Haha, thanks Pavlos! Learned much from you for all this!

5. I want ot thank Tobias Rupprecht and his Peripheral Liberalism reseach group for the opportunity to join - a bit in extremis - the nice roster of contributions around the world on this topic. And please, write me in case are you interest in having access to the chapter.

4. The paper also serves to further contest the Washington Consensus centric take on Peru's neoliberalism, portraying the weight of that longer genealogy of ideas. Creative arguments on floating exchange rate, self-help urbanism and property owning populism could be found in that back-story.

3. The argument is that Peru's peripheral economy, with fiscal constrains, but also heightened expectations for development shaped the path of these early neoliberals. Experiments of authoritarian austerity were possible. But also the need to accomodate to the developmental and welfarist urges.

2. That lineage of ideologues, that some were at the same time powerful businessmen and politicians, streches back to the 1930s. The chapter summarizes the history of pionnering success in bringing stark liberalization (not without authorianism), but also their failures throughout the 20th century.

1. As a good complement, earlier this year I published this chapter in the edited volumen Market Economists Beyond the West, edited by Tobias Rupprecht in Routledge. In there, I relate the 1980s story to the longer Peruvian genealogy of neoliberal ideas.

www.routledge.com/Market-Econo...

@mpifg.bsky.social @williamcallison.bsky.social @tomasgold.bsky.social @juliangomezdelgado.bsky.social @paulodrinot.bsky.social @quinnslobodian.com @llchristyll.bsky.social @cami34.bsky.social @proufos.bsky.social @cacrisalves.bsky.social @benbraun.eurosky.social @melindacooper.bsky.social

9. The piece will be part of the upcoming special issue “Polycentric Neoliberalism” that offers similar fascinating analysis from the experiences of other Latin-American and Asian Cases. Many thanks to Tomas Gold and Max Jara for organizing it. online.ucpress.edu/gp/collectio...

8. From the historical analysis of a peripheral case, the article resonates with today’s perplexity of the end-not-end of neoliberalism, as it explores one of their many mutations, in which the hybrid interaction - rather than clear-cut - between "paradigms" is central.

7. The analysis serves as an example of how neoliberal populism takes shape, and how it is able to strategically decouple itself from the debates on macroeconomic matters that in the 1980s, that were briefly a hard-sell in Latin America.

6. This “microeconomic populism” present in De Soto was not just sucessful intellctually in the 80s and played a role alongside Fujimori's shock therapy in the 1990s, but has become a central part of Peru's liberal right-wing until today.

5. De Soto’s success is understood in the text as the ability to co-opt many elements of left populist discourse into a pro-market narrative of Peru’s failed economics and a promise to solve it through financial and legal coding, instead of macroeconomic redistribution: a microeconomic populism.

4. De Soto’s "Other Path", the book and the political agenda, was more influenced by other neoliberal ideas than those of macroeconomic adjustment (more Buchanan, Law and Economics and Hayek, than Friedman). However, these influences were confronted with and reshaped by Peru’s left populism.

3. I argue against a reading of De Soto based solely in the Washington Consensus’ set of blueprints. Instead De Soto’s creative neoliberal argument has a more interactive (and polycentric!) story of emergence, in which Peru’s left economic populist environment of the mid 1980s played a key role.

2. I reconstruct the trajectory of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto throughout the 1980s (and of his think tank ILD) following the origins, influences and contexts behind his (their) ideas (and actions towards) of a liberal revolution based on popular informal entrepreneurship.

First page of the article on Neoliberal Populism in Peru.

1.NEW ARTICLE. Fresh out of the oven, I want to share my article on “neoliberal populism” just out in out in Global Perspectives. I analyze the ideational origins of Peru's resilient neoliberalism in the 1980s. Here a free access to the article (for a month). online.ucpress.edu/gp/article/d...

Economics can either enable the slide toward fascism, or defend affordability, dignity, and democracy.

I wrote ANTI-FASCIST ECONOMICS with my baby by my side—a constant reminder that the future should be livable for all.

Out in October with Random House.

Today in Berlin

Captain it's Wednesday

Captain it's Wednesday

Nice. Congrats

Hey. Until qhen are you here? Are you visiting good ole cologne?

I felt sort of deja vu when I saw the Ft thing the other day. This explains it! Ha

Really pleased to advertise these 4 LSE postdocs in the history of popular government as part of our ERC Synergy Project "Popular Government in Global Perspective (POPGOV)"

Kluge in front of a police officer

cover of the German edition of Negt and Kluge: Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung

With Alexander Kluge the other great theorist of the public sphere died, shortly after Habermas.
Today we live the effects of the pacification of conflicts through “facades of legitimation” & “pseudo-publics” & the resulting blockages of social hopes, experiences & needs he diagnosed.
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We are hiring a tenure track (!) senior researcher in political economy!

This is obviously a great job (permanent without teaching obligation) and I hope you all apply.

However, I would like to take a moment to share just how significant this is in the German academic context ⬇️

Stellenangebote

We are hiring! The Department of Inequality, Transformation and Conflict is looking for Postdoc & Doc Researchers (m/f/d). Find out more & apply via www.ips.mpg.de #MaxPlanck #Postdoc #PhD #Sociology #SocialScience #PoliticalScience #Inequality #Conflict www.ips.mpg.de/13135/stelle...

Fossil fuel stocks are exploding in response to the war on Iran.

Who stands to benefit? The richest of the rich.

Who stands to lose? All of us who have to pay higher prices for energy and a new round of sellers' inflation.

Sharepic zu kurzfristigen Nachrücker:innenplätzen für die Keynes Spring School 2026 am 10. und 11. März 2026 an der Universität Duisburg-Essen. Bei Interesse: Mail an julian.becker@uni-due.de

Keynes Spring School 2026 am Institut für Sozioökonomie @unidue.bsky.social – jetzt letzte Nachrücker:innen-Plätze sichern. Bei Interesse: Schickt uns eine Mail!

Alle Infos zur Keynes Spring School 2026:
www.uni-due.de/soziooekonom...

The first set of postdocs for our ERC project on popular government have just been advertised. These 3 postdocs will be based at UC Louvain with my co-PI Pierre-Etienne Vandamme and focus on contemporary democratic theory. Apply! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...