Audiobooks by Quinn Slobodian

[Spanish] - Muskismo: Elon Musk y la nueva era posliberal

"Una radiografía del nuevo orden tecnológico mundial. «Impecablemente investigado y magníficamente escrito». Branko Milanovic Aclamado como un genio mesiánico y tildado al mismo tiempo de bufón imprudente, Elon Musk ha capturado el imaginario popular de nuestra era. Pero, más allá del personaje, Quinn Slobodian y Ben Tarnoff proponen una tesis inquietante: Musk no es una anomalía del sistema, sino su encarnación más lograda. Bajo esta premisa, su forma de operar definiría la economía del siglo xxi de la misma forma que el fordismo definió el capitalismo del siglo xx. Heredero de la tecnocracia, el muskismo plantea gobiernos dirigidos como startups, equipados con software capaz de automatizar políticas a gran escala; promete soberanía individual a través de la tecnología —la fusión creciente entre humanos y máquinas y la evaporación de buena parte del trabajo—; y ofrece seguridad en tiempos de crisis. A cambio, sin embargo, concentra el poder en las pocas manos de quienes poseen la infraestructura. Presentado como modernizador, este proyecto esconde en su interior un mecanismo que reactiva antiguas jerarquías. ¿De dónde vienen todas estas ideas? ¿Qué camino han seguido hasta llegar al corazón de la primera potencia mundial? La propuesta de este libro es que, para entender el mundo que Elon Musk aspira a construir, debemos entender primero los mundos que construyeron a Elon Musk. Desde Sudáfrica hasta Silicon Valley, de SpaceX a DOGE, de la ciencia ficción a los videojuegos y las redes sociales, sus páginas recorren las experiencias que han moldeado la visión de Musk para revelar la lógica política y económica que están adoptando los gobiernos y las corporaciones más poderosas del planeta. Muskismo no trata solo de un hombre, trata del mundo que está ayudando a transformar."

Ben Tarnoff, Quinn Slobodian (Author), Javier Lacroix (Narrator)

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Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed

"Brought to you by Penguin. A pyrotechnic examination of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called Muskism: a playbook for our new postliberal age. It’s not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you could say his life is one long improvisation. And he’s certainly never used the word Muskism – just as, a century ago, Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own postliberal modernity. In exploring the forces that have shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley, Space X to DOGE, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our own crisis-ridden world. Muskism, they show, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human future: where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. This is a worldview in which the technocrat is king; which piggybacks on the state to achieve supremacy; and in which only a select few deserve salvation. If you enter, this book warns you, you will grind and you will live in the shadow of one man – but the rewards could be priceless and the alternative might be extinction. © Ben Tarnoff 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026"

Ben Tarnoff, Quinn Slobodian (Author), Adam Grupper (Narrator)

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Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right

"Brought to you by Penguin. A revelatory exploration of how today’s right-wing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within it After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated – and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek’s disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote. In this illuminating new book, historian Quinn Slobodian reveals how, from the 1990s onwards, neoliberal thinkers turned to nature, in an attempt to roll back social changes and to return to a hierarchy of gender, race and cultural difference. He explores how these thinkers drew on the language of science, from cognitive psychology to genetics, in order to embed the idea of ‘competition’ ever deeper into social life, and to advocate cultural homogeneity as essential for markets to truly work. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neo-confederates, ethnonationalists that would become known as the alt-right. Hayek’s Bastards shows that many contemporary iterations of the Far Right, from Javier Milei to Donald Trump, emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but within it. As repellent as their politics may be, these supposed disruptors are not defectors from the neoliberal order, but its latest cheerleaders. ‘An essential read to understand the times in which we live' - Lea Ypi © Quinn Slobodian 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025"

Quinn Slobodian (Author), Justin Avoth (Narrator)

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[German] - Kapitalismus ohne Demokratie: Wie Marktradikale die Welt in Mikronationen, Privatstädte und Steueroasen zerlegen wollen

"Freiheit und Demokratie, so der Investor Peter Thiel 2009, seien nicht länger kompatibel. Wer die Freiheit liebe, müsse daher versuchen, der Politik in all ihren Formen zu entkommen. Zuflucht suchen könnten Libertäre im Cyberspace, im Weltraum und auf dem offenen Meer. Das mag verblasen klingen, steht aber in einer jahrzehntealten Tradition marktradikaler Ideen: Denker wie Milton Friedman begeisterten sich für das noch unter britischer Oberhoheit stehende Hongkong; Margaret Thatcher träumte von einem Singapur an der Themse. In Globalisten befasste sich Quinn Slobodian mit Versuchen, ökonomische Fragen der demokratischen Willensbildung zu entziehen, etwa durch ihre Übertragung an internationale Organisationen. In Kapitalismus ohne Demokratie geht es nun um eine andere Lösung für das von Thiel beklagte Problem: die Zerschlagung der Welt in Steueroasen, Privatstädte oder Mikronationen. Slobodian nimmt uns mit auf eine faszinierende Reise durch die Welt der neoliberalen Utopien. Sie führt nach Dubai und Liechtenstein, ins vom Bürgerkrieg zerrüttete Somalia und zu Elon Musks texanischem Weltraumbahnhof. Und sie weitet den Blick auf eine mögliche Zukunft, die uns Sorgen machen sollte."

Quinn Slobodian (Author), Philipp Schepmann (Narrator)

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

"Brought to you by Penguin. Look at a map of the world and you'll see a neat patchwork of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. From the 1990s onwards, globalization has shattered the map, leading to an explosion of new legal entities: tax havens, free ports, city-states, gated enclaves and special economic zones. These new spaces are freed from ordinary forms of regulation, taxation and mutual obligation - and with them, ultracapitalists believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Historian Quinn Slobodian follows the most notorious 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 slate where capitalism and democracy can be finally uncoupled. Crack-Up Capitalism is a propulsive history of the recent past, and an alarming view of our near future. ©2023 Quinn Slobodian (P)2023 Penguin Audio"

Quinn Slobodian (Author), Keith Sellon-Wright (Narrator)

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Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

"Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. Slobodian begins in Austria in the 1920s. Empires were dissolving and nationalism, socialism, and democratic self-determination threatened the stability of the global capitalist system. In response, Austrian intellectuals called for a new way of organizing the world. But they and their successors in academia and government, from such famous economists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to influential but lesser-known figures such as Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin, did not propose a regime of laissez-faire. Rather they used states and global institutions—the League of Nations, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade Organization, and international investment law—to insulate the markets against sovereign states, political change, and turbulent democratic demands for greater equality and social justice. Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand project of protecting capitalism on a global scale. It was a project, Slobodian shows, that changed the world, but that was also undermined time and again by the inequality, relentless change, and social injustice that accompanied it."

Quinn Slobodian (Author), Joe Barrett (Narrator)

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Audiobooks by Quinn Slobodian

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