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F&L Blog – Profiting from Neoliberalism

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Profiting from Neoliberalism: How the Radical Right Gains From Crumbling Public Services

by Simone Cremaschi

23.10.2025

The rise of the far right is often linked to economic decline and depopulation of “left behind regions”. But could public service cuts, as part of broader neoliberal austerity policies, play an independent role? In this blog, Simone Cremaschi cites research he and his colleagues have conducted into otherwise similar municipalities in Italy, which, for varying reasons, underwent significantly different levels of public service cuts. They found evidence that regions with steeper retrenchments recorded higher shifts in support for the far-right. Using zero-sum logic, far-right parties have been able to frame shrinking services as a problem of demand, not supply. This suggests that restoring and rebuilding public services could halt the rise of the far-right. The question now is whether mainstream parties will re-build the credibility and support to do so.

Public services across Western Europe are under strain. Years of economic stagnation, financial crises, a pandemic, and rising energy prices have left governments with record debt and soaring interest payments. As a growing share of tax revenue is swallowed by debt service, less remains for hospitals, schools, and local infrastructure. These constraints leave little room to reverse a decade of neoliberal-imposed austerity, which closed or hollowed out key public services – from rural post offices and public transport links to police stations and GP practices in major cities.

One might expect these conditions to benefit parties on the left, traditionally associated with calls for higher public spending and stronger social support. Yet a series of empirical studies I have conducted with co-authors shows that reduced access to public services – what we call public service deprivation– often fuels support for radical-right parties instead.[i] This political backlash to service cuts helps explain why these parties have made such significant inroads into mainstream politics in the past years.

We began our research in Italy, where policy debates in recent years have devoted considerable attention to so-called “inner areas” – areas marked by economic stagnation, depopulation, and isolation from essential services such as schools, hospitals, and train stations. These territories struck us as the concrete embodiment of the “left-behind places” often invoked by journalists to explain the geographic concentration of support for radical-right leaders like Donald Trump, or the Brexit referendum. This led us to ask whether the availability – or withdrawal – of public services could be driving this geography of discontent.

How Public Service Deprivation Fuels Exclusionary Politics

"public services are the primary channel through which citizens interact with the state [...] their decline strikes at the heart of the social contract. These grievances translate into a demand for solutions at the ballot box, creating fertile ground for parties that promise to restore services by reallocating them toward “deserving” locals."

We began answering this question by studying a 2010 reform that required Italian municipalities below a fixed population threshold to deliver key public services – such as policing and waste collection – jointly with neighboring municipalities. Because of an arbitrary cut-off, it created a natural experiment: some municipalities were forced to amalgamate services while others of a similar size were not. This allowed us to compare municipalities in these two groups across time and isolate the effect of reducing public services on electoral outcomes. Our results, published in the American Journal of Political Science [ii], show that this reform ultimately reduced access to essential services and, in turn, boosted support for radical-right parties such as Salvini’s League among affected voters in the years that followed.

Our analysis suggests that public service deprivation fuels radical-right support by generating grievances that resonate with political rhetoric linking declining services to immigration. When communities accustomed to reliable public provision – as is common in Italy and Western Europe – experience sudden deterioration, they develop a sense of unfairness and neglect: a perception that “their” community is no longer receiving its fair share of resources and that political elites do not care. Because public services are the primary channel through which citizens interact with the state and observe how their taxes are spent, their decline strikes at the heart of the social contract. These grievances translate into a demand for solutions at the ballot box, creating fertile ground for parties that promise to restore services by reallocating them toward “deserving” locals.

Radical-right parties have proven particularly adept at meeting this demand. In our data, we show that they increasingly mobilized the issue of public services after the 2010 reform in Italy, framing service decline as a consequence of immigration and of a state that prioritizes “undeserving outsiders” over “deserving locals.” Even though immigrants are not the primary drivers of service retrenchment, this rhetoric resonates with zero-sum thinking triggered by service cutbacks, because public services are difficult to exclude users from. Consistent with this mechanism, we find that attitudes toward immigrants worsened in municipalities affected by the reform, helping to explain why voters in these areas shifted toward parties such as the League.

How Public Services Shape Political Reactions to Economic Shocks

Public services matter not only because their decline directly pushes voters toward the radical right, but also because they shape how communities respond to other crises. Economic shocks – from import competition to de-industrialization and technological change – are well-known triggers of discontent that radical-right leaders can mobilize. When communities have long felt neglected by the state, these shocks are more easily interpreted as yet another sign of abandonment, paving the way for a radical-right turn. We document this dynamic in a study recently published in the American Political Science Review [ii].

In this study, we turn to Xylella, a plant disease epidemic that exterminated olive trees in southern Puglia (the heel of Italy’s boot) between 2014 and 2016. As with the 2010 public service reform, this epidemic created a rare natural experiment. The bacterium arrived by chance on a boat from Costa Rica, landing in the port of Gallipoli, and spread northward, killing millions of trees before containment measures halted its advance roughly 200 kilometers away – leaving neighboring olive-producing regions largely untouched. This sharp boundary gave us a unique opportunity to compare affected and unaffected areas before and after the shock – something rarely possible since most economic shocks unfold gradually and across much larger regions. Our results show that this had similar electoral effects to other economic shocks observed across the United States and Western Europe, increasing support for radical-right parties – most notably Meloni’s Brothers of Italy – across affected areas.

"When communities experience prolonged public service deprivation, they develop a community narrative of abandonment by the state and political elites."

Our analysis explains why the plant disease epidemic led to a radical-right turn by highlighting the key role of public services. Combining statistical analysis with qualitative fieldwork in the most affected municipalities, we show that the epidemic not only disrupted a vital economic sector but also uprooted community life and identities that had been built over centuries around olive cultivation and oil production. The sudden extermination of olive trees generated deep concerns about the future of these communities, heightening the appeal of radical-right narratives that frame political elites as indifferent and promise to restore the status of neglected areas. Crucially, this effect was not uniform: we find that communities with a history of poorer access to public services were significantly more likely to shift their support toward radical-right parties.

Because public services are the primary channel through which citizens interact with the state, the level of service access available to a community shapes how residents see themselves and their relationship with public institutions. Over time, collective identities become embedded in the stories people tell each other about the place where they live. These stories, passed among neighbors and across generations, form a shared lens for interpreting new events. When communities experience prolonged public service deprivation, they develop a community narrative of abandonment by the state and political elites. In the case of Xylella in Italy, areas that had internalized this narrative interpreted the epidemic as yet another instance of state neglect. This interpretation resonated strongly with radical-right messaging, amplifying the turn toward radical-right parties in the wake of the shock.

How the Radical Right Gains Across Europe

"Finding credible and popular responses to public service decline remains a key political challenge in the years ahead, but one we surely must tackle if we are to halt the continued rise of the radical right."

Rising radical-right support in response to public service cuts is not just an Italian story. Across Europe, researchers have shown that when schools or hospitals close – as in parts of Germany and Denmark – trust in the state falls and radical-right parties gain ground [iii, iv]. Another study, recently published in the American Journal of Political Science [v], finds that austerity measures across Europe – often targeting public services – boosted radical-right voting in economically vulnerable regions.

England offers a particularly telling example. The National Health Service (NHS) is one of the largest publicly funded health care systems in the world, a clear symbol of the state’s duty to care for its people and one widely supported across the political spectrum. Yet public satisfaction with the NHS is sinking to its lowest level. A key source of frustration has been the steady disappearance of local doctors’ offices: since 2013, nearly 1,700 GP practices have shut down or merged – more than a quarter of England’s local clinics.

In a new study, we find that these closures have fuelled support for the radical right. Using data on every GP practice closure since 2013, we show that voters affected by closures report worse experiences with the health system and become more likely to support parties like UKIP and Reform UK. Examining political messaging, we find that these parties have effectively connected NHS pressures to immigration in their discourse. And, indeed, the shift toward the radical right is strongest in places with higher immigration, where the narrative of “outsiders overloading the system” resonates most.

This case shows that the dynamics we uncovered in Italy are not limited to extraordinary moments such as sudden reforms or economic shocks. The crisis of the NHS has been unfolding for decades and is likely to persist, driven by rising public debt and growing demand from an ageing population. These long-simmering grievances are once again being harnessed by political entrepreneurs who link them to immigration – a strategy that continues to fuel radical-right support.

Taken together, this body of research challenges the common expectation that declining public services should lead voters to demand more redistribution and flock to left-wing parties. Instead, we find that public service deprivation often fuels support for exclusionary – radical-right – parties. Their successes threaten the rights and protections of minority groups such as immigrants. And as growing evidence shows, they also contribute to the progressive erosion of democratic norms.

Several factors limit how mainstream parties can respond to radical-right gains over public service decline. Reversing service cuts usually implies higher taxes – a remedy that remains unpopular. Credibility is another hurdle: after decades of decline, promises to rebuild public services can ring hollow when they come from parties that previously oversaw the cuts. The radical right, by contrast, offers a deceptively simple solution: reduce demand by excluding “undeserving” outsiders, often immigrants. This rhetoric has proven both powerful and persuasive. Finding credible and popular responses to public service decline remains a key political challenge in the years ahead, but one we surely must tackle if we are to halt the continued rise of the radical right.

Headshot Cremaschi

Simone Cremaschi is a political scientists studying topics in comparative political economy, political behavior, and political sociology. He works as a postdoctoral researcher at Bocconi University and the Dondena Centre.

References/Further Readings

  • [i] Cremaschi, Simone, Paula Rettl, Marco Cappelluti, and Catherine E. De Vries (2024). “ Geographies of Discontent: Public Service Deprivation and the Rise of the Far Right in Italy.” American Journal of Political Science.
  • [ii] Cremaschi, Simone, Bariletto, Nicola, and Catherine E. De Vries (2025). “Without Roots: The Political Consequences of Collective Economic Shocks.” American Political Science Review.
  • [iii] Stroppe, Anne-Kathrin. 2023. “Left behind in a Public Services Wasteland? On the Accessibility of Public Services and Political Trust.” Political Geography 105: 102905.
  • [iv] Nyholt, Niels. 2024. “Left Behind: Voters’ Reactions to Local School and Hospital Closures.” European Journal of Political Research 63 (3): 884–905.
  • [v] Baccini, Leonardo, and Thomas Sattler. 2025. “ Austerity, Economic Vulnerability, and Populism.” American Journal of Political Science 69: 899–914.
  • [vi] Dickson, Zachary P., Sara B Hobolt, Catherine E de Vries and Simone Cremaschi (2025). Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right: Evidence from England’s National Health Service. Working Paper.

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F&L Blog – Balanced Budgets, Broken Democracies

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Balanced budgets, Broken Democracies: the urgent need to democratize money

Colleen Schneider

25.09.2025

Colleen Schneider is a PhD researcher at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in the Institute for Ecological Economics. Her work focuses on the political economy of monetary and fiscal policy in a social-ecological transition. In this piece she explores how ideas about money greatly shape states’ capacity for governance, explaining how the neoliberal ideology of “balanced budgets” has been used consistently and across party lines to justify austerity. As Polanyi saw governments’ adherence to the Gold Standard during the 1930s as enabling the rise of fascism, today’s attachment to arbitrary fiscal rules risks emboldening the far-right while worsening social and ecological crises. To counter this, Schneider calls for a “deficit owl” approach to budgeting focused on the effects of fiscal spending, supported by a politicization and democratization of money.

“The government should create, issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity. Money will cease to be master and will then become servant of humanity.”
Abraham Lincoln, 1985
“Well, we’re out of money now.”
Barak Obama, 2009

How ideas about money shape the capacity to govern ​

For the last 5,000 years money has served as a tool of governance. Through the Middle Ages Monarchs regularly reminted coins to increase the money supply, often to fund war. This was possible because the value of coinage was set by political decree and reinforced by trust in the governing authority. Today, we operate in a fiat money system, meaning that money is created through the spending of currency-issuing governments. Governments’ ability to create money is limited by ideas about the desirability of fiscal spending and the role of government debt.

Ideas about money shape the potential and structure of governance. The idea of “balanced budgets” has delimited the political imaginary of the last several decades. The shift to understanding balanced budgets as a good in-and-of themselves, and to the institutionalization of this idea, is a core tenet of the neoliberal era. It has been used, consistently and across party lines, to justify austerity. This includes cuts to social welfare programs as well as spending cuts on necessary public infrastructure, health, and education.  

To illustrate the importance of these ideas and how they shape the capacity for governance, we can define three distinct positions. The first two are orthodox positions of “deficit hawks” and “deficit doves.” Hawks insist government deficits are always problematic. Their thinking goes that when governments spend more than they receive in taxes, they “crowd out” private sector spending, ultimately leading to lower growth and risking default. In contrast, doves acknowledge running government deficits can be useful and necessary in the short term, such as during recession. Like hawks, they hold with the position that balanced budgets should be prioritized in the longer term. Both hawks and doves present this constraint not as a political rule, but as economic law.

The third position is that of “deficit owls.” Owls see the constraints on spending by sovereign currency-issuing governments as access to real resources, their ability to maintain price stability, and political will. Owls place the focus on the results of fiscal spending. For governments (or supra-national regions, like the Eurozone) that issue their own currency, hard limits come into play if there is a need to access foreign currency for, say, import purchases or paying foreign-denominated debts. Utilizing domestic resources, however, is constrained by the availability of those resources and the effects on the macroeconomy—namely, inflation. Owls point out that public sector deficits are nothing more than private sector surpluses. Running public surpluses, thereby driving the private sector to take on more debt, has consistently preceded recessions.   

In short, politically imposed limits on debt and deficits are the result of certain ideas about money, and of political decisions taken in specific historical and ideological contexts. In our present case, the hegemonic status of neoliberal ideology has provided the container for institutionalizing fiscal limits.

The neoliberal de-democratization of the monetary system stripped money as a tool of governance

The post-WWII Keynesian era of fiscal dominance relied upon democratic coordination for macroeconomic stability. In contrast, the 1980s were marked by a distinct shift in how the monetary system was understood and operationalized as a governance tool. Under neoliberalism, politically-embedded management of the monetary system was replaced with technocratic management and a reverential deference to bond markets. This construction of monetary scarcity can be understood through the apparent “naturalization” and “depoliticization” of money that is central to the neoliberal project. This logic found academic justification in the neoclassical treatment of money as a neutral veil over market exchange.

This naturalization of money makes the management of the monetary system a matter of technocratic efficiency best left to economists at “apolitical” and “independent” central banks. Through the shift in central banking and the deference of elected governments to the need for balanced budgets, money as a mode of governance was effectively removed from the democratic political sphere while being simultaneously stripped of morality and subjectivity. Depoliticization went hand-in-hand with de-democratization. 

Balanced budgets paved the way for austerity in the United States and Europe

Following the rhetoric of American Presidents vis-a-vis the fiscal situation of the United States provides an enlightening perspective on the shift toward deference of balanced budgets and its effects. While Lincoln, and those that came after him for the next century, discussed the fiscal budget in reference to its effects in the economy – such as employment and social provision – the 1970s mark a break from this functional understanding of monetary governance.  

In the 1980s Ronald Reagan relied heavily on the rhetorical trope of balanced budgets to impose austerity, pledging to “discipline the federal Government to live within its means”. He signed deficit reduction into law while lowering taxes and cutting spending on housing, education, and agriculture (before going on to enact massive increases in military spending in his second term). George Bush Senior went so far as to attempt to write balanced budgets into the constitution. James Buchanan supported this effort, arguing that it would be an effective and permanent barrier against democratic demands for social spending. This was democracy, insulated from too much democracy—a marker of neoliberal politics.

Buchanan’s effort was not successful, and, in place of constitutional amendment, Bush Senior institutionalized a pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) spending rule, intended to limit fiscal capacity and “solve the problem of budget deficits.”  Clinton, too, oversaw vast cuts and, in some cases, complete withdrawal of social welfare programs in the name of deficit reduction. G.W. Bush then used the“left over” money from Clinton’s budget surplus then to justify tax cuts. Obama focused on the need for fiscal discipline and restored the PAYGO rule.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have consistently taken the positions of fiscal doves or hawks, treating public goods as liabilities and economic growth as the highest good. The consistent result has been the gutting of social protections.  

The fiscal limits of the European Union—enshrined in the Maastricht Criteria and enacted through the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP)—are emblematic of the de-democratization of monetary governance. Several European states have also enshrined balanced budgets into their constitutions. Switzerland amended their constitution in 2001, and Germany constitutionalized the debt brake in 2009, among others. These limits are not based on any sound empirical relationship between debt, deficits, and growth, while institutionally embedding an incapacity to effectively deal with unemployment, the climate crisis, and myriad other crises.

The COVID pandemic revealed the fragile state of public services in the EU after years of austerity, and the activation of the SGP’s escape clause during the pandemic made clear the extent to which the debt and deficit rules inhibit effective social (and ecological) spending. In 2024 the SGP was revised and reinstated by the European Council with only minor changes, and now imposes an estimated €100 billion in cuts for EU governments, which will hit low-income households hardest.  

From neoliberal balanced budgets to far-right extremism

Just as Karl Polanyi referred to faith in the gold standard as an ideology shared by whole nations in the 19th century, balanced budgets play this role in the neoliberal era. The result is governments that have been heavily constrained in their capacity to address social ills, driving skyrocketing inequality, and escalating ecological crises. A line can be drawn from the disenfranchisement driven by years of neoliberal austerity to recent fascistic counter-movements. Consider the rise of the Golden Dawn party in the midst of the Greek government debt crisis driven by the Troika. Or the rise of Alt-Right groups in the United States in the last two decades.

In The Great Transformation Polanyi blamed the “stubbornness” of economic liberals in prioritizing the maintenance of the gold standard system in the late 19th and early 20th century for the “decisive weakening of the democratic forces that might otherwise have averted the fascist catastrophe”. Polanyi contended that the United States, in leaving the Gold Standard in 1933, showed themselves to be “masters not servants of the currency” and utilized their newfound fiscal capacity to fund the New Deal program. Two converging factors enabled this to happen: a claiming of the fiscal capacity of the government, and a government that was held accountable to the needs of the working class. The New Deal demonstrated how democratic politics and social protection can go hand-in-hand to mitigate the effects of increasing marketization and to forestall shifts toward fascism. Politicization and democratization of the monetary system are essential in this.

With this in mind, we can question where cracks in the ideology of balanced budgets exist today, and toward what ends they are directed.

Deficits for war, not peace?

For decades now neoliberal dominance has delimited the political imaginary. Attempts to question the validity of fiscal rules and to explore alternatives have been dismissed as “unrealistic” or “irresponsible.”  But government responses to the financial crisis of 2007-08 and to the pandemic created cracks in the veneer of “there is no alternative”. Recently, the European Council has granted the activation of national escape clauses specifically for defense spending and, as of July 2025, 15 nations have signed on to this option. This means, simply, that spending on defense is not counted toward debt and deficit limits. A political choice made manifest, while holding on to the rhetorical insistence that the limits are necessary. Following the pause on the SGP during the pandemic, a coalition of EU nations called for social and ecological spending to be permanently exempted from debt and deficit limits, but a stronger coalition pushing “fiscal responsibility” effectively opposed this.  

Donald Trump has stated that he wants to scrap the U.S. debt limit entirely. While he has not managed to do this, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in July 2025 raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, and will add an estimated $3.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Most of the economic benefits will go to the rich. The middle class will see little, if any benefit, and poorer households will lose. In doing so, Trump can frame himself as breaking with the (much maligned) status quo, while simultaneously serving corporatist and wealthy financial interests. This is money as a tool of plutocratic governance.  

To confront our crises we must politicize and democratize money

To effectively address the multiple social and ecological crisis of the present day, we must make explicit the political nature of money, and thus the capacity for money as a mode of governance. However—as Polanyi witnessed in Europe in the 1930s and the US is witnessing today—a politicized monetary system can serve as a tool of fascism just as easily as one of socialism. Given this, it is essential that politicization takes place alongside strengthening and expanding democracy, including monetary and economic forms of democracy.

In focusing on the effects of public spending, not arbitrary budget rules, the approach of deficit owls creates a coherent alternative to neoliberal rhetoric, a counter to austerity logic, and offers the capacity to build out robust forms of social protection and effective responses to ecological crises.

Colleen Schneider is a PhD researcher at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in the Institute for Ecological Economics.

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F&L Blog – A Perpetuum Mobile of Cynicism

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A Perpetuum Mobile of Cynicism: on the Symbiosis of Neoliberal and Fascist Views of Humanity

Natascha Strobl

28.08.2025

Economic liberalism and fascism often present themselves as opposites. Fascist forces claim to represent an anti-capitalism that is actually an anti-modernism and economic liberalism sees itself as a bulwark against totalitarianism but, in reality, means anti-communism. Despite all the alleged and actual contradictions, there is a decisive common source of these two ways of thinking: they share a negative image of humanity. Neoliberal capitalism sees individuals in constant struggle with each other. Only through eternal competition can something like innovation or progress come about at all. This idea of competition originates from the structure of the work process and the associated performance ideology and is transferred from there to all areas of society. Starting with the earliest competition for educational places from kindergarten onwards, through living space to relationships and the health sector – every area of society is permeated by acts of competition, selection and the creation of winners and losers.

In neoliberalism, it is important to see the situation of the losers as morally justified and, as a result, to ostracize them from society. Those who do not manage to be among the winners do not deserve to receive any help from society. This is how a neoliberal society produces few winners and many losers. Economically, this can be clearly seen in the ever-increasing concentration of wealth. But it is also visible in the rising potential for frustration in society. The promised goals and markers of prosperity (being able to afford a house, vacation, car) are achievable for fewer and fewer people. In consequence, there are not only more and more people who can be considered ‘losers’ of neoliberalism, they also increasingly feel like such. 

The neoliberal, hegemonic ideology frames this as people’s own failure and argues that they don’t deserve it any other way. This neoliberalization of everyday life goes hand in hand with a weakening of democratic institutions, which appear powerless in the face of business and industry influence and consequently act solely in their interests. What remains is a loss of trust in democratic institutions, as well as in (public) media and science. According to sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer “authoritarian temptations” thrive, as can be seen in the increasing success of far-right parties and movements.

Life as Constant Struggle

Neoliberalism shares this cynical view of humanity with fascism. Fascism also sees people as beings to be harassed and sanctioned, and who live in constant struggle with each other. The ethnic element adds a further level: Not only individuals, but also peoples, cultures or “races” are in competition with each other and have to assert themselves against each other. Both concepts of humanity are thus united by an essentially Malthusian or Social Darwinist view of humanity. It is about eating or being eaten. Applying this view of humanity to a society means living in constant fear and insecurity of all other people. Solidarity, community and cooperation are not only impossible, but they are also undesirable and portrayed as harmful.

Neoliberalism and Fascism – a Perpetuum Mobile

In countries such as Austria and Germany, the post-war consensus consists of a fragile agreement on democratisation, the promise of political equality, and an economic system based on inequality. Political intervention in the first post-war decades contained the social Darwinist roots of this system. However, from the implementation of neoliberal policies in the 1980s onwards, these roots began to reappear openly. This was accompanied by attempts to reduce democracy, particularly in the world of work. Trade unions and workers’ representatives were disempowered. Neoliberal think tanks and lobbies have formed a kind of state within the state, pursuing opaque policies under the guise of neutrality. Since the 1970s, they have also funded biased research through donations to universities. At the same time, they have set up astroturf organisations and engaged in disinformation and culture war campaigns. Neoliberal protagonists are therefore guilty of the very things they accuse others of. This neoliberal ecosystem is a prime example of how socio-political, authoritarian, right-wing extremist and even fascist agendas naturally accompany their hard economic liberal agendas.

Neoliberalism thus prepares the ground for fascism by hegemonizing a cynical and negative view of humanity. Once it is generally accepted that nothing is guaranteed and that any minimum standard is considered decadent, it is much easier to curtail or abolish regulating institutions. This means rolling back state control and that everyone is being

pitched against everyone else. This is precisely the essence of undertakings like DOGE. They dismantle democracy, both discursively and institutionally. The result is a world in which there is no longer any security or trust. Experiences of solidarity are becoming increasingly rare. Everyday life becomes a constant struggle for survival in competition with other people. The tenor is clear: there is not enough for everyone, and you must make sure that you are one of the winners. Nobody is looking out for you, so you don’t have to look out for anyone either.

Fascist Promises

Fascism pushes this precarious state further by affirming and reinforcing it. Our experiences with neoliberalism confirm the fascist view that the world really is as bleak, ruthless and harsh as it has always been claimed to be and at the same time opens up the opportunity to dismiss the left (or what one considers to be the left) as naive dreamers. Neoliberalism destroys the existing order and security, each of which is democratically underpinned. Fascism, on the other hand, offers a promise of order and an authoritarian, hierarchical and elitist security – the authoritarian temptations mentioned above. Without the prior destruction of liberal democracy through neoliberalism, however, fascism would not be possible. Fascism could not prevail on its own, as it has neither the roots nor the resources to do so. It absolutely needs the upheavals and crises of (neoliberal) capitalism in order to gain a mass base at all.

Fascism obtains this mass base through a promise of order, security and value through belonging. In its basic social Darwinist-genocidal attitude, this order can only be achieved through an act of purification. This purification means the ethnic selection of undesirables, be they ethnic, religious or social groups. This selection promises the exclusion of those elements that cause insecurity. These are scapegoats. But even for those who are part of the new order, authoritarian security actually consists of permanent insecurity. You are integrated into a national community from which you can be excluded at any time. In a state of security created through fascism you have to live in constant fear of everyone around you. This shows the negative, cynical and social Darwinist view of humanity shared by neoliberalism and fascism. Everyday life is characterized by insecurity and fear.

Fascism and Capital

However, none of this happens in a vacuum. Fascism becomes an option for capital factions when their own business model, and thus their ability to accumulate capital, is disrupted and cannot be saved democratically. This, for instance, currently applies to the fossil fuel economy: Oil and gas have no future – and that is why these very industries are now pumping money into the neoliberal-fascist ecosystem. Fascism thus becomes a strategy for the persistence of declining or emerging business models. There are also industries that need the support of an authoritarian state because their ability for profit-making is much lower in a democracy. This, for example, also includes the tech industry – be it the social media giants who desire to end all regulation, the surveillance industry or corporations who want to silence debates on the (un)ethical use of artificial intelligence – these business models cannot fully develop in a functioning democracy.

Whether fascism prepares people for capitalism or vice versa is somehow irrelevant — both statements are equally true. Fascism and capitalism are symbiotic systems. They have their own logic and can exist independently, but they benefit from each other and share a common basis. This basis is the education of humans to be compassionless. This lack of compassion is directed towards others, who consequently deserve to die. However, it is also directed inward, meaning, from a neoliberal point of view, one never deserves a life without fear or the right to simply live with dignity. The core of neoliberalism and fascism is therefore a negative view of humanity that does not grant individuals any dignity in their own right but instead categorises and evaluates them according to their performance and usefulness, as well as their ancestry and genetic characteristics.

Natascha Strobl is a political scientist and journalist. She is an expert on right-wing extremism and the New Right. Her book "Radikalisierter Konservatismus. Eine Analyse" was a bestseller and was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Political Books.

Further Reading

  • Heitmeyer, Wilhelm: Autoritäre Versuchungen (2018)

  • Horkheimer, Max: Die Juden und Europa. Authoritarian State. Reason and self-preservation 1939-1941 (1967)

  • Polanyi, Karl: The Great Transformation. Political and economic origins of societies and economic systems (1944/1973)

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F&L Blog – Enchaining Democracy

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Enchaining Democracy: The Koch Network’s Stealth Crusade for Free-Reign Capitalism

Nancy MacLean, edited by Solveig Degen

21.08.2025

In the past decade, it has become ever more obvious that US politics are in profound crisis. A government that once claimed to be of, by, and for the people has been captured by oligarchs and corporations whose agendas are driving unmatched inequality and planetary crisis. With the first and now second presidency of Donald J. Trump, even elementary norms of civic decency were imperiled. Anyone who follows US politics knows this – however, what you may be struggling to figure out is how things have come this far and what the rise of the US Radical Right means for the wider world.

The full-fledged attack on democracy we are witnessing at the moment has been fed by many streams, of course. They include long-growing movement conservatism, the Religious Right, as well as the white Supremacist Right that has resurfaced with a vengeance of late. All of these are important, and have yielded votes to effect radical policy change, but, in this blog piece, I want to discuss another, often overlooked piece of the puzzle: the billionaire-funded libertarian right.

Over the past decades, Charles Koch, CEO of the fossil heavy-weight Koch Industries and 22nd richest man in the world and his late brother David have assembled a vast network of over 600 like-minded wealthy donors into what is now the largest private political network in the world. It spans research institutes, think tanks, and advocacy organizations, and far exceeds the size and sophistication of any national party. This network has become a powerful delivery vehicle for its libertarian and increasingly authoritarian agenda. We’ve seen its fingerprints in the Brexit campaign, in billionaire support for fascist parties in Europe, in the growing collaboration of far-right parties and neoliberal think tanks, and in the ascent of the Trump administration itself.

In this piece, however, I do not want to talk about the scale and audacity of the Koch network’s bid for power, but closer examine the underlying ideology and ideas this network has weaponized to climb from utter marginality to breathtaking power. Why do I think understanding these ideas and their origin matter so much? Because there is an unmarked hazard in our current situation in how the noisiest threats are getting the most attention. Donald Trump – whom I’ve come to think of as the Distractor in Chief – draws nearly all media attention, but not enough attention is paid to the plan which is moving along apace out of the spotlight: In the 30 states now dominated by the Republican party, the Koch network – which has bent the Republican party to its purposes in federal departments, agencies, and in the courts – aims to permanently rewrite the rules of US society. This is important to understand: The dismantling of the US democratic system is not led by a president with a limited attention span and bad temper, but by a highly strategic network that is archly determined, breathtakingly well-funded, and acting globally.

Forget Chicago: The Crucible of Buchanan‘s Virginia School

In recent years, much ink has been spent on exposing the rise, ideas, and machinations of the so-called Chicago School of Economics. People such as Naomi Klein with her influential book The Shock Doctrine, Philip Mirowski in his book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, or Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists and Hayek’s Bastards provide detailed and insightful accounts of how the ideas of the Chicago School have gained traction in policymaking and slowly reshaped global economic policy. However, through my research on the Atlas Network in Democracy in Chains and my archival work at George Mason University, I learned that it was another – so far mostly unacknowledged – strand of

economic thinking that has had far more influence on the Koch network’s development and political strategy. I learned that it was the Nobel laureate and public choice economist James M. Buchanan whose work supplied the strategic path that the Koch network pursues.

Buchanan, who grew up in Tennessee, completed his PhD at the Chicago School of Economics and was president of the Mont Pelerin Society. In 1986, he won the Nobel Prize for Economics for having pioneered a new way of thinking called public choice economics. Public choice economics also became influential in political science and law – and, as I learned through my research, among activists and elected officials on the Right. What made Buchanan’s work new was – in his phrase – that he developed an economic analysis of politics. He applied Chicago-style and Austrian-style libertarian economic assumptions to political actors to argue that they should only be understood as individuals rationally seeking their personal self-interest – not the common good as they claimed.

With public choice economics, Buchanan turned new attention to what he liked to call ‘the rules of the game of politics’: to the taxing and spending incentives of the political process, and to how altering the rules of the process might yield different outcomes. That theoretical premise led Buchanan to a new explanation of deficits because he made sense of why the governments would overspend in times of prosperity, not just depression or recession as Keynesian economics would predict. As a thinker who specialized in public finance and who identified with the political Right in the South, often criticizing “Eastern elites”, Buchanan made it his mission to find ways to reduce taxes and shrink the expanding public sector, then in its heyday of expansion.

In this way, his ideas were closely aligned with Milton Friedman and the liberal economic Chicago-school agenda, but Buchanan’s subset school – the Virginia School of Political Economy – was always distinctive and tendentious from Chicago-school ideas: Buchanan himself said, looking back, that his goal was ‘to tear down’ the very idea of ‘the public interest’ and economics for the ‘common good’ as Chicago followers proclaimed. For libertarians like Buchanan, there is no common good. Any such notion of shared purpose of democratic governments violates the individual liberty of the minority. The minority he was concerned with was that of wealthy taxpayers who do not share the majority’s view of the public interest. And government, Buchanan and his colleagues argued, all but steals their property, if it taxes them for purposes they do not share.

Indeed, even in his scholarly work he made this point very agitationally. In what he viewed as his master work, The Limits of Liberty, written during the 1970s crime panic, Buchanan compared government ‘coercion’ of the unwilling taxpayer to ‘the thug who steals his wallet in Central Park’. He spoke of net tax recipients as ‘parasites on the productive’; he warned of ‘predators and prey’. His very vocabulary made fellow citizens appear as menaces, not even truly human. It is a vocabulary that is disinhibiting, one that licenses hostility. And it, too, is rife on the Right today and mirrored in claims such as made by Elon Musk that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”.

But Buchanan did not stop with developing theory that he hoped would undermine the legitimacy of the modern welfare and regulatory state. Believing fiercely in the rightness of his cause, he moved in the 1970s from scholarship to organizing to apply that theory, urging right-wing donors to help build a ‘counterintelligentsia’. How? By creating what he called ‘a gravy train’ to bring men into the libertarian fold and train them for intellectual battle with Keynesians and social justice advocates.

Buchanan taught Charles Koch that for capitalism to thrive, democracy must be enchained: not overthrown in a coup, but rather quietly rigged so that it can no longer provide what citizens expect of it – from workers’ rights and retirement benefits to protection from discrimination and environmental destruction. Beginning in the early 1970s, Buchanan and Charles Koch allied to transform the model of government that Western capitalist nations built up over the twentieth century seeking a way to make the US – and the world, in fact – conform to an arch vision of economic liberty, a kind of free-reign capitalism beyond the reach of voters and their governments. As Charles Koch once put it “I want to build the kind of force that propelled Columbus to his discoveries”.

Libertarian Model Constitutions and Regulatory Test-Labs

As Buchanan started organizing, he also shifted from diagnosis to prescription; he began developing the field he called constitutional economics. In the belief that all existing constitutions were ‘failures’ as far as protecting the wealthy minority from the grabbing majority was concerned, Buchanan set out to design a new legal regime – one that would protect capitalists from government. He took pride in being an ‘academic entrepreneur’, and his venture into constitutional economics showed his acute sense of timing: For he turned to constitutional design in the mid-1970s just as the military junta of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile was facing intense international pressure to return to representative government.

Pinochet’s regime wanted to lock in the radical transformation of the political economy it had forced upon the country, including the privatization of social security and education. In 1980, the dictatorship’s corporate allies invited Buchanan to Santiago to try out his ideas for how to devise a constitution that would protect capitalism from government; the result, Chile’s so-called ‘Constitution of Liberty’ – ratified in a rigged plebiscite – is still achieving that purpose: In 2019, 20 people lost their lives in the massive struggle for a new constitution that might again be responsive to the will of the vast majority.

Sadly, the Chilean experience is not a detour of purely historical interest, but rather, a case of past as prologue. That kind of constitution – a constitution not of checks and balances, but of locks and bolts – has been coming to the United States for several years and is now on the verge of national government take-over with the second presidency of Donald Trump. The first moves in these directions were already visible in 2010, when in North Carolina a radicalized Republican Party, dominated by Koch-backed Tea Party figures, won majorities in both houses of the state legislature and introduced the same prescriptions Buchanan advocated for. What unfolded in North Carolina was a stunning barrage of radical rules changes on the Chilean model: These included extreme gerrymandering, union suppression, attacks on public education, rejection of Medicaid expansion, and environmental regulation rollbacks. “Getting dramatic economic change at the federal level is very difficult”, Tim Phillips, President of the Koch organizing enterprise Americans for Prosperity, later explained “[so] a few years ago, the idea we had was to create model states. North Carolina was a great opportunity to do that”.

To appreciate the nature of this ‘shock and awe’ strategy of libertarian warfare, it helps to know that Buchanan had long urged his teammates on the Right to stop focusing on who rules and study the rules. He explained to like thinkers and those who funded them – including Charles Koch – that if you did not like the outcome of public policy over a long period of time, you must focus laser-like on systematically changing the rules of governance.

Activists mobilising against such policy changes have long focused all their efforts on demonstrating to elected Republican representatives the massive impact these reforms have on the welfare of the general population and especially the poorer segments of society, often believing that showcasing the detrimental effects they have on people would sway officials to revert them. However, what these activists often do not realise are that the men pushing this agenda are not misinformed about the likely consequences – they fully understand that the policies they introduce inflict harm on many of their fellow citizens . but, it is crucial to realise that they truly believe that their endgame is worth that price. To wit: the libertarian morality deems it better to have people die from lack of health care than receive it from government, from taxes paid by others. This, really, is what they mean, ultimately, by personal responsibility: you should be on your own, for all your needs. And if you fail to anticipate and save for

those future needs, you deserve your fate. Not only that your suffering will have instructive value for others in the new world the libertarians are ushering into being: watching what happens to you, as government no longer helps you, will teach others that they must save. What they seek, in short, is a world in which we are kept from using government to help ourselves and one another: by ironclad new rules.

The Koch Network’s Promotion of Libertarian Transformation on Every Continent

The Koch project, as a project of social and political transformation, is so radically new in human history – in its scope, audacity, and strategic sophistication – that the social sciences lack even a concept for it. The Koch donor network funds an infrastructure of literally hundreds of organizations – all working to radically alter government and society in a quest to bring unfettered free-reign capitalism into being. Just as Marxists know a workers’ revolution will have to be international to succeed, so have the members of the Koch network reached the same conclusion: Their vehicle is the so-called Atlas Network, which at this writing claims over 400 affiliates in 95 countries, their operations partly funded by Koch and allied capitalists, with heavy support from fossil fuel-based fortunes.

In fact, Atlas can now claim to be the largest think tank network in the world. Yet, the organization is all but unknown to most scholars and trackers of neo-liberalism. Atlas presents itself to the global public as a non-profit body “strengthening the worldwide freedom movement”. Its mission, according to its website, is to “[increase] global prosperity by strengthening a network of independent partner organizations that promote individual freedom and are committed to identifying and removing barriers to human flourishing”

As in the case of the Koch network’s operations in the US, the rhetoric of freedom packages a cause which does more than simply compete in the marketplace of ideas to win converts. Even from the very limited investigations undertaken to date, numerous Atlas affiliates have been found to sway public opinion with disinformation, operate in secrecy, violate tax laws on charitable endeavors, and more. Most concerning here is the key role several of its affiliates have played in the rise of right-wing populism, the topic with which I will end.

Nowhere is the application of the whatever-it-takes-to-win ethos of Atlas more chilling than in Central Europe, the original spawning ground of Nazism. Some Atlas participants are building cosy relationships with neo-Nazi parties in Germany, Austria and other EU countries. As the European economic historian Janek Wasserman explains “the transnational emergence of the ‘New Right’ demonstrates an alarming degree of interaction between rightists and “Austrian” supporters of free markets and economic liberty”. Where one side brings numbers and street energy, the other brings wealthy donors, highly placed political and intellectual allies, and a coherent policy agenda.

In Austria itself, two organizations that got most of their seed money from the Koch Foundation and the Atlas Network, the Friedrich Hayek Institute and the Austrian Economics Center, saw some of their leading members join the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). A right-wing populist party par excellence, it is anti-immigrant, ethnonationalist, and hostile to the European Union. In other words, a seed bed of incipient neo-Nazim. The Director of the Friedrich Hayek Institute, Barbara Kolm, has served the (FPÖ) as an economic advisor, denouncing the EU and trumpeting the US Tea Party, all in the name of Hayek and Austrians. But, then, she succeeded in bringing the FPÖ to embrace the economic agenda of the arch-capitalist donor network: including deregulation, privatization, decreased corporate and income taxes, and decreased social services.

To conclude, the Koch network’s project is unprecedented in scale and ambition. It is a global, strategic, and well-funded assault on democracy, aiming to chain popular power in the name of capitalist freedom.

To understand our crisis – and act on it – we must unmask the ideas behind this project, name the networks that sustain it, and build coalitions that defend our existing democratic systems, as well as promote the economic strategies that are needed to sustain them: anti-austerity measures, stronger redistribution mechanisms, resilient social systems, and effective environmental protection guidelines. The stakes are nothing less than our collective ability to decide our future and prevent a reign of billionaires who see empathy as humanity’s biggest weakness.

Nancy K. MacLean is an American historian. She is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. Her research focuses on race, gender, labor history and social movements in 20th-century U.S. history.

Further Reading

  • MacLean, Nancy. 2017. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. London, UK: Penguin Books.
  • Slobodian, Quinn. 2025. Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

  • Wasserman, Janek. 2020. The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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F&L Blog – Untangling Donald Trump

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Untangling Donald Trump: Between Liberalism and Fascism

Fred Block

13.08.2025

The relentless series of shocks in the first five months of Donald Trump’s second administration has left most observers stunned and confused. One horrendous set of policies has followed another. There is the destructive march of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team through government agencies, the abrupt ending of U.S. foreign aid programs, the on-again, off-again, on-again tariffs, the push for a major budget bill that will cut taxes for the rich while throwing millions off of medical coverage, the war against major institutions including the National Institutes of Health, the legacy news media, Ivy League Universities, the largest corporate law firms, and the disregard of the courts in sending noncitizen detainees to overseas Gulags. And now we have the U.S. Marines on the streets of Los Angeles in response to minor acts of violence. How can we make sense of these changes?

Trump’s initiatives are part of an authoritarian playbook. Trump is using every ounce of executive branch power to cow potential opponents into submission.  Arresting pro-Palestinian campus activists and deporting people without due process is sending the signal that public dissent is dangerous. The attacks on big law firms, universities, and legacy media are intended to force these major pillars of civil society to acquiesce in whatever MAGA policies Trump chooses to pursue.  

During the first Trump Administration, Adam Serwer made the cogent observation that “the cruelty is the point.” That continues to be true in the second Trump Administration with the abrupt cessation of food aid overseas, the shipping of Venezuelan immigrants to concentration camps in El Salvador, and the huge cuts in social programs in the President’s “big beautiful” budget bill. 

For Trump, the actual consequences of the tariffs for the economy are largely irrelevant; he is not doing it to accomplish anything other than the exercise in dominance. To be sure, if the economic, political, and foreign policy consequen-ces are too negative, he will “coward out” and move on to another display of dominance. He has the threatened conquest of Greenland, Canada, or the Pa-nama Canal in reserve as future exercises in the unilateral exercise of irrational authority.

Trump’s commitment to irrationality is not unique. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger tried something similar back in the 1970’s with the “madman” strategy vis-à-vis their former communist adversaries. The idea was to convince North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and China that Nixon was so crazy that he might further escalate the war against North Vietnam by using nuclear weapons or by deliberately bombing the dikes on the Red River to create catastrophic flooding.  But this ploy ultimately proved ineffective.

n contrast, Trump’s version of the madman strategy has been effective at home. His threats that he will defy legality and take direct revenge against universities, corporate law firms, legacy media companies, and other businesses that refuse to bend the knee has produced a wave of subservient surrenders. He success-fully intimidated Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote for a cartoonishly awful and electorally indefensible budget bill.  

The Neoliberal Agenda

It is also true that much of what Trump has been doing is completely consistent with a long-term right-wing Republican agenda that has considerable support from the business community. He has been faithfully delivering on the wish list compiled by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 which is basically a more radical version of the neoliberal agenda pushed by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher four decades ago.

Trump’s Administration has crippled government regulation of business including measures for environmental protection, protections against financial fraud, and efforts to assure product safety. He has also dismantled the government infrastructure that protects racial groups, women, and others from discrimination.  Huge personnel cuts at the Internal Revenue Service undermine effective tax collection. Trump has further escalated the historic right-wing campaign against the regulation of business by firing the heads of independent regulatory agencies who previously could only be terminated for cause.  Thus far, the Supreme Court seems ready to rubber stamp this reversal of doctrine that had been in place since the 1930’s.

Trump with his DOGE allies has been shrinking the civilian side of the federal government by mass firings across a wide range of government agencies. While many of these firings are still being contested in the courts, tens of thousands accepted voluntary buyouts. At the same time, proposed cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP (food stamps) benefits will shrink these key safety net programs.

Finally, there are the enormous proposed tax cuts benefiting the wealthy that the House passed even though hardly anybody still claims that they will produce future prosperity. The justification seems to be that the very rich, including the Trump family, deserve every penny that they have garnered, and trying to make them pay taxes is basically immoral.

While these Trump measures are in line with a long-term right-wing business agenda, this agenda does not unify the capitalist class. The group of people who make up the capitalist class—those who have amassed great wealth and those who run major business firms—have become deeply divided in their political outlook. While some are militant supporters of the rightward trajectory of the Republican coalition, others have allied themselves to the Democratic Party.

Most media attention has focused on the network of right-wing billionaires and multi-millionaires who have been fervent supporters of Donald Trump since he came down that famous escalator. This includes key actors in finance who have made fortunes in hedge funds, private equity and cryptocurrencies. They have been joined more recently by tech-based oligarchs including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreesen who have seen the second Trump Administration as an opportunity to fundamentally reshape the federal government.

However, Kamala Harris’ campaign and associated groups raised nearly $2 billion—much of which came from very rich people. Forbes reported in late October 2024 that they had identified 83 billionaires who were supporting Kamala Harris and only 52 who were backing Trump. Of course, Elon Musk’s $288 million contribution to the Trump campaign more than made up for this imbalance in billionaire support.

Some of the big money contributors to Harris did so in the hope that once elected she would abandon some of the less business-friendly policies of the Biden Administration. They wanted an end to Biden’s aggressive antitrust policies and greater restraint on deficit spending. However, many also supported her because of deep distrust of Trump for his corruption, his disregard for norms and laws, and his embrace of the radical right’s agenda.

In short, there is little substantive agreement in the U.S. capitalist class over the best policies needed to make the U.S. economy and society work effectively.  There is an important and influential faction that wants to roll back not just the New Deal but most of the reforms of the Progressive Era as well.  But there is also a substantial group who look back at Bill Clinton’s Administration with considerable nostalgia. He pursued a balanced budget, ended welfare entitlements, and presided over an economic boom. Finally, there is even a group who has come to believe that the inequality in income distribution is now too extreme, and that steps must be made to improve the living standards of working class and poor people. A group called, Patriotic Millionaires, has been lobbying for higher taxes on themselves.

Whatever these divided preferences, Trump’s madman performance has effectively intimidated those members of the ruling class who run actual organizations.  Whether they manage a legacy media outlet, a university, a law firm, a bank, or a medium-sized or giant corporation, the risks are great of offending a President obsessed with vengeance against his opponents. He can cancel federal contracts, impose negative regulatory actions, and pursue criminal or tax evasion charges.   The safest strategy is to keep one’s head down and one’s mouth closed and avoid conflict.  If he comes after you—as he has with law firms, universities, and media companies—make a quick deal and give him what he wants.

The key point is that Trump’s only means to pursue the neoliberal agenda of more tax cuts for the rich, reducing regulation, and shrinking social programs is through the exercise of his style of irrational authoritarianism.  The neoliberal policies are now deeply unpopular, even with substantial segments of Trump’s electoral base who depend on programs like Medicaid and Medicare that are scheduled for massive cuts.   Moreover, the agenda is also opposed by critical parts of the capitalist class, even as many of them are too fearful to express that opposition in public. In short, Trump has to rely on intimidation to force Republicans in Congress to rubber stamp his efforts.

The irony is that Trump’s various irrational initiatives end up further eroding his political support. The crazy tariffs, the catastrophic gutting of foreign aid programs, the assault on green energy spending, and the systematic assault on federally funded scientific research are disliked by much of the business community and by large majorities of the public.  Even the mass deportation program is upsetting to many employers and much of the public.    

This provides some grounds for hope in a terrifying political environment. Precisely because Trump’s policies have attacked so many different constituencies simultaneously, the possibility exists for political protests on a scale not seen in the U.S. since the Great Depression.  Trump and his minions will probably respond to such protests with military force, as they have started doing already in Los Angeles. But the repressive capacity of his regime is limited because in contrast to Mussolini and Hitler, Trump lacks disciplined paramilitary units eager to assault or kill their political opponents.   

How this all ends remains highly uncertain. What we do know, however, is that decades of neoliberalism have culminated in Trump’s frontal assault on democratic governance.

Fred L. Block is Professor of Sociology at UC Davis. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading sociologists and followers of Karl Polanyi.

Further Reading

  • Block, Fred L. (2025). The Habitation Society: Creating Sustainable Prosperity. Agenda Publishing. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-habitation-society/9781788217507/
  • Block, Fred. L (2018). Capitalism: The Future of an Illusion. University of California Press. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/capitalism/paper

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