This book provides a comprehensive history and analysis of the Neoliberal Order. It begins with a short summary of the rise and fall of the New Deal Order, the subject of a previous book by the author. It then explains the initial growth of Neoliberal thought. The remaining chapters retell American postwar history pointing out the influences that Neoliberalism had on that history. It finishes with the Neoliberal Order lying in ruins after the Trump presidency and speculates on what a future order could look like.

The book would be interesting to people interested in economics and recent political history. The main weakness of the book is the lack of discussion of Neoliberalism outside of the USA. The introduction is also weak. ( )

Gary Gerstle is an emeritus professor of American history at Cambridge University in the UK.
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order is a book about American history written for a general audience about the period of American history and politics from the Great Depression until early 2021. Mr. Gerstle used the tools of the historian to tell a complicated story, in narrative form, about the how institutions, individuals, ideas, wealth and power worked.
Mr. Gerstle discusses, briefly, wealth in America, and the American version of “classical” liberal ideology and politics in the late 19th century. He suggests that Americans, after regarding the American Revolution as a rejection of government by an aristocracy, and the adoption of republican government. The American founders regarded the ownership and use of property by individuals and private interests as important to the working of society. Prof. Gerstle accepts that the signatories of the Declaration of Independence had did not read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations or other foundational theories of economic liberalism, but does not argue that the founders regulated or protected economic rights in the original Constitution or Bill of Rights. Prof. Gerstle maintains that a laissez-faire form of liberalism was the ideology of the American gilded age in the 19th century, believed by robber barons, bankers, businessmen and the middle class.
Americans came to regard the power of wealth and the influence of business elites threats to the goals, living standards and liberty of Americans. American politicians enacted laws regulating economic concentration and later, banking. The collapse of the world economy in 1930, led to the liberalism of the New Deal, a synthesis of liberalism with acceptance of the justifiable uses of government power. The New Deal economic order continued after World War II when American business interests supported a strong national government to protect American prosperity from the Communist system. The use of government power to restrict business was widely accepted.
American business interests funded efforts to transform New Deal liberalism into Washington consensus globalist neoliberalism. At the same time, American culture adopted consumerism and environmentalism as progressive or liberal social goals. Consumerism demanded better quality, more durable, safer and less expensive product be manufacuted and sold by industry and that the government assure those outcomes. It fostered suspicion that when government was not doing enough, it was lazy, careless, remote or corrupt. The Reagan presidency, followed by the Clinton presidency, colloraborated in the destruction of US competition law, the destruction of American industry by globalization, the privatization and commercialization of the Internet, and the deregulation of banks. The American public, fascinated by luxury and accepting the apparent inevitability of the system, acquiesced. This led to the Crash of 2008 and the collapse of the middle class. This caused the Trump presidency, QAnon, and crisis of the 2020 election.
It is a lucid narrative. Like other narratives, it makes some leaps of proof and logic. ( )

A compendium of our recent political and economic history--the writing of history while the history is happening. ( )