Gary Gerstle on the Neoliberal Political Order: An Elite Promise of a World of Freedom and Emancipation (Part I)

In this extended conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó published in two parts, Gary Gerstle discusses key questions tackled in his new The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. Part I covers Gerstle’s interpretation of the longue durée history of liberalism; his encompassing approach to the study of political orders; how the neoliberal order became hegemonic in the US; and why the Soviet Union is crucial to the history of the US.

Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research in American History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. He is also a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society. He has written extensively about immigration, race, and nationality, with a particular focus on how Americans have constituted and reconstituted themselves as a nation and the ways in which immigration and race have disrupted and reinforced that process. He has also studied the history of American political thought, institutions, and conflicts, and maintains a longstanding interest in questions of class and class formation.

Gary Gerstle’s best-known books include the co-edited The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (1989), which he has followed up with the co-edited volume Beyond the New Deal Order (2019), Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (2015), American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (2017, updated edition) and the co-edited volume A Cultural History of Democracy in the Modern Age (2021). The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era published in April 2022.

Part II shall be released next week.