What did neoliberalism’s intellectual advocates have to say about race? How did they respond to struggles against colonialism and for civil rights? And how did their ideas help reshape racism over the last half century?
In his new book, Neoliberalism and Race, Lars Cornelissen revisits the history of neoliberal ideas through the lens of race. He maps out how neoliberal thinkers like Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer and Thomas Sowell conceptualised racial difference, sometimes explicitly and sometimes in more coded terms. The book argues that neoliberal ideology is constitutively racialised, meaning that it cannot be divorced from its racial foundations without rendering it incoherent and unrecognisable.
Neoliberalism and Race uses historical methods to reconstruct neoliberal ideas of race and position them within the broader field of racist ideology. Using archival sources, Cornelissen identifies relationships between the neoliberal tradition and fascist race theory, the British Colonial Office, and the transnational eugenics movement, each of which markedly impacted neoliberalism’s trajectory.
Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History. Recent publications include A Neutral Toolkit? For a Fundamental Critique of Constructive Alignment (with Lucy Newby, in Teaching in Higher Education, 2025), Post-War Ordoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Development (in Thomas Biebricher et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ordoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2022) and Neoliberal Imperialism (in Politics, 2023).
Lars will be joined by Gargi Bhattacharyya, Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre at UCL's Institute of Advanced Studies; Siddhant Issar, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville; and Melayna Lamb, Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Law, London.
