late 1950s and is still, still with us in the United States. You should think of an organization like the Hoover Institution, which was not founded by neoliberals, but became very prominently neoliberal in the late 1950s, and it had fellows working for it, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, but also Thomas Sowell worked there for most of his career. And also the Heritage Institution, sorry, the Heritage foundation, which is today infamous for writing the Project 2025 plans that have been very influential in shaping the second Trump administration. And it's in the news relatively frequently. The difference between an organization like the Hoover Institution and the Heritage foundation is that the Hoover Institution is focused really on sort of the philosophical ideas of neoliberalism and is doing the kind of theory building. Heritage is focused on directly influencing lawmakers in Washington, D.C. so they have what they call the briefcase test, where instead of writing books, they will write a one page statement on how senators should vote in this or that bill on the basis of sort of free market principles. So these institutions have been around for a long time and there's also very many of them. There's many hundreds all over the world. And if you want to understand how sort of neoliberal ideology developed over the course of the late 20th century and then became influential in terms of policy making, that is where you would look. In my research, I discovered that some of these think tanks, some of the more prominent ones, actually were quite receptive to ideas of race science and to eugenics and to arguments in favor of racial segregation in the American south or racial apartheid in Southern Africa. I wouldn't say that this was frequently an established research program that they would have pursued in much detail. They wouldn't have published a book, for example, on race. This might have happened occasionally, but it would have been very rare. But they did have close relationships with people working on these topics, whose views were very widely known and who will happily have published in eugenicist periodicals, for example, some of them were even employed by these neoliberal think tanks. So one of the people that I study in the book is called Stefan Poseny, is another Austrian emigre, a fellow student of Ludwig von Mises, in fact, who moved to the United States during the Second World War and then became a kind of relatively well known historian of, of warfare. And in the 1960s, Osani became a very explicit race scientist. He wrote a few books on this. He published in some of the most infamous eugenics journals at the time. And he wrote in defense of racial apartheid in South Africa. Again, all of these were just views that he published. It wasn't private correspondence that he expressed these views. And it was his published work. And he worked at the Hoover Institution for most of his career. Like I say, he didn't publish work with the Hoover Institution that had these views, but he did publish a lot of these views during his time there. Another person in the United Kingdom who fulfills a similar role as Richard Lynn, who only died two years ago, one of the most infamous eugenicists of the 21st century, published a whole raft of books that tried to rescue the reputation of eugenics, including a book called Eugenics that he published in 1996. Richard Lynn had a very close relationship to the Institute of Economic Affairs. He introduced some of the directors of the Institute of Economic affairs to the British Eugenics foundation, of which Lyn was himself also a member. And again, his work for the Institute of Economic affairs did not frequently discuss his eugenicist views. But he did publish on Eugenics at the same time as he was writing for and engaging with and working closely together with these sort of British neoliberals. He himself, Richard Lyn himself, built neoliberal ideas into his philosophy of race. I wouldn't characterize him as a straightforward neoliberal, but I do think he very much tried to forge a bridge between neoliberal ideas and this kind of race science. So I would characterize him as having one foot in a neoliberal movement and one foot in the eugenics movement. It's important to continue to make that distinction and to not fall into the trap of saying at some point neoliberalism became eugenicist. I think it's important to maintain the distinction between these movements and explore the points at which they intersected or the moments at which they worked together and collaborated and sort of use the same networks in order to spread their ideas so that we can more critically put our finger on why it was that they work together and which ideas were able to travel between the two movements. So my argument is that there's a pattern, really a historical pattern, which goes all the way back to the early neoliberal movement, in the 40s and 50s, of ideas that overlap between neoliberal ideology and eugenic circles. This would include a resolute anti socialism, for example, but it would also include certain beliefs in the superiority of Western culture over other cultures and resistance to state intervention in society at an economic level, but. But not, of course, at the level of sort of population and demography. Which is what eugenics is all about. So I think these alliances tell us that neoliberals have always been able to suspend or sometimes even abandon what we would typically consider key liberal principles such as universal equality before the law, in pursuit of more partisan ideological goals. And in order to gain influence and to sort of forge networks and alliances on the political right.
- [71:52]
Morteza Hajizadeh
I'm trying to bring it all into an end. You know, nowadays we have again, the rise of nationalism, the rise of right wing populists all over the world. Most of these people also an advocate of neoliberal economy or free market now, whatever that means. But I'm keen to know how should these anti racist or anti colonial colonial groups, or more progressive movements in general, more effectively work to counter the impacts of neoliberalism or the racial aspects of this neoliberalism? And I think it's very relevant to the. You're a historian, you've written about how people like Promises or Hayek, you know, it mobilized these racial ideologies. But as I mentioned, and as you also pointed out throughout this interview, it's something that is still well, alive, as you can see in New York, for example, with Zoram Hamdani. So how can these progressive groups more effectively work to counter the impacts, especially the racial impacts of neoliberalism?
- [73:00]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
Yeah, thank you. It's a great question to end on. I think that it's important for me to say that the book that I've written does not try to tell anybody what to do or next steps or sort of political responses to the situation that we're in, not least because the situation is so rapidly developing. What I try to do in the book is to tell my fellow comrades and other people who are critical of neoliberalism that they can't afford to forget about race when they try to understand where we are today, what this present conjuncture is, how we got here, and the role that neoliberalism plays therein. So I tried to say that if we fail to see that race has always been a, what I call a constitutive element of neoliberalism, something that neoliberalism was never able to do without, then we can start to see why it is that over the course of its dominance as a sort of philosophy of government, neoliberalism's response to the crises, many of which it generated itself through bad policy making and, and sort of letting corporate actors go completely rogue, have revolved around using racist and racial ideas in order to scapegoat vulnerable groups. So I Think the dynamic in kind of neoliberal culture is essentially that the crises that we are living through, which are social and which are economic and which are environmental and climatic, are reconfigured at the ideological level by neoliberal ideology into problems of and for race. So race is the theme through which neoliberal ideology tries to interpret and make sense of and invite the broader population to make sense of the crises the. That we are living through. So I think that's relevant because as I said at the start of this interview, there remains a tendency to see right wing nationalist politics as a reaction to neoliberalism that rejects neoliberalism for the most part, some of which is explicitly critical of neoliberalism. I think there's an element of that. I think there sometimes is right wing discourse of this kind which does say we had a period of neoliberalism and it was bad and it was globalizing and it let all of these immigrants into our country. What they mean by neoliberalism there is not the same as what I mean by it. And so really what's going on is a. Is a set of ideas are being brought together that do not actually sit at a very far remove from where neoliberal ideology has kind of always satisfied on questions of race and civilization and world history and immigration and various other related themes. So my invitation really to readers is to not fall into the trap of seeing racism as an afterthought when we're criticizing neoliberalism as something that sort of is kind of already there because Western societies are racist and neoliberalism never really had a solution to it, and so it kind of defaulted to it. My response to that would be no, no, racism was always a constitutive kind of part of the neoliberal discourse that responds to its own crises. And that is also why I end the book by saying, if we see neoliberalism as a constitutively racialized philosophy, then we also must take the next step, which is to think about our political response to neoliberalism as being constitutively anti racist. If you don't do that, you make the mistake of not placing racism at the kind of forefront of your analysis. And it also ends up scapegoating vulnerable groups and vulnerable minorities in society in a way that we are now seeing across sort of advanced capitalist societies where even supposedly left wing or centre left parties are very happy to be vocally and horrifically critical of immigration in order to sort of mollify the far right. And to, to woo these voters that they think are on the right and can't be can't be convinced of the value of migration. And so instead, we just become vocally opposed to immigration instead. I think once you've done that, you have completely surrendered to the sort of existing right wing discourse. But you have also got a very bad analysis of neoliberalism, which cannot be solved unless you address the sort of racial elements and the racial structures around which it's built.
- [78:24]
Morteza Hajizadeh
This was a perfect point to, I guess, end this conversation. I just like to thank you again. This was such a wonderful book, neoliberalism and Race, published by Stanford University Press. Dr. Lars Cornelison, thank you very much for your time to speak about your book with us.
- [78:44]
Dr. Lars Cornelison
It was my pleasure. Thank you very much, Moses, for taking the time as well.