Lars Cornelissen's "Neoliberalism and Race"

Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Neoliberalism and Race, and reported the following:

On page 99, we are introduced to the way Arthur Shenfield, a British barrister and political thinker who fulfilled a prominent role in the neoliberal intellectual movement, thought about white minority rule in southern Africa in the 1960s and 70s. We learn not only that Shenfield was fiercely opposed to anti-colonial movements but also that he had no objection to white minority rule or even racial apartheid. We encounter his assertion that ‘The principle of apartheid is neither dishonorable nor, in the bad sense, racist.’ (To which I respond: ‘Did he think there was a good sense?’)

The reader who opens my book to this page would get a decent idea of my overall project. Neoliberalism and Race offers a systematic critique of neoliberal thought that centres themes of race, colonialism, and culture. It maps out how prominent neoliberal thinkers conceptualised race and where they stood on such questions as the European colonial project, apartheid, and civil rights. The arguments discussed on page 99 are certainly representative of the themes explored in the book and would give the reader a keen sense of what else to expect in its pages.

What the page 99 reader would miss, however, is my attempt to read neoliberal racial thought through the lens of the Black radical tradition, which provides me with the conceptual tools to demystify some of the more densely coded racial constructs that populate the neoliberal repertoire. My engagement with this tradition happens mostly in the Introduction and Conclusion to the book, and in the opening and closing sections of each chapter, but does not feature on this page.

Learn more about Neoliberalism and Race at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue