Capitalism and Democracy Uncoupled

by Oui Tue Oct 21st, 2025 at 09:11:12 AM EST

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Cleveland Review of Books: A Complicated System of Traps: On Quinn Slobodian's "Crack-Up Capitalism" | June 2023 |

It's appropriate that Slobodian opens his book with an epigraph from Ministry of the Future, a science fiction novel by Kim Stanley Robinson:

It became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time... après moi le déluge.

"Après moi, le déluge," the saying goes. "After me, the flood." Attributed to King Louis XV of France in 1757, it's thought to convey the French nobility's nihilistic hedonism and indifference to the sad lot left in their wake. France suffered heavy losses that year in the Third Silesian War with Prussia--a conflict born of the feudal hangover afflicting the European continent and the lasting political instability it brought with it. Furthermore, French society was strained by deepening contradictions between the decadence of its aristocracy and the plight of its rapidly growing underclass.

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

Look at a map of the world and you'll see a neat patchwork of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. From the 1990s onwards, globalization has shattered the map, leading to an explosion of new legal entities: tax havens, free ports, city-states, gated enclaves and special economic zones. These new spaces are freed from ordinary forms of regulation, taxation and mutual obligation -- and with them, ultra-capitalists believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Historian Quinn Slobodian follows the most notorious radical libertarians -- from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel -- around the globe as they search for the perfect home for their free market fantasy. The hunt leads from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the medieval City of London, and finally into the world's oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where capitalism and democracy can be finally uncoupled.