Are libertarians to blame for everything?

CRACK-UP CAPITALISM

by Quinn Slobodian 352pp, Penguin, 1514), ebook £12.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

T£25 (0844 871

When the Soviet bloc crumbled in 1989, there was a temptation to believe that democracy and economic success were inseparable bedfellows. Francis Fukuyama wrote his infamous book on the point, The End of History and the Last Man, which predicted the permanent victory of liberal democracy over socialist dictatorships. The rise of China put paid to that theory, proving that you can have capitalism without democracy. But Quinn Slobodian goes one step further and asserts that the Chinese model – in micro-form – is where the entire world is headed.

His thesis is that we overestimate the durability of the liberal-democratic nation-state. The world, Slobodian argues, is becoming divided into “zones” rather than countries – zones, that is, where capitalism is allowed to run riot over the interests of the people. This is not a new phenomenon: the City of London, for example, has long been run by a corporation which, unlike a normal borough council, sets the votes of commerce above those of local residents. But the idea of the special economic zone has been revived in recent times, from Hong Kong to Rishi Sunak’s freeports.

Slobodian, a Canadian writer who is “professor of the history of ideas” at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, is not an advocate of these zones; rather, he sees them as creeping dystopias. He is right that some business people find democracy a bit of a pain and rather admire the Chinese way of suppressing dissent against development. Who wouldn’t momentarily feel this way if, for example, their plans for a jobcreating industrial park were held up by the protests of a handful of local residents, or by rules protecting a species of dormouse that hasn’t been spotted in the area for half a century? Slobodian