Book Review: Review Essay: An Escape from Politics? On Exit and Outcasting

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231195287
• Author: Jessica Whyte
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

1022 Political Theory 51(6)

8. Roni Hirsch, “The Environmental Justice Movement as a Model Politics of

Risk,” Polity, 53, no. 4 (2021): 616–44.

workplace and the contributory principle. As I have argued elsewhere, the

idea of risk itself extends well beyond the mechanisms of insurance and can

be used to assign responsibility (rather than widely diffuse it) and demand

redress for the policies that have placed communities in danger.8 For politi-

cal theorists, the way forward must be to untangle insurance from its many

“others,” both institutionally and as a set of values, and to understand the

politics of risk as a wide range that runs from exclusion and discrimination

to wide democratic solidarity.

Review Essay: An Escape from Politics? On Exit and Outcasting

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy by

Quinn Slobodian. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2023. 337 pp.

Reviewed by: Jessica Whyte, Philosophy, School of Humanities and Languages,

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

DOI: 10.1177/00905917231195287

Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism begins with a remark by venture

capitalist Peter Thiel: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are

compatible,” the PayPal founder wrote back in 2009. “The great task for

libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” Crack-Up

Capitalism is a sparkling historical account of the thought and practice of

those who have embraced that “great task” in the last several decades. By

following a motley collection of libertarian ideologues, venture capitalists,

and think-tankers through their varied attempts to escape from politics, the

book also reveals much about political life at the latest stage of capitalism.

Slobodian’s focus is on “the zone”—that is, “an enclave carved out of a

nation and freed from ordinary forms of regulation” (2). Along with the

familiar free-trade and export-processing zones of London’s Canary Wharf

or China’s Shenzen, Slobodian takes us on a dizzying tour from Hong Kong

of the late 1970s, where the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman saw

proof that capitalism could dispense with democracy, all the way to the

“cloud country” that biotech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan dreamed of