Quinn Slobodian. Globalists. The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2018.

By the end of the twentieth century it was a common belief that free-market ideology had conquered the world. The importance of states was receding in the push and pull of the global economy. At the World Economic Forum at Davos in 1995, an iconic location of the era, U.S. president Bill Clinton observed that "24-hour markets can respond with blinding speed and sometimes ruthlessness." Chancellor Gerhard Schröder referenced the "storms of globalization" as he announced a major reform of the welfare system in reunified Germany. The social market economy, he said, must modernize or it would "be modernized by the unchecked forces of the market." Politics had moved to the passive tense. The only actor was the global economy. U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan put the point most bluntly in 2007 when he declared, "It hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces."3 To its critics, this looked like a new empire with "globalization substituting for colonialism." To its champions, it was a world in which goods and capital, if not people, flowed according to the logic of supply and demand, creating prosperity or at least opportunity for all. This philosophy of the rule of market forces was labeled "neoliberalism" by its critics.