Historian Quinn Slobodian follows the radical libertarians from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel – around the globe as they search for the perfect home for their free market fantasy. The hunt leads from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-confederate South to the medieval City of London, and finally into the world’s oceans and war zones charting the relentless quest for a blank state where capitalism and democracy can be finally uncoupled.

British Chancellor Jeremy Hunt  created 12 new UK investment zones especially designed to benefit from tax breaks and other incentives to promote investment and innovation in his March 2023 budget. Supporters ailed the scheme for government’s elusive manifesto  promise of levelling up, sceptics dismissed as window dressing aimed at reviving Conservative Party’s polling numbers in the North.

Slobodian’s new book is convincing us that such schemes in fact represent something more profound  and just as respectable face of what he terms “crack-up capitalism”, the strategy of “punching holes in the territory of the nation state, creating zones of exception with different laws and often no democratic oversight”.

Behind them is massed  powerful and well-resourced intellectual movement that has for 70 years been devoted to rejecting the fundamental principles of democratic governance and the social market economy in favour of libertarian, radical capitalist alternative.

Crack-Up Capitalism highlights the theorist Albert Hirschman between opposite logics of Voice – in which the remedy for decline is to try proactively to fix things – and Exit – in which solution is to up sticks and start anew.

Slobodian explores the political economy of urban regeneration schemes such as Canary Wharf in London and Hudson Yards in New York and city scale projects in accelerated development in Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai.  Tensions often arise  between the demands of democratic politics and the desire to attract capital to stimulate economic dynamism.

Siobodian explores how in the early 1980s chief Lennox Sebe, the ruler of Ciskei, one of the so-called Bantustans created by apartheid South Africa as self-governing  homelands, invited the head of libertarian Free Market Foundation think-tank to turn the enclave into  “an African Hong Kong”. The experiment developed into an explosive police state- conveniently furnishing South Africa’s politicians with the perfect cautionary tale  as they sought to avoid enfranchising the majority population.

Slobodian explores Liechtenstein, not just a relic of Europe’s feudal past,  and argues that  the principality represents a truly postmodern political and economic project. In 2003, its ruler, Prince Hans-Adam II, redrew its constitution simultaneously to grant the monarchy absolute executive power and to guarantee the population’s right to abolish it.  The State adopted the model of capitalist corporate governance as its political system. According to Prince “ the people are now shareholders of the state”.

Slobodian explores Michael van Notten, a Dutch lawyer and ex-EEC official who in the 1990s became so convinced of the Hayekian merits of the Somali clan system that he tried to found a new country based on it –Freedonia – in Mauritius.

Peter Thiel, forty-one-year old venture capitalist having made a small fortune by founding PayPal and investing early in Facebook,  he had taken a huge hit in the financial crisis the year before. He now only had one thing on his mind how to escape from the tax-collecting democratic state and wrote “ I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.”.

Crack-Up Capitalism is a propulsive history of the recent past and an alarming view of our near future.

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of World Without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian, Allen Lane £25, 352 pages.