Power, Passion, and Neoliberalism

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is very impressive indeed. This is, however, not immediately evident, a sense that is confirmed by Joseph Stiglitz' review of the book. Even before I read it, I was certain that the Nobel laureate would highlight Klein's attempt to make a connection between the electric shock experiments performed by the notorious McGill University psychologist Ewen Cameron who was on contract with the CIA and the economic shock approach developed by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago.

And indeed, he does, in the course of writing a typical New York Times Book Review piece that dares not evince too much enthusiasm for a book that comes from left field lest it provoke the ever-alert watchdogs of the right to question one's credentials. Stiglitz, in fact, suggests that Klein's analysis might be infected with conspiracy theory with his very first sentence: "here are no accidents in the world as seen by Naomi Klein." The Nobel laureate does have some positive things to say about the book, but he neutralizes this by dropping the line that Klein "is not an academic and must not be judged as one." As for Klein's central concept of "disaster capitalism," it is mentioned once but otherwise ignored. It all adds up to damning with faint praise.

The New York school of publishing says that you win or lose your audience in the first few pages, but whatever their reason for bringing the Cameron experiments up front and strongly implying a link between the genesis of Cameron's shock treatment and the Chicago School approach to economic policymaking, it is bad judgment on the part of Klein and her editors. What is transparently intended mainly as a dramatic device risks achieving its opposite. Conspiracy theory buffs will be elated but not the critical, discerning audience the book is aimed at.

Towering Work

Which is a pity since The Shock Doctrine recovers to emerge as a towering work, one that brilliantly follows neoliberalism's march from marginal theology to universal policy. Klein combines the journalist's eye for the arresting detail, the analyst's ability to spot, surface, and dissect deeper trends, and a talent for telling a spell-binding story, to prove once again that a masterful journalist can often illuminate social realities far better than the best-trained economist or political scientist.

With her ability to combine no-stone-left-unturned investigative reporting with in-depth social analysis, Klein is her generation's David Halberstam, her Shock Doctrine and an earlier book No Logo being on par with The Best and the Brightest and War in a Time of Peace. There is one difference, though: Klein is unashamedly a woman of the left, and this is where her analysis derives both its power and its passion.

The Shock Doctrine traces neoliberalism's rise to dominance to a program set up in the mid-fifties to enable Chilean students to imbibe the radical free-market doctrine being propagated by Milton Friedman and his associates at the University of Chicago. The U of C's economics department was then an oasis of radical free-market thinking in a world dominated by Keynesianism in the United States and Europe and "developmentalism" or desarrollismo in Latin America, with their pragmatic compromises between the state and the market, labor and management, trade and development.

Los Chicago Boys

The opportunity for neoliberalism to come in from the cold arrived in the early 70s, when General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the revolutionary government of President Salvador Allende in Chile and invited the "Chicago Boys" that had been waiting in the wings for years to manage the economy. With the population stunned by the coup, the "Chicago Boys" went about the task of swiftly dismantling the Keynesian and developmentalist compromises that underpinned one of Latin America's most advanced industrial economies.

With a Year Zero mentality Continued>>>>
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