Liberty Beyond Neo-Liberalism: A Republican Critique of Liberal Governance in a Globalizing Age. By Steven Slaughter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 272p. $75.00.

Mainstream accounts define globalization as two connected processes. The first is the relentless increase in the interrelation of economic actors. The second is growing recognition of the superiority of “market forces” over state intervention in the economy. Free markets are seen as “natural” forces or “iron laws” of economics that only the economically illiterate or perhaps the insane would limit. Among the many impressive contributions made by Steven Slaughter is the distinction between what he calls “globalization” and “economic globalization.” The former, he argues, is the growing interdependence of economic actors that appears to be an inherent aspect of capitalist development. The latter, however, denotes the contingent victory of free market ideology, or “neoliberalism” over other forms of liberalism. For Slaughter, economic globalization is not the inevitable victory of “natural” and efficient markets against the state. Economic globalization is a form of “governance” that involves state policy, relations between states, and norms and everyday practices. This governance was the creation of state policy and international agreements. Slaughter's argument constitutes an updating of Karl Polanyi's famous claim in The Great Transformation (2001) that nineteenth-century “lasissez-faire” economics was an invention.