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GL O BA L I S T S
 Globalists
The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

Qu i n n s l obodi a n

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2018
 Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca

First printing

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Slobodian, Quinn, 1978–­author.

Title: Globalists : the end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism /
Quinn Slobodian.
Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : Harvard University Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017050071 | ISBN 9780674979529 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Globalization—­History—20th ­century. |
Neoliberalism—­History—20th ­century. | Capitalism—­History—20th ­century.
Classification: LCC JZ1318 .S595 2018 | DDC 320.51/3—­dc23
LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2017050071

Cover design: Jill Breitbarth

Cover art: Art: Open Window, 1917 (oil paint, mixed media & wax on panel), Juan Gris
(1887–1927)/Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, USA/The Louise and Walter
Arensberg Collection, 1950/Bridgeman Images
For M & Y
 Contents

list of abbreviations ix

Introduction: Thinking in World O

­ rders 1
1. A World of Walls 27
2. A World of Numbers 55
3. A World of Federations 91
4. A World of Rights 121
5. A World of Races 146
6. A World of Constitutions 182
7. A World of Signals 218
Conclusion: A World of P
­ eople without a ­People 263

notes 289
acknowl­e dgments 363
index 365
 Abbreviations

AAAA American-­African Affairs Association

ARA American-­R hodesian Association
CAP Common Agricultural Policy
CWL Walter Lipp­mann Colloquium
ECLA United Nations Economic Commission for Latin Amer­i­ca
ECOSOC United Nations Economic and Social Council
EDU Eastern Demo­cratic Union
EEC Eu­ro­pean Economic Community
EFTA Eu­ro­pean ­Free Trade Area
G-77 Group of 77
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
ICC International Chamber of Commerce
ICIC International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation
IIIC International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation
ILO International ­Labour Organ­ization
IMF International Monetary Fund
x A bb r e v iatio n s

ISC International Studies Conference

ITO International Trade Organ­ization
LSE London School of Economics
MPS Mont Pèlerin Society
NAFTA North American ­Free Trade Agreement
NAM National Association of Manufacturers
NBER National Bureau of Economic Research
NIEO New International Economic Order
TPRC Trade Policy Research Centre
UCT University of Cape Town
UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
WTO World Trade Organ­ization
GL O BA L I S T S
 Introduction
Thinking in World O­ rders

A nation may beget its own barbarian invaders.

—­w ilhelm röpke, 1942

B y the end of the twentieth ­century it was a common belief that free-­
market ideology had conquered the world. The importance of states
was receding in the push and pull of the global economy. At the World
Economic Forum at Davos in 1995, an iconic location of the era, U.S.
president Bill Clinton observed that “24-­hour markets can respond with
blinding speed and sometimes ruthlessness.”1 Chancellor Gerhard Schröder
referenced the “storms of globalization” as he announced a major reform
of the welfare system in reunified Germany. The social market economy,
he said, must modernize or it would “be modernized by the unchecked
forces of the market.”2 Politics had moved to the passive tense. The only
actor was the global economy. U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan
Greenspan put the point most bluntly in 2007 when he declared, “It
hardly makes any difference who ­will be the next president. The world is
governed by market forces.”3 To its critics, this looked like a new em-
pire with “globalization substituting for colonialism.”4 To its champions,
2 GLOBALISTS

it was a world in which goods and capital, if not p ­ eople, flowed ac-
cording to the logic of supply and demand, creating prosperity—or at
least ­opportunity—­for all.5 This philosophy of the rule of market forces
was labeled “neoliberalism” by its critics. Neoliberals, we ­were told,
believed in global laissez-­ faire: self-­
regulating markets, shrunken
states, and the reduction of all ­human motivation to the one-­dimensional
rational self-­interest of Homo economicus. The neoliberal globalists, it
was claimed, conflated free-­market capitalism with democracy and
fantasized about a single world market without borders.
My narrative corrects this storyline. It shows that self-­described neo-
liberals did not believe in self-­regulating markets as autonomous enti-
ties. They did not see democracy and capitalism as synonymous. They
did not see h ­ umans as motivated only by economic rationality. They
sought neither the disappearance of the state nor the disappearance of
borders. And they did not see the world only through the lens of the in-
dividual. In fact, the foundational neoliberal insight is comparable to
that of John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi: the market does not and
cannot take care of itself. The core of twentieth-­century neoliberal the-
orizing involves what they called the meta-­economic or extra-­economic
conditions for safeguarding capitalism at the scale of the entire world. I
show that the neoliberal proj­ect focused on designing institutions—­not
to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against
the threat of democracy, to create a framework to contain often-­irrational
­human be­hav­ior, and to reorder the world ­after empire as a space of
competing states in which borders fulfill a necessary function.
How can we make sense of neoliberalism—­and can we even use that
name? For years many have claimed that the term is virtually meaning-
less. “­There is for all practical purposes, no such ­thing” as neoliberal
theory, one scholar claimed recently.6 In 2016, however, the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund (IMF), making international headlines, not only
identified neoliberalism as a coherent doctrine but asked if the policy
package of privatization, deregulation, and liberalization had been
“oversold.”7 Fortune reported at the time that “even the IMF now ad-
mits neoliberalism has failed.”8 The magazine’s suggestion that this was
a new development was somewhat inaccurate. The policies associated
with neoliberalism had been challenged—at least rhetorically—­for two
 I n t r o d u ctio n 3

de­cades. An early expression of doubt came from Joseph Stiglitz ­after

the Asian financial crisis of 1997.9 World Bank chief economist from
1997 to 2000 and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics,
Stiglitz became a vocal critic of neoliberal globalization. In the late 1990s
other critics declared that the un­regu­la­ted global ­free market was “the
last utopia”—­and the international financial institutions partly agreed.10
They dropped their doctrinaire opposition to capital controls, the very
subject of the 2016 Fortune article. The World Trade Organ­ization (WTO)
underwent a similar facelift. ­After protests shut down its 1999 meeting,
it pivoted to emphasize the h ­ uman side of globalization.
Even though the policies described as neoliberal had long been criti-
cized, the IMF report was still significant for recognizing the label “neo-
liberalism.” The term appeared poised for the mainstream, appearing
in the Financial Times, the Guardian, and other newspapers.11 Also in 2016,
the Adam Smith Institute, founded in 1977 and a source of guidance for
Margaret Thatcher, “came out as neoliberals,” in their words, shedding
their former moniker, “libertarian.”12 “Globalist in outlook” was one of
the princi­ples they claimed for themselves. In 2017 the director of the
Walter Eucken Institute in Germany publicly defended the honor of
what he called “classic neoliberalism” and its call for “a strong state
standing above the interests of lobbies.”13 It seemed that for both critics
and proponents “the movement that dared not speak its own name”
could now be named.14 This was a clarifying development. Labeling
neoliberalism helps us to see it as one body of thought and one mode of
governance among o ­ thers—as a form or variety of regulation rather
than its radical Other.
In the last de­cade, extraordinary efforts have been made to historicize
neoliberalism and its prescriptions for global governance, and to trans-
form the “po­liti­cal swearword” or “anti-­liberal slogan” into a subject of
rigorous archival research.15 My narrative knits together two strands of
scholarship that have remained strangely disconnected. The first strand
is the work to trace the intellectual history of the neoliberal movement.16
The second strand is the study of neoliberal globalist theory by social
scientists, not historians. Scholars have shown that the term “neoliber-
alism” was coined first at the Walter Lipp­mann Colloquium in Paris in
1938 as a way to describe the desire of the gathered economists, sociologists,
4 GLOBALISTS

journalists, and business leaders to “renovate” liberalism.17 As one scholar

argues, one of the most defensible ways to study neoliberalism is as “an
or­ga­nized group of individuals exchanging ideas within a common in-
tellectual framework.”18 Historians have focused, in par­tic­u­lar, on the
Mont Pèlerin Society, formed by F. A. Hayek and ­others in 1947, as a
group of like-­minded intellectuals and policy makers who would meet
periodically to discuss world affairs and the con­temporary condition
of the po­liti­cal cause to which they ­were devoted. This group was not
without its internal rifts, as the works cited have shown. Apart from
monetary policy and development economics, though, the question of
international and global governance has been surprisingly neglected in
­these histories.19 Although ­there ­were differences among ­these thinkers,
my contention is that we can discern the broad strokes of a coherent
prescription for world order in their writings and actions. Globalizing
the ordoliberal princi­ple of “thinking in ­orders,” their proj­ect of thinking
in world o ­ rders offered a set of proposals designed to defend the world
economy from a democracy that became global only in the twentieth
­century—­producing a state of affairs and a set of challenges that their
pre­de­ces­sors, the classical liberals, could never have predicted.
The clearest-­eyed academic observers of the neoliberal philosophy of
global ordering have been not historians but social scientists. For the
last twenty years, po­liti­cal scientists and sociologists have elaborated a
sophisticated analy­sis of the neoliberal proj­ect. They have identified
efforts to insulate market actors from demo­cratic pressures in a series of
institutions from the IMF and the World Bank to port authorities and
central banks worldwide, including the Eu­ro­pean Central Bank, gover-
nance structures like the Eu­ro­pean Union, trade treaties like the North
American ­Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the WTO. They have
also seen efforts to insulate in the expansion of international investment
law designed to protect foreign investors from diverse forms of expro-
priation and to provide a parallel global ­legal system known as the
transnational law merchant.20 They have traced the emergence of an
“offshore world” of tax havens and the proliferation of zones of many
types, all designed to provide safe harbor for capital, f­ ree from fear of
infringement by policies of progressive taxation or re­distribution.21
“Insulation of markets” is a useful meta­phorical description of the aim
 I n t r o d u ctio n 5

of neoliberalism as a specific institution-­building proj­ect rather than as

a nebulous “logic” or “rationality.” The work of social scientists in de-
fining this insulation has been rigorous, but their history of neoliberal
theory has been less so—­they often give intellectuals such as Hayek and
Milton Friedman only walk-on roles.22 The ideas of such neoliberal lu-
minaries are said to inspire or “suggest” certain forms of global and re-
gional governance, yet we are left to won­der how this influence actually
happened and where the ideas came from in the first place. The name of
Hayek, in par­tic­u­lar, often operates as a free-­floating signifier more than
an index to an ­actual historical figure. Some label the Eu­ro­pean Union
a “Hayekian federation,” for example, while o ­ thers call the desire to
leave the EU a hope of “reviving Hayek’s dream.”23 What exactly did
thinkers like Hayek wish for, and where and when did the ideas of neo-
liberal globalism originate? I locate a key point of origin of neoliberal
globalist thinking within the epochal shift of order that occurred at the
end of empire. Decolonization, I argue, was central to the emergence of
the neoliberal model of world governance.

ENCASEMENT, NOT LIBERATION

One of the obstacles to understanding neoliberals on their own terms

has been an excessive reliance on a set of ideas borrowed from the Hun-
garian economic historian Karl Polanyi, who has become, as one scholar
notes, “­after Michel Foucault, prob­ably the most popu­lar theorist among
social scientists t­ oday.”24 Across many attempts to account for neo­
liberal globalization, the retroactive influence of Polanyi’s 1944 book
The ­Great Transformation is marked. According to t­ hose who adapt Po-
lanyi’s narrative, the “market fundamentalism” of neoliberals led them
to seek to “disembed” the “natu­ral” market from society and thus realize
their utopian dream of a “self-­regulating market.” It is noted routinely
that Polanyi was actually writing about the nineteenth c­ entury, but
critics often make the leap to say that this was a critique of neoliberalism
before the fact. Of a piece with the Polanyian language is the idea that
the goal of neoliberals is to liberate markets or set them ­free. The
other­w ise uncommon adjective “unfettered” is attached habitually to
6 GLOBALISTS

“markets” as both neoliberal goal and putative real­ity.25 Against the

intention of the authors of neoliberal theory, this meta­phor essential-
izes the object of critique: the market becomes a ­thing capable of being
liberated by agents, instead of being, as neoliberals themselves believed,
a set of relationships that rely on an institutional framework.26
The applications of Polanyi’s categories have led to key insights, and
I build on the efforts of scholars since the turn of the millennium to
conceive of the neoliberal proj­ect as “a simultaneous roll-­back and roll-­out
of state functions.”27 Adapting Polanyi, some scholars have even written
of “embedded neoliberalism.”28 Yet if we want to understand neolib-
eral thought on its own terms—an essential first step of critique—we
should not be misled by the notion of a self-­regulating market liberated
from the state. Looking at the writings of the neoliberals concerned
with global order, one discovers the importance of the fact that Polanyi
was their con­temporary. Like him, they saw the ­Great Depression as
evidence that the old form of capitalism was unworkable, and they set
about theorizing the broader conditions required for its survival. In the
words of one scholar, both Hayek and Polanyi w ­ ere “concerned with
socio-­institutional responses to the ­free market.”29 In fact, Hayek devel-
oped his own idea of “­free markets as socially embedded.”30 If we place
too much emphasis on the category of market fundamentalism, we ­will
fail to notice that the real focus of neoliberal proposals is not on the
market per se but on redesigning states, laws, and other institutions to
protect the market. L ­ egal scholars have been clear on the increasing “le-
galization” or “juridicization” of world trade.31 Focusing on Hayek and
his collaborators allows us to understand this within the intellectual
history of neoliberal thought.
A 2006 article in the leading neoliberal journal Ordo clarified that
the found­ers of the neoliberal movement “added the syllable ‘neo’ ”
­because they recognized the need to establish “the role of the state both
more clearly and differently,” including increased attention to the “legal-­
institutional framework.”32 Far from having a utopian belief in the market
as operating in­de­pen­dently of ­human intervention, “neoliberals . . . ​have
pointed to the extra-­economic conditions for a f­ ree economic system.”33
It is an inadequately acknowledged fact that the focus of both German
ordoliberalism and Austrian economics is not on the economy as such
 I n t r o d u ctio n 7

but on the institutions creating a space for the economy.34 When Hayek
referred to the “self-­regulating forces of the economy”—as he did, for
example, in his inaugural lecture when taking up his position in
Freiburg—he followed immediately with a discussion of the need for a
“framework” for the economy.35 The overwhelming focus of his work
was on the prob­lem of designing what he called, in his next book ­after
The Road to Serfdom, a “constitution of liberty.”36
“Hayek saw clearly,” one scholar writes, “that the market is a social
institution embedded in a ­great variety of institutions in which it gains
meaning.”37 Hayek himself dismissed the idea that he was calling for a
“minimal state.”38 Although the shorthand phrase “strong state and ­free
market” has its usefulness in explaining neoliberalism, how one defines
strength is not self-­evident.39 One scholar has argued that it makes ­little
sense to think of the state in quantitative rather than qualitative terms;
the question of “how much” state should be replaced by “what kind” of
state.40 The chapters that follow provide an exposition through time of
the neoliberal idea that markets are not natu­ral but are products of the
po­liti­cal construction of institutions to encase them. Markets buttress
the repository of cultural values that are a necessary but not sufficient
condition for markets’ continued existence.

GENEVA SCHOOL, NOT CHICAGO SCHOOL

In 1983 one of Hayek’s students, the leading international economic

­lawyer Ernst-­Ulrich Petersmann, wrote, “The common starting point of
the neoliberal economic theory is the insight that in any well-­functioning
market economy the ‘invisible hand’ of market competition must by ne-
cessity be complemented by the ‘vis­i­ble hand’ of the law.” He listed the
well-­k nown neoliberal schools of thought: the Freiburg School, birth-
place of German ordoliberalism, and home to Walter Eucken and Franz
Böhm; the Chicago School, identified with Milton Friedman, Aaron
Director, Richard Posner, and ­others; and the Cologne School of Ludwig
Müller-­Armack. Then he cited a virtual unknown: the Geneva School.41
Who or what was the Geneva School? The following chapters pres­ent
a narrative about a strain of neoliberalism that has been neglected by
8 GLOBALISTS

historians. I introduce a set of thinkers who have not been central in the
En­glish lit­er­a­ture and reframe t­ hose like Hayek who have been. I adopt
and expand the label “Geneva School” to describe a genus of neoliberal
thought that stretches from the seminar rooms of fin-­de-­siècle Vienna to
the halls of the WTO in fin-­de-­millennium Geneva. My goal in intro-
ducing the term is neither to invite hairsplitting about inclusion nor
to litigate the roster of its members. Rather, my intention is to remedy
the confusion produced when diverse thinkers are contained ­under the
single umbrella term “neoliberal.” The Geneva School offers provisional
but helpful illumination of ­those aspects of neoliberal thought related
to world order that have remained more or less in the shadows. As pro-
posed h ­ ere, the Geneva School includes thinkers who held academic po-
sitions in Geneva, Switzerland, among them Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig
von Mises, and Michael Heilperin; t­ hose who pursued or presented key
research ­there, including Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and Gottfried Haberler;
and ­those who worked at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT), such as Jan Tumlir, Frieder Roessler, and Petersmann him-
self. Although they shared affinities with the Freiburg School, Geneva
School neoliberals transposed the ordoliberal idea of “the economic
constitution”—or the totality of rules governing economic life—to the
scale beyond the nation.
The distinct contributions of the Geneva School to neoliberal thought
are often neglected in English-­language discussions. Most histories of
the neoliberal movement begin in continental Eu­rope with the meetings
in the 1930s and 1940s but shift their gaze to the United States and ­Great
Britain ahead of the neoliberal breakthrough of Reagan and Thatcher
in the 1980s. This shift is accompanied by a pointed focus on the Chicago
School, and Friedman in par­tic­u­lar. Even though some welcome atten-
tion is now being given to the field of law and economics and the public
choice theory of James M. Buchanan and ­others of the ­Virginia School,
the overall tendency has been ­toward an understanding of neoliberal
thought that tilts ­toward the Anglo-­American side.42 What this misses
is the importance of the contributions of ­those who remained in conti-
nental Eu­rope or who, like Hayek, returned to Eu­rope. Correcting this
elision is critical ­because it was the Eu­ro­pean neoliberals who ­were
most attentive to questions of international order.
 I n t r o d u ctio n 9

My narrative pres­ents a vision of neoliberal globalism viewed from

Central Eu­rope, ­because it was Central Eu­ro­pean neoliberals who
most consistently looked at the world as a w ­ hole. Both Chicago School
and ­ Virginia School thinkers exhibited the peculiarly American
quality of ignoring the rest of the world while assuming that Amer­i­ca
was a working model of it.43 Eu­ro­pean neoliberals did not have this
luxury, as they existed for most of the c­ entury ­under the influence of
varying levels of U.S. hegemony. It made sense that Central Eu­ro­pean
neoliberals ­were precocious theorists of world order. Their countries
did not enjoy a vast domestic market like that of the United States, so
they w ­ ere forced to be more attentive to the question of access to the
world market through ­either trade or annexation. The early end of em-
pire in Central Eu­rope ­a fter the First World War also required them to
contemplate strategies for balancing state power with economic inter-
dependence. Although the story begins in Vienna, the Swiss city on
the lake, Geneva—­e ventually the home of the WTO—­became the
spiritual capital of the group of thinkers who sought to solve the riddle
of postimperial order.
Most historians would claim that the question of world order had
been more or less settled early in the c­ entury in f­ avor of the idea of
national self-­determination offered by both Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow
Wilson and demanded by anticolonial actors worldwide. In that view,
the princi­ple of self-­determination, thwarted at Versailles by the unwill-
ingness of the United States and Eu­ro­pean empires to live up to their
own rhe­toric, and waylaid by the fascist expansionism of Italy and Ger-
many and ­later the Soviet control over its satellite states, eventually tri-
umphed with the wave of decolonization ­after the Second World War
and, most recently, with the end of apartheid in South Africa and So-
viet rule in Eastern Eu­rope. Geneva School neoliberals disagreed with
this narrative. To their mind, commitments to national sovereignty and
autonomy ­were dangerous if taken seriously. They ­were stalwart critics
of national sovereignty, believing that ­after empire, nations must remain
embedded in an international institutional order that safeguarded
capital and protected its right to move throughout the world. The car-
dinal sin of the twentieth c­ entury was the belief in unfettered national
in­de­pen­dence, and the neoliberal world order required enforceable
10 GLOBALISTS

isonomy—or “same law,” as Hayek would l­ater call it—­against the illu-
sion of autonomy, or “own law.”
Geneva School neoliberals reconciled the tension between the world
economy and the world of nations through their own distinct geog-
raphy. Their global imaginary was sketched by the erstwhile Nazi jurist
Carl Schmitt in 1950. Schmitt proposed that t­ here was not one world but
two. One was the world partitioned into bounded, territorial states
where governments ruled over ­human beings. This he called the world
of imperium, using the Roman ­legal term. The other was the world of
property, where p ­ eople owned ­things, money, and land scattered across
the earth. This was the world of dominium. The doubled world of modern
capitalism coalesced in the nineteenth ­century. The ubiquity of foreign
investment had made it routine for p ­ eople to own all or part of enter-
prises in countries where they w ­ ere not citizens and had never even set
foot. Money worked almost anywhere and could be exchanged into and
out of major currencies at the fixed rates of the gold standard. Contracts
­were enforced universally by written and unwritten codes of business
conduct. Even military occupation did not affect private property. Un-
like earlier eras of plunder, the land or business was still yours a­ fter the
­enemy army had swept through. To Schmitt, the division between
dominium and imperium was more fundamental than the purely po­
liti­cal distinction of foreign and domestic. The most impor­tant border
did not halve the world like an orange into East and West, or North and
South, but preserved overlapping w ­ holes in suspension, like an orange’s
pith and peel. “Over, ­under and beside the state-­political borders of what
appeared to be a purely po­liti­cal international law between states,” he
wrote, “spread a f­ree, i.e. non-­state sphere of economy permeating
every­thing: a global economy.” 44
Schmitt meant the doubled world as something negative, an impinge-
ment on the full exercise of national sovereignty. But neoliberals felt
he had offered the best description of the world they wanted to con-
serve. Wilhelm Röpke, who taught in Geneva for nearly thirty years,
believed that exactly this division would be the basis for a liberal world
order. The ideal neoliberal order would maintain the balance between
the two global spheres through an enforceable world law, creating
a “minimum of constitutional order” and a “separation of the state-­
 I n t r o d u ctio n 11

public sphere from the private domain.” 45 In a lecture he delivered at

the Acad­emy of International Law at The Hague in 1955, Röpke empha-
sized the importance of the division while also pointing to its paradox.
“To diminish national sovereignty is most emphatically one of the ur-
gent needs of our time,” he argued, but “the excess of sovereignty should
be abolished instead of being transferred to a higher po­liti­cal and geo­
graph­i­cal unit.” 46
Scaling national government up to the planet, creating a global gov-
ernment, was no solution. The puzzle of the neoliberal ­century was to
find the right institutions to sustain the often strained balance between
the economic world and the po­liti­cal world. The consequences of the
doubled globe for reimagining the world a­ fter empire are dismissed all
too easily in narratives of modern global history as the passage from
colonial subjugation to national in­de­pen­dence. Few thinkers engaged
with the consequences of this doubled world more than the group of
economists and ­lawyers described in ­these pages. Convinced from the
beginning of the c­ entury that ­there was and could only be a single world
economy, they strove to reconcile mutual economic de­pen­dency with
po­liti­cal self-­determination.
In his Hague lecture, Röpke suggested that the solution could be
found in the space between economics and law.47 As the following chap-
ters show, from its beginnings Geneva School neoliberalism has been
less a discipline of economics than a discipline of statecraft and law.
More than making markets, ­these neoliberals have concentrated on
making market enforcers. When Hayek moved from the University of
Chicago to Freiburg in 1962, he became the heir of the homegrown
German law-­and-­economics tradition of ordoliberalism, and most
scholars recognize him as an ally, if not a member, of the Freiburg
School.48 His 1960 work The Constitution of Liberty and even more so
his 1970s trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty (written during his time
in Freiburg) justify this designation, ­because he became ever more fo-
cused on finding a ­legal and institutional fix for the disruptive effects of
democracy on market pro­cesses. Unlike the ordoliberals, who called
for an “economic constitution” at the level of the nation, the Geneva
School neoliberals called for an economic constitution for the world.
I argue that we can understand the proposal of the Geneva School as a
12 GLOBALISTS

rethinking of ordoliberalism at the scale of the world. We might call it

ordoglobalism.49
Geneva School neoliberals offered a blueprint for globalism based on
institutions of multitiered governance that are insulated from demo­cratic
decision making and charged with maintaining the balance between the
po­liti­cal world of imperium and the economic world of dominium. Do-
minium is not a space of laissez-­faire or noninterventionism but is in-
stead an object of constant maintenance, litigation, design, and care. At
the core of the Geneva School imaginary was a vision for what Hayek
first saw in the Habsburg Empire—­a model of what he called “a double
government, a cultural and an economic government.”50 Geneva School
neoliberals prescribed neither an obliteration of politics by economics
nor the dissolution of states into a global marketplace but a carefully
structured and regulated settlement between the two.
As noted earlier, social scientists have tended to use the meta­phor of
insulation to describe the relationship between state and market in neo-
liberalism. This tendency is ironic. As we w ­ ill see, neoliberals from the
1930s to the 1970s used a geographic version of the meta­phor to attack
the belief in the possibility of “economic insulation,” meaning a degree
of self-­sufficiency that would buffer nations from shocks of change in
global markets. Neoliberals described this devotion to self-­sufficiency as
having the capacity to “destroy the universal society” and “shatter the
world.” With the switch to an electricity meta­phor in the 1990s, though,
it became a neoliberal norm. One of Hayek’s successors at Freiburg
wrote, “Hayek’s principal argument is his call for an institutional ar-
rangement that effectively insulates the rule-­making authority from
the short term demands of day-­to-­day government.”51 The semantic
change was symptomatic of a larger transformation of world economic
imagination: from thinking of the global economy in terms of islands
(insulae) and territories to imagining it in terms of a unitary circuitry
of a wired world. What is insulated now is not the end target of the shock
of the price signal but the wire that transmits it. Yet even this meta­phor
is ultimately unsatisfying. The neoliberal goal is more absolute than the
dampening implied by insulation. What neoliberals seek is not a par-
tial but a complete protection of private capital rights, and the ability of
supranational judiciary bodies like the Eu­ro­pean Court of Justice and
 I n t r o d u ctio n 13

the WTO to override national legislation that might disrupt the global
rights of capital. For this reason, I propose the meta­phor of encasement
rather than mere insulation of the world economy as the imaginary
telos of the neoliberal proj­ect—­a proj­ect in which states play an indis-
pensable role.
This narrative places neoliberalism in history. It traces neoliberal
­g lobalism as an intellectual proj­ect that began in the ashes of the
Habsburg Empire and climaxed in the creation of the WTO. It shows
that ordoglobalism was a way of living with the fact that the nation-­
state had become an enduring fixture of the modern world. What neo-
liberalism sought over the de­cades was an institutional encasement for
the world of nations that would prevent catastrophic breaches of the
bound­aries between imperium and dominium. The right institutions,
laws, and binding commitments would safeguard the well-­being of the
­whole. This is not a narrative of triumph—­the sputtering of the WTO is
at best a pyrrhic victory for the specific strain of neoliberal globalism I
describe in the following chapters. Instead the narrative shows that neo-
liberalism as a body of thought clearly originated in an early twentieth-­
century crisis about how to or­ga­nize the ­whole earth.

MILITANT GLOBALISM, NOT MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM

Ordoglobalism was haunted by two puzzles across the twentieth c­ entury:

first, how to rely on democracy, given democracy’s capacity to destroy
itself; and second, how to rely on nations, given nationalism’s capacity
to “disintegrate the world.” The first tension is familiar to students of
modern Eu­rope. It is well known that democracy can have illiberal out-
comes and can even lead to its own self-­annihilation by demo­cratic means.
Many, especially in Germany, believed that the experience of the period
between the two world wars had taught that democracy must be lim-
ited. It must be subject to checks and restrictions that would prevent il-
liberal outcomes. The idea of “militant democracy” was theorized by
po­liti­cal scientists in the 1930s and put into practice in postwar Western
Eu­rope.52 Constitutional courts, in par­tic­u­lar, played a key role in fending
off challenges to the liberal order from left and right. Many thinkers agreed
14 GLOBALISTS

that liberal states must show what one social demo­cratic politician called
“the courage of intolerance” ­toward ­those who rejected the constitutional
order.53
The confrontation with mass democracy was also at the heart of the
­century for neoliberals. On the one hand, they embraced democracy for
providing a means of peaceful change and a space for evolutionary dis-
covery beneficial to the system at large—­thus proving mistaken ­those
who describe neoliberals as opposed to democracy as such. On the other
hand, democracy bore the seed of destruction for the totality. Reflecting
on the challenges to the liberal order posed by the demands of a po­liti­
cally mobilized working class, Röpke observed in 1942 that “a nation
may beget its own barbarian invaders.”54 Histories of the neoliberal
movement written from the U.S. and British perspectives—as prehisto-
ries of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations—­miss the specifically
post-­fascist context of neoliberal prescriptions for domestic and inter-
national organ­ization.55 In fact, neoliberals w
­ ere key articulators of what
Jan-­Werner Müller calls “constrained democracy.”56 The tension was
always between advocating democracy for peaceful change and con-
demning its capacity to upend order.
If historians miss the post-­fascist context, they miss the postcolonial
context too. It is seldom observed that Hayek first turned his efforts
­toward redesigning representative government—­risking the charge of
inconsistency by his own confession in adopting a “made” rather than
a “grown” constitution—in response to the emergence of “new nations”
in the wake of decolonization.57 His model constitution was not in-
tended, he insisted, for Britain but for both “new nations” and fascist
states such as Salazar’s Portugal. Speaking of new nations as well as
countries in South Amer­i­ca with po­liti­cal traditions “not entirely ade-
quate” for democracy, he wrote, “I believe that limiting the powers of
democracy in ­t hese new parts of the world is the only chance of pre-
serving democracy in t­ hose parts of the world. If democracies do not
limit their own powers, they w ­ ill be destroyed.”58 Historians have
chronically overlooked the fact that the end of global empires was es-
sential to the emergence of neoliberalism as an intellectual movement.
Alongside the confrontation with mass democracy, the related tension
between the nation and the world was equally as central for neoliberals.
 I n t r o d u ctio n 15

The nation could be useful insofar as it provided ser­vices of stabilization

(which would often include restrictions to migration) and cultivated
legitimacy in the po­liti­cal sphere. But like democracy, it also bore the
risk of tipping into excess. Thus, it needed to be constrained just as de-
mocracy did. Neoliberals believed in what could be called militant glo-
balism or, adapting Müller’s term, constrained nationalism—­t he need
for a set of institutional safeguards and ­legal constraints to prevent
nation-­states from transgressing their commitments to the world eco-
nomic order. Neoliberals ­were proponents of an institutional frame-
work in which the world economy would survive threats to its holistic
integrity. Militant globalism would not displace national states but
would work with and through them to ensure the proper functioning
of the w­ hole.
As ­will become clear in the following chapters, it is wrong to see neo-
liberals as critics of the state per se but correct to see them as perennial
skeptics of the nation-­state. In 1979 Hayek wrote, “It seems to me that
in this ­century our attempts to create an international government ca-
pable of assuring peace have generally approached the task from the
wrong end: creating large numbers of specialized authorities aiming at
par­tic­u ­lar regulations rather than aiming at a true international law
which would limit the powers of national governments to harm each
other.”59 He described this as the “dethronement of politics,” but it is just
as obviously the dethronement of the nation. Just as proponents of mil-
itant democracy perceived a need to constrain democracy, proponents
of militant globalism perceived a need to constrain nation-­states and set
limits on their exercise of sovereignty.
Militant globalism bears resemblances to what Hermann Heller in
1933 called “authoritarian liberalism.” 60 Like him, neoliberals empha-
sized the need to override popu­lar decisions when they controvert what
is seen as the superior princi­ple of the order at large. Scholars have
adapted Heller’s term to understand the logic of the Eu­ro­pean Union.61
An advantage of militant globalism as an explanatory category is its at-
tention to the question of scale, which is neglected in many treatments
of neoliberal thought. As the following chapters show, the world frame
was not incidental to the prescriptions of many neoliberal thinkers. Nor
was their vision particularly amenable to a logic of “dimensions variable.”
16 GLOBALISTS

For the members of the Geneva School, who w ­ ere attentive to prob­
lems of global systemic interdependence, only the world scale was
enough. For them, capitalism at the global scale was the sine qua non of
the normative neoliberal order.
I argue that the encasement of the market in a spirit of militant glo-
balism is a better way of describing the international dimensions of the
neoliberal proj­ect than the Polanyian terms of disembedding the
economy according to a doctrine of market fundamentalism. Polanyi’s
ideas provide an elegant parable whereby the cap­i­tal­ist world economy
progressively eliminates barriers to its own functioning, to the point
that it destroys its own capacity for self-­reproduction. In this narrative,
the market is omnivorous, relentlessly transforming land, ­labor, and
money into commodities, ­until the basis for social life has been de-
stroyed. Capitalism, according to this analy­sis, needs an opposition to
save it from itself. By confronting and absorbing challenges, from
workers’ insurance to the welfare state, capitalism secures the social
conditions that allow it to persist.62 As the following chapters show, an
essential aspect of the proj­ect of neoliberalism was determining how to
preempt the opposition by building an extra-­economic framework that
would secure the continued existence of capitalism. Rather than a self-­
regulating market and an economy that eats every­thing, what the neo-
liberals envisaged and fought for was an ongoing settlement between
imperium and dominium while pushing policies to deepen the power
of competition to shape and direct ­human life. The normative neolib-
eral world is not a borderless market without states but a doubled world
kept safe from mass demands for social justice and redistributive
equality by the guardians of the economic constitution.

THE THREE RUPTURES OF THE NEOLIBERAL ­C ENTURY

A neoliberal perspective on the history of the twentieth ­century amounts

to an alternative account of the modern era. In a neoliberal history of
the ­century, decolonization began in 1919; fascism looked promising to
some ­until it raised tariff walls; the Cold War was secondary to the war
against the Global New Deal; the end of apartheid was seen by some as
 I n t r o d u ctio n 17

a tragedy; and countries w ­ ere secondary entities subordinate to the to-

tality of the globe. It is a history where the so-­called golden age of
postwar capitalism was actually a dark age, governed by Keynesian de-
lusions and misguided fantasies of global economic equality. It is about
the development of a planet linked by money, information, and goods
where the signature achievement of the c­ entury was not an international
community, a global civil society, or the deepening of democracy, but
an ever-­integrating object called the world economy and the institutions
designated to encase it.
The following chapters tell the story of the twentieth ­century through
the eyes of neoliberals who did not see capitalism and democracy as
mutually reinforcing but who instead faced democracy as a prob­lem. De-
mocracy meant successive waves of clamoring demanding masses, always
threatening to push the functioning market economy off its tracks. For
neoliberals, the demo­cratic threat took many forms, from the white working
class to the non-­European decolonizing world. The ­century was marked
by three ruptures, each accompanying an expansion in what German or-
doliberal Walter Eucken called in 1932 “the democ­ratization of the world.” 63
The first, and most foundational, rupture was the First World War, when
nations ceased to uphold the most impor­tant condition of world trade
and investment—­the gold standard. The period a­ fter the war brought a
crucial blurring of the division between the po­liti­cal and economic
worlds and what neoliberals called a “politicization” of the economic,
as universal suffrage spread across the West and the new nations of
East Central Eu­rope mistook the legitimate goal of in­de­pen­dence for
the hopeless proj­ect of self-­sufficiency, dissolving the former regional
division of ­labor, which itself modeled a larger interdependence of the
world.
The second rupture came with the G ­ reat Depression, beginning in
1929. The thinkers who called themselves neoliberals ­after 1938 saw the
futility of restoring the lost unity of the world economy through academic
research and the coordination of international statistical experts. Not
only was the task fundamentally po­liti­cal, but it could only be po­liti­cal.
It is well known that many of the leading figures of the neoliberal
movement, including Mises, Hayek, and Haberler, began their ­careers
as researchers of what was called the business cycle, or the patterns by
18 GLOBALISTS

which economic crises occurred at regular intervals. Less frequently

observed is the turn of this group away from statistics and business
cycle research by the end of the 1930s. I argue that they concluded that
the world economy was sublime, beyond repre­sen­ta­tion and quantifi-
cation. This conclusion turned them away from the documentation and
analy­sis of the economy as such and t­oward the design of institutions
necessary to sustain and protect the sacrosanct space of the world
economy.
Hayek began to realize in the 1930s that the dispersal of knowledge
throughout an entire market economy was so complete that no indi-
vidual could ever gain a functional overview of it. The shock of the
1930s brought with it the realization that the world economy was basi-
cally unknowable. Any task of reconstructing the relationship between
the two worlds—of many nations and one economy—­would have to be
a proj­ect of redesigning the state and, increasingly a­ fter 1945, of rede-
signing the law. The essence of this proj­ect was multitiered governance
or neoliberal federalism. In the wake of the mystification of the world
economy, the Geneva School neoliberals’ most impor­tant field of influ-
ence was not in economics per se but in international law and interna-
tional governance.
The ­century’s third rupture came not so much with the Second
World War or the Cold War—­neither of which have much of a pres-
ence in the neoliberal c­ entury—­but with the revolt of the Global South
in the 1970s. The oil shock of 1973–1974 placed postcolonial actors at
center stage. Robust demands for economic re­distribution and stabili-
zation ­were enshrined in the Declaration of a New International Eco-
nomic Order championed by the world’s poorer nations and passed by
the UN General Assembly in 1974. Confronting both the Global South
and the boom in computer-­a ided models of global reform in the 1970s,
the Geneva School developed their own vision of a world economy
without numbers—­a world of information and rules. For the Geneva
School, the period from the 1970s to the 1990s was about rethinking the
world economy as an information pro­cessor and global institutions
as the necessary calibrators of that pro­cessor. Trade rules, enforced
through internationally enforceable constitutional laws, would ensure
stability.
 I n t r o d u ctio n 19

The rise of Geneva School globalism had ­little to do with the sup-
posed free-­market utopianism or market fundamentalism of which it is
often accused. It was clear to the intellectuals of the 1930s that the choice
was not between a governed nation and an ungoverned world economy.
One of the surprises in the narrative I pres­ent may be to find thinkers
like Hayek and Mises, who are commonly described as libertarian,
speaking matter-­of-­factly about the need for vari­ous forms of interna-
tional and even global governance. The withering away of the relative
influence of national states was always to be accompanied by the cor-
responding strengthening of supranational institutions. The core of
ordoglobalism is its own version of what Polanyi called re-­embedding
the market. The crucial difference between him and the neoliberals is the
ends to which the market is being re-­embedded. For Polanyi, it was to
restore a mea­sure of humanity and social justice. For neoliberals, it was
to prevent state proj­ects of egalitarian re­distribution and secure com-
petition, alternatively defined as the optimal functioning of the price-­
signaling system.

VERTICAL FIXES FOR A DISINTEGRATING WORLD

The twentieth c­ entury is commonly portrayed as the period of the

triumph of neoliberalism. The c­ entury had proved neoliberals right, it
seemed. All gods other than capitalism had failed. Communism had
ended in spectacular dissolution. Despite their apparent victory, how-
ever, Geneva School neoliberals throughout the twentieth c­ entury ­were
haunted by a vision of a world disintegrating. Sometimes accused of
having a smug confidence in the resilience of capitalism, they instead
­were troubled by the possibility that the global conditions that sustain a
cap­i­tal­ist world economy ­were fundamentally ­under threat. The domi-
nant emotion felt by the neoliberals at the heart of my narrative was not
hubris but anxiety. They expended all of their efforts in attempting to
design fixes to stabilize what they saw as a precarious arrangement.
Although I focus on a relatively small number of individuals, I do not
ascribe to them a superhuman strength or causality or treat their texts as
holy writ. Neoliberal thought has not mapped directly onto real­ity in
20 GLOBALISTS

the era since the 1980s. I do not nominate the writings of Hayek or any
other thinker as a Rosetta Stone for descrying an internal logic to a nec-
essarily complex real­ity. Policies and rhetorical strategies enacted since
the Thatcher and Reagan victories reflect diverse forces and constituen-
cies that must be considered individually and that resist easy general-
ization. I do not attempt to deliver ­either the final word on neoliberalism
or a magic bullet theory to summarize de­cades of ever-­morphing global
capitalism.
Instead I use the biographies of Geneva School neoliberals as a way
to weave through a discussion of a series of institutions that ­were de-
signed to encase the global market from interference by national gov-
ernments. The following chapters offer a historical field guide to ­these
institutions, for some of which neoliberal intellectuals ­were the original
architects, but for most of which they played the role of advocate, adopter,
or adapter. Hayek’s demand to “dethrone politics” was only the first part
of the neoliberal fix. The second was not to enthrone the economy but
to encase it and find institutional forms to enforce the division. Neoliberals
repeatedly sought solutions to the prob­lem of order in a vertical move. The
fix was found, time and again, in a scale shift for governance, including
in the League of Nations, international investment law, blueprints for
supranational federation, systems of weighted franchise, Eu­ ro­pean
competition law, and ultimately the WTO itself.
Neoliberalism is sometimes described as descending from a moun-
taintop, the Swiss peak of Mont Pèlerin in par­tic­u­lar. Neoliberals them-
selves promote the impression of a lofty intellectual detachment through
their references to Alexis de Tocqueville, Immanuel Kant, J. S. Mill,
and Lord Acton. As we w ­ ill see, though, the neoliberal luminaries w­ ere
actually involved in very practical activity—­the application of economic
knowledge—­getting their hands dirty in advising business, pressuring
governments, drawing up charts, and gathering statistics. Across the
­century, neoliberals saw dif­fer­ent bodies as potential enforcers for the
world market. The following narrative begins with the period just ­after
the First World War. Globalization talk before the G ­ reat War produced
many of the tropes that still echo t­ oday. Economists spoke of the death
of distance, the obsolescence of borders, the impossibility of autono-
mous domestic policy. That period also introduced a cluster of argu-
 I n t r o d u ctio n 21

ments that are central to the neoliberal imagination. The world economy
was unitary and could not be divided meaningfully into constituent na-
tions or empires. It was interdependent, ­because industrial nations relied
on foreign markets for both raw materials and sales, and fluctuations of
supply and demand ­were felt worldwide. It was infrastructurally homo-
geneous, comprising a material network of railroads, telegraph lines,
and steamships as well as standard conventions of law, finance, and
production. At the same time, it was functionally heterogeneous, ­because
dif­fer­ent regions specialized in economic activity that suited their par­
tic­u­lar endowments, producing a greater international division of ­labor
and thus a more efficient use of the world’s resources. Most importantly,
the world economy had a supranational force, capable of overriding
attempts by individual polities to influence it.
The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) was an eco­nom­
ically internationalist body that sought to document and propagate the
idea of a single world economy. The ICC gathered international eco-
nomic statistics and advocated for the removal of barriers to trade and
the f­ree movement of capital. Immediately following the First World
War and the dissolution of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, Mises
and his circle thought it looked like a good partner. Mises himself was a
delegate to the ICC, and the first generation of Austrian neoliberals all
worked at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. From the beginning, the
doctrine of neoliberalism reflected an intermingling with the needs of
its patrons in the business community. The “world of walls” (Chapter 1)
that emerged ­after the First World War became a counterpoint against
which neoliberals ­imagined their open world economy.
In the 1920s the League of Nations also appeared to some of the ­future
neoliberals as a supranational authority that might be capable of en-
suring the conditions of capitalism’s doubled world. Mises, Hayek,
Haberler, and Röpke helped produce the first synoptic portraits of “a
world of numbers” (Chapter 2) in their cooperation with the League in
Geneva. By the late 1930s, though, the core of the neoliberal movements
responded to the rise of what they called economic nationalism, espe-
cially in Central Eu­rope, by denying that the economy could be seen at
all. Hayek’s position that the economy could not be apprehended by the
senses was inconsistent with the emerging field of macroeconomics, but
22 GLOBALISTS

it also realigned the proj­ect of neoliberalism: from talking about the

economy to talking about the framework that encased it.
In the 1930s and 1940s, neoliberals devised their own schemes for
large-­scale order, drawing up plans for international federation in blue-
prints of double government that would encase the ineffable market. In
place of empire, Robbins, Hayek, and Mises proposed “a world of fed-
erations” (Chapter 3).
The Bretton Woods system devised in 1944 offered scarce hope to
neoliberals that it would function as a guardian of the world economy.
The United Nations’ solution to the end of empire—­granting votes to
the proliferating nations of the non-­European world—­t hreatened the
balance between dominium and imperium. Working again with the
ICC, neoliberals helped craft a universal investment code and bilateral
investment treaties that they hoped would safeguard capital in “a world
of rights” (Chapter 4).
The need to defend the world economy led some neoliberals to
seemingly illiberal bedfellows. The case of Augusto Pinochet’s Chile
is notorious; the neoliberal relationship to apartheid South Africa is
less well studied. ­Here we encounter a split in the Geneva School. Al-
most all of the neoliberals discussed h ­ ere rejected race as a category
of analy­sis, especially ­a fter 1945, but Wilhelm Röpke is con­spic­u­ous
for his belief that defending the world economy meant defending
Western Christian—­a nd Caucasian—­princi­ples against what fellow
neoliberal William H. Hutt called “black imperialism.” 64 Röpke’s
postwar belief in “a world of races” (Chapter 5) was in many ways a
marked detour from the mainstream of Geneva School neoliberals.
Figures such as Hayek, Friedman, and Hutt also criticized the diplomatic
isolation of white minority governments in Southern Africa, but for
reasons closer to the concerns of this book—­namely, the perils of un-
constrained democracy and the need to insulate world economic
order from the po­liti­cal demands of social justice.
Far more than the segregationist solutions of Southern Africa, the
most hopeful enforcer of the economic constitution in the postwar
­period for Geneva School neoliberals was the Eu­ro­pean Economic
Community. What came into existence with the Treaty of Rome in 1957
was a compromise with Christian democracy, agricultural interests,
 I n t r o d u ctio n 23

and socialism, but some neoliberals felt that it offered a potential model
for “a world of constitutions” (Chapter 6) that could trump national
sovereignty in the name of competition. The multilevel model looked
like an institutional means of securing market rights.
In the 1970s, Geneva School neoliberals scaled up the example of
Eu­rope to confront the demands of the world’s poorer nations for a
New International Economic Order (NIEO). Building on Hayek’s the-
ories, his students and followers at the GATT constructed a counter-
theory to the NIEO that they hoped would prevent what they called
economic decolonization from disrupting world order from the mar-
gins. Hayek’s students at the GATT developed an understanding of the
global economy as “a world of signals” (Chapter 7) for communicating
prices for which binding constitutionalized ­legal frameworks ­were nec-
essary to preserve conditions of predictability and stability for indi-
vidual economic actors. This thinking was an impor­tant intellectual
stream leading into the creation of the WTO—­a crowning victory of
the neoliberal proj­ect of finding an extra-­economic enforcer for the
world economy in the twentieth ­century.
When the GATT moved into the former headquarters of the Inter-
national L ­ abour Organ­ization in 1977, they renamed the building the
Centre William Rappard a­ fter the Swiss neoliberal and host of the first
Mont Pèlerin Society meeting, who brought Röpke, Mises, Hayek, and
Robbins to Geneva in the 1930s and 1940s. When the WTO opened in
1995, it was in this building. The long intellectual prehistory of the high
point of the Geneva School of neoliberalism shows that, at its origins,
neoliberalism was not only a philosophy of ­free markets but also a blue-
print for double government in capitalism’s doubled world. Covering
the better part of a ­century as it does, my account is necessarily incom-
plete. It focuses on the period from the early 1920s to the early 1980s,
mostly ending before the breakthrough of neoliberal policies with the
governments of Reagan and Thatcher. It does not explore the worthy
topics of the conversion of the IMF and World Bank to the policies that
became known as the “Washington Consensus.” Similarly absent are
the transformations in international monetary governance, including
the rise of monetarism, the end of the Bretton Woods system, the intro-
duction of the euro, and changes in central bank policy. This means
24 GLOBALISTS

leaving out the all-­important question of finance, which was perhaps

the single most impor­tant transformation in global capitalism since the
1970s. One reason for the omission is that t­ hese topics have been cov-
ered comprehensively by other authors, whose excellent work is cited in
this Introduction’s endnotes.65 Other reasons are the constraints of
space and my desire to tell one story with enough detail to avoid the
generalizations that plague the social science lit­er­a­ture.
The narrative offered h ­ ere is a fairly contained story, presented
largely through biography, about three generations of thinkers, from
the Mises Circle in 1920s Vienna to the international economic
­lawyers of Geneva who helped theorize the WTO in the 1980s. Its
focus is on the specific notion of a double government form designed to
encase the respective fields of dominium and imperium. It finds the
intellectual origins of neoliberal globalism in the reordering of the
world that came at the end of empire and finds the historical roots of
paradigms of international economic law and neoliberal constitu-
tionalism more often covered by po­liti­cal scientists and sociologists
than historians. Looking at the ­century from Geneva (rather than
Chicago, Washington, or London), we see a strand of thought that
held that, in order to survive, the world economy needed laws that
limited the autonomy of nations. We see a version of neoliberalism
where the core value is not the freedom of the individual but the in-
terdependence of the w ­ hole.
It is impor­tant to note at the outset that none of the ideas proposed
­here ever reigned uncontested, and very few had the status of main-
stream common sense. The success and failure of neoliberalism as a
historical phenomenon cannot be explained only through close study
of the writings of its best-­k nown thinkers. I d ­ on’t make a case for the
success or failure of neoliberalism. But I do aim to shed light on a
number of moments where neoliberal thought was translated into policy
or institutional design through partnerships with politicians, bureau-
crats, or businesspeople. As a po­liti­cal proj­ect, the many real-­world effects
of neoliberalism are documentable. One can write their histories. This
book offers one such history by putting the neoliberal proj­ect into a
broader framework than other scholars have provided to date. All but
ignored by existing histories, the questions of empire, decolonization,
 I n t r o d u ctio n 25

and the world economy ­were at the heart of the neoliberal proj­ect from
its inception.

) ) )

The fact that the paradigmatic product of Geneva School neoliberalism—

the WTO—­has been riven with exceptions, infractions, and ignored
rules only shows that the clash of economic ideas is far from finished
and that the world economy continues to be redefined.66 As one historian
notes, one of the most striking facts about the elaborate l­egal regime
established to protect private property rights in the postwar period is
that “it did not work.” 67 The early twenty-­first ­century has been marked
by ever more countries refusing investment treaties or withdrawing
from existing ones.68 Ever more countries are choosing not to turn to
the IMF for loans, chastened by the punishments delivered by elector-
ates a­ fter past programs of austerity imposed by diktat. Visions of
national economic sovereignty—­and claims made in its name—­have
proven a harder nut to crack than the more optimistic neoliberal theo-
rists believed it would be.
It should be more obvious than ever that to discuss neoliberal ideas
of order, especially at the supranational level, is not to assert neoliberal
omnipotence. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, so-­called popu-
list movements from left to right have multiplied and taken aim at many
of the institutions described in t­hese chapters. In the time it took to
write t­ hese pages, globalism itself has gone from a rather obscure term
of academic analy­sis to a target of right-­w ing opprobrium, helping
to fuel the campaign of the winning candidate for the world’s most
power­ful office. Globalists, defined (if at all) as a shifting and often
shadowy combination of the financial, po­liti­cal, and academic elite, are
routinely scapegoated for all that ails the body politic and viewed as
specters of an identity dangerously unmoored from the concerns of or-
dinary ­people. The following chapters narrate the self-­perception of
­t hose who would welcome being labeled “globalists.” They help bring
neoliberalism down to earth by casting both neoliberalism and glo-
balism less as abstract overarching logics of history than as po­liti­cal
proj­ects populated by discrete individuals occupying specific places and
26 GLOBALISTS

moments in time. For all of the alternating handwringing and obituary

writing of its critics, and the alternating self-­congratulation and despair
among its celebrants, neoliberal globalism remains one argument among
many. What follows is a story, not of a victory, but of an ongoing strug­gle
to determine which princi­ples should govern the world economy, and, by
extension, all of our lives.
 1

A World of Walls
For the liberal, the world does not end at the borders of the
state. In his eyes, what­ever significance national bound­aries
have is only incidental and subordinate. His po­liti­cal
thinking encompasses the w ­ hole of mankind.
—­ludwig von mises, 1927

T he end of the First World War delivered the first blow to the world of
empires. The Austro-­Hungarian Empire, which once sprawled across
most of Eastern Eu­rope, was reduced to a wisp of its former self.
Austria was one-­quarter of its former size and contained one-­fifth of its
former population. Hungary lost two-­thirds of its territory and two-­
fifths of its population. The Ottoman Empire, which had endured over
six centuries and at its height spanned Eu­rope, the Near East, and North
Africa, contracted to the peninsula of Turkey, with a footprint across the
Bosporus. French and British authorities took over Ottoman territories,
including Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, and claimed, at least on paper, to
prepare them for self-­government. Germany’s African and South Pacific
colonies ­were divvied up among the victors (with South Africa co-­
opting Southwest Africa for itself). ­T hese former colonies ­were now
called mandates, with in­de­pen­dence deferred to a f­ uture date. Although
the League of Nations began its life as a “league of empires,” it grew to
28 GLOBALISTS

offer a space for new claims from the global margins.1 Even if the Eu­ro­
pean world powers ­were far from ready to give up their overseas territo-
ries, one could see on the map of Eastern Eu­rope, and hear in the
speeches of Woodrow Wilson, V. I. Lenin, and anticolonial intellectuals
such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Mao Zedong that a new princi­ple of na-
tional self-­determination was ­going global, readying an ambush against
the old language of empire.2
As the concept of the nation circulated in the 1920s, so did the con-
cept of the world. The term “world economy” entered En­glish in the
de­cade of the “emergence of international society.”3 It came with a raft
of other “world” phrases, including “world history,” “world lit­er­a­ture,”
“world affairs,” and, of course, “world war.” Like ­family members and
breathable air, the world economy was discussed most when it was
gone. To many, the end of the First World War looked like the end of
the world economy. The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote
in 1922 that “shortly before the world war we w ­ ere in sight of realizing
the dream of an ecumenical society. Has the war merely interrupted
this development for a brief period or has it utterly destroyed it? Is it
conceivable that this development can cease, that society can go back-
wards?”4 He wondered: “Who then would rebuild the shattered world?”5
Liberals saw themselves in the curious position of needing to reconstruct
something that had worked partly b ­ ecause it was taken for granted. With
the war it became clear that pro­gress was not a one-­way street—­the world
economy could go backward. Economists, states, and businesspeople
would have to work together to rebuild the shattered world of global
capitalism.
One of the major ruptures in the neoliberal narrative of the twentieth
­century was the First World War. Scholars have observed that in the
course of that war, all belligerent powers “moved in the direction of or­
ga­nized capitalism and war collectivism.”6 Foreign-­owned property
was seized, command economies replaced market supply and demand,
centralized regimes of rationing and resource allocation displaced the
price mechanism, and national governments and planning boards de-
molished the walls of corporate secrecy, intruded into private accounts
and affairs of business to gather data about production and distribution,
and created what some called “war socialism” and what the German
 A W o r l d of W alls 29

statesman and entrepreneur Walther Rathenau called the Großwirtschaft,

or “­great economy.”7
In the course of the war, the sacred nature of private property across
borders was ­violated; the space of the private cap­i­tal­ist was desecrated.
Private accounts ­were now part of state knowledge, rendered as inputs
into a comprehensive plan for allocating the nation’s resources. No-
where was the collapse of the division between public and private more
catastrophic than in the sites of successful socialist revolutions: the So-
viet Union in 1917, the Bavarian Soviet republic of 1918, and the Hun-
garian revolution ­under Bela Kun. But the era ­after the First World War
saw everywhere a g­ reat exposure of corporate secrets—­business had to
be made vis­i­ble, and for its own good.
From the liberal perspective, three ­factors empowered the domain of
politics against that of the economy ­after the war. First, popu­lar sover-
eignty was strengthened by the generalization of universal male suffrage
in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca, making it more difficult to maintain
the gold standard through domestic adjustments borne by ordinary
p
­ eople.8 Second, the war left a legacy of what liberals saw as misguided
confidence in the power of governments to allocate resources. It is no
coincidence that one of Hayek and Mises’s most impor­tant antagonists in
Vienna was Otto Neurath, a man who had created a moneyless plan for
the Bavarian Republic. Since the war, an economy directed by central
authorities looked like a ­viable alternative. Third, the resolution of the
war in the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain validated the idea
that the nation was the most impor­tant category for organ­izing ­human
affairs. To the group that would become the neoliberals, the era a­ fter
1918 was marked by an attempt to reestablish what they saw as the cor-
rect balance between the public world of government and the private
world of property and contract. Concretely, this translated into a series
of proj­ects of cap­i­tal­ist internationalism. ­There needed to be a re­spect
for private property that trumped national law. Investment must be able
to cross borders back and forth without fear of obstacles or expropria-
tion. Capital needed to become cosmopolitan again.
In this chapter I w ­ ill focus on the Austrian liberals in the Vienna of
the 1920s and the institutions where they first practiced their craft and
found their po­liti­cal worldview. The two most impor­tant international
30 GLOBALISTS

economic institutions of the period ­were the International Chamber of

Commerce (ICC) and the League of Nations. ­Those two institutions
or­ga­nized the World Economic Conference of 1927, the first economic
gathering to take the entire world as its subject. It codified an interna-
tional opposition to trade obstacles and brought the meta­phor of the
“tariff wall” into common circulation. In an era when the United States
withdrew into relative diplomatic isolation, the League of Nations took
the lead in drafting blueprints for global economic governance, a series
of conversations in which the ­later neoliberals Ludwig von Mises, Gott-
fried Haberler, Wilhelm Röpke, Lionel Robbins, and F. A. Hayek w ­ ere
all directly involved.
One challenge for the institutions was to restore ­free trade; the other
was the domestic obstacle of l­ abor ­unions. In the same year as the World
Economic Conference, Mises was pres­ent for the workers’ uprising in
Vienna, which left close to one hundred p ­ eople dead and the Palace of
Justice in flames. Liberals perceived tariff walls and workers’ wage de-
mands as two kinds of barricades in the market. Achieving the liberal
ideal required a state that could eliminate obstacles to trade and obstacles
to the adjustment of wages. This meant a militant and, when necessary,
militarized opposition to the strategies of or­ga­nized ­labor to protect
their salaries and their state-­granted entitlements. The bloody suppres-
sion of the 1927 riots assured Mises that the state was willing and able to
use any means necessary to prevent workers from creating po­liti­cal
conditions favorable to their own goals.

MILITANT LIBERALISM ON THE RINGSTRASSE

If or­ga­nized neoliberalism has a birthplace, it is Stubenring 8–10 at the

eastern end of the g­ rand boulevard of Vienna’s Ringstrasse. At that ad-
dress, in 1907, the Lower Austrian Chamber of Commerce and Industry
(­later the Vienna Chamber of Commerce) opened its new building, a
massive six-­story structure designed by Ludwig Baumann in a combi-
nation of neoclassicism and Jugendstil art nouveau, with the two-­headed
ea­gle of the dual monarchy on its corner with the bound fasces on a
shield. One entered the building between four marble columns, then
 A W o r l d of W alls 31

proceeded up a central stairway flanked by life-­size bronze sculptures

of topless Egyptian acolytes holding votive bowls aloft and backed by a
geometric matrix of blue and green stained glass. A ­ fter taking a job
­there in 1909 at age 27, Ludwig Mises walked up ­those stairs ­every
working day for twenty-­five years. F. A. Hayek took his first job ­there in
1921, working with Mises as a civil servant for eigh­teen months on a
commission related to the St. Germain peace treaty.9 A ­ fter the mid-
1920s, Mises was joined by Hayek again, along with another protégé,
Gottfried Haberler, for whom Mises secured positions in the Aus-
trian Business Cycle Research Institute, which operated in the same
building. Mises’s office on the second floor, facing the Ringstrasse, was
also the meeting place for his private seminar, which included Fritz
Machlup and visits by Lionel Robbins, Frank Knight, and John Van
Sickle, becoming part of the “extra-­academic cosmopolitan intellectual
formation” that in 1947 would become the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin
Society.10
Beginning the story of neoliberalism with the Stubenring in the
1920s rather than with Mont Pèlerin in 1947 deflates the self-­heroizing
narrative of lonely embattled intellectuals and reveals the world in
which f­uture neoliberals formed their princi­ples. It also shows how
their writing began with straightforward policy prob­lems rather than
abstract contemplation. Though Mises claimed that “no other calling
was more desirable to me as that of a university professor,” in many
ways the Chamber of Commerce remained his most characteristic
milieu, and his policy suggestions remained remarkably consistent.11
He began his c­ areer in Austria in the last years of the Habsburg Em-
pire, advocating strenuously for lower corporate taxes on industry,
and ended it in the last years of the First Austrian Republic, arguing
for the same. Taking the position of Chamber secretary in 1918, Mises
was obliged to advise the government and write expert evaluations of
new laws in the interwar period, a duty that peaked with leading a
three-­person Economic Commission in 1930.12 Even if he is remem-
bered for his work on social philosophy and theories of money and
credit, Mises earned his livelihood for much of his adult life as a
forthright advocate for the needs of business, including with the Chamber
of Commerce in the 1920s and 1930s, and the National Association of
32 GLOBALISTS

Manufacturers (NAM) and Foundation for Economic Education ­a fter

his emigration to the United States.13
The location of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce on the Ringstrasse
was heavy with symbolism and helps illustrate the milieu out of which
the Austrian strain of neoliberalism emerged. The boulevards them-
selves w­ ere built in the wake of the revolutions of 1848 on the vacant land
that had once been the medieval city walls. In his classic study of fin-­
de-­siècle Vienna, Carl Schorske describes how the liberal city government
used the Ringstrasse to showcase its vision of social order, building the
parliament and city hall alongside theaters and the university.14 The de-
velopments echoed ­those ­under way in Paris ­under the direction of
Baron George-­Eugène Haussmann. Both urban renewal proj­ects created
arteries of commerce and transportation in medieval cities, building
wide streets that could serve si­mul­ta­neously as sites of cultural enrich-
ment in their opera h ­ ouses and museums, expressions of state power
in their monuments, and sites of consumption in their shop win­dows
and sidewalk cafes.15 The wide streets would also make it harder for
­future insurgents to build the barricades that characterized the revolu-
tions of 1848. Both designs included arsenals and barracks for the easy
deployment of troops to quell domestic threats.16 The Ringstrasse and
Haussmann’s boulevards turned Vienna and Paris into modern cities,
hubs of commerce capable of accommodating—­a nd policing—an
expanding population of all classes.
The Stuben Quarter was built at the tail end of the Ringstrasse in
the first de­cade of the 1900s, “as the liberal era closed.”17 The view
from the Chamber of Commerce was onto the massive seven-­story
War Ministry, designed by the same architect and completed in 1913.
That building was topped by a bronze Habsburg ea­gle with a sixteen-­
meter wingspan, which required that an extra floor be built to undergird
it. Beneath it was a slogan: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” A ­ fter
the war, the building became a barracks for the Austrian military.
The ea­gle remained but was literally decrowned, and the slogan was
removed. The third building in the ensemble remained unchanged:
the headquarters of the Postal Savings Bank, an equally massive
building designed by Otto Wagner, which opened in 1906 as one of
the most famous buildings in the style of Jugendstil and early mod-
 A W o r l d of W alls 33

ernism, built with reinforced concrete with a facade boldly ­free of

ornament.
Mises watched the events of the de­cade and formed his vision of eco-
nomic order from the vantage point of the Stuben Quarter. The War Min-
istry building across the street from the Vienna Chamber of Commerce
seemed to embody what Mises would l­ater oppose as “omnipotent gov-
ernment.”18 Yet his version of neoliberalism never rejected the state as
such.19 Michel Foucault’s attribution of “state-­phobia” to Austrian neolib-
erals is a misunderstanding, especially considering Mises’s ­career as an
advocate for the use of government taxes to fund business interests.20
Mises would become a patron saint to American libertarians, but he not
only worked professionally as a state-­funded advisor to the government
but also saw a strong role for the state in the protection of property and
keeping of the peace. In a telling phrase from 1922, he called the state “a
producer of security.”21 For Mises, the assessment of state action depended
on the field of engagement. The imperial state itself did not concern him.
His fear was of interventionist government that appealed to “the p ­ eople”
for its legitimacy. His state could find its legitimacy only in its defense of
the sanctity of private property and the forces of competition.
We ­will see in Chapter 3 that Mises had no qualms about using gov-
ernment military power to open and secure overseas markets. And even
as he condemned what he called “étatism”—­state intervention into the
production and supply of goods—he criticized the state for not acting
more aggressively against l­abor u ­ nions.22 Maintaining security often
­involved repressing worker demonstrations, which he saw as criminal
vio­lence outside of the law. Such undertakings ­were not and could not
be the functions of a small state. In this sense, the transformation of the
former War Ministry into a garrison for the new Austrian military ­after
1920 should also be seen as a necessary and appropriate component of
Mises’s neoliberal model.
Schorske claimed that the early twentieth c­ entury was the end of the
liberal era. That might be true for party politics, but 1907 was also the
year of the achievement of universal male suffrage, one of liberalism’s
central demands for achieving popu­lar sovereignty. It was partly direct
action, including demonstrations in 1907, that brought this about, and
this shook Mises deeply. He described public demonstrations as tactics
34 GLOBALISTS

of “terror and intimidation.” “Unchallenged,” he wrote in his memoirs,

“the Social Demo­crats assumed the ‘right to the street.’ ”23 The streets of
Vienna, and the Ringstrasse in par­tic­u­lar, ­were more than a symbolic
space. They ­were the forum where popu­lar demands ­were voiced, some-
times to be granted and other times to be suppressed. In moments of
uprising, crowds became symbols for the ­people as such, and ­those who
­were skeptical of democracy often based their re­sis­tance to change on
the sight of such manifestations. The city was not just the backdrop for
the emergence of a par­tic­u­lar set of ideas. Neoliberal thinkers arrived
at their ideas in response to the world they saw around them. The ques-
tion of democracy became more pressing in the era of universal suffrage
in Austria. One could argue that the “end of the liberal era”—as the ad-
vent of a new paradigm of militarized liberalism, l­ater to be called
neoliberalism—­developed precisely as a response to the growth of mass
democracy. This new paradigm was centered, not in the parliament or
university, but in the triumvirate of security, finance, and commerce lo-
cated in the Stuben Quarter. A well-­armed state and sound money
flanked by business w ­ ere the icons of the ideology taking shape.

THE INVENTION OF THE TARIFF WALL

­ fter the First World War, Mises and his circle found institutional al-
A
lies beyond the nation and empire. A key institution in rebuilding what
Mises called the “shattered world” of the global economy was the ICC,
founded in Paris in 1920. The many recent histories of international civil
society have given surprisingly l­ittle attention to the international coor-
dination of businesspeople: the global public sphere of cap­i­tal­ists. Only
two books have been written about its most paradigmatic organ­ization,
the ICC: a dissertation in German, and a book commissioned by the
chamber itself in the 1930s, with a title—­Merchants of Peace—­that sug-
gests an in-­house bias.24 The ICC would become an impor­tant institu-
tional partner for the Austrian neoliberals.
The ICC emerged as an amalgam of two developments in the late
nineteenth c­ entury: international cartels and international statistical
associations. The cartels w­ ere groups of businessmen who specialized
 A W o r l d of W alls 35

in the same sector and would set prices and ensure collective profit-
ability. The ICC’s direct forerunners w ­ ere international business feder-
ations that appeared in the de­cade before the First World War. ­These
made public the formerly secretive cartel discussions and incorporated
an aspect of public relations into their practice.25 The international statis-
tical associations began with the International Statistical Institute, which
was formed in 1885 and was the first entity to collate global statistics.
The Institute was overseen by two economists at the University of
Vienna who ­were also Mises’s professors: Franz Neumann-­Spallart and
Franz Juraschek. As F. A. Hayek’s grand­father, Juraschek had a filial tie
to the neoliberal circle.26
Without a seat at the League of Nations, American economic inter-
nationalists often relied on the ICC to make their position heard. At
the 1919 meeting in Atlantic City that would lead to the formation of the
ICC, the organizers explained that reestablishing world trade a­ fter the
war would be a strug­gle in itself. The isolationist position of the U.S.
government had already effected a curious reversal. Eu­ro­pean business
leaders now had to come to the rescue of Americans. The chair of the
Atlantic City conference, Alfred C. Bedford, said to the fifty Eu­ro­pean
businessmen in attendance: “It is as if you w ­ ere a relief force come to
assist us in raising a blockage. For against Amer­i­ca—as much as against
Europe—­a blockade by the war’s havoc upon that highly sensitive mech-
anism of the world’s trade, threatens and impends.” The assembled
business leaders ­imagined a world that should and needed to be f­ ree of
walls obstructing goods and capital. As Bedford said, “not only the physical
comfort and well-­being but the very lives of millions of ­people, depend
upon this modern mechanism of international trade being restored, upon
the barriers which ­were erected in the wake of war being leveled, ­until
the channels of commerce can be reopened so that the commodities upon
which ­human existence depends, may flow unchecked from where they
are most plentiful to where they are most needed.”27 Bedford evoked a
vision of the world economy as a hydraulic landscape. Commodities
flowed through the “channels of commerce” created by the infrastruc-
ture of shipping and rails, and enabled presumably by the ­free flow of
information in the networks of communication. This was a networked
world economy without centralized control, where the laws of supply
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
different calibre. At last Ireland was providentially saved by the
change of wind, which prevented the enemy from effecting a landing
on her coast.
That the public will feel little interest in the danger of an invasion
of Ireland which might have happened in the last century; that it can
be of little consequence to the public to hear how or why, twenty
years ago, this or that man's telegraph was not established,—I am
aware; and I am sensible that few will care how cheaply it might
have been obtained, or will be greatly interested in hearing of
generous offers which were not accepted, and patriotic exertions
which were not permitted to be of any national utility. I know that as
a biographer I am expected to put private feelings out of the
question; and this duty, as far as human nature will permit, I hope I
have performed.
The facts are stated from my own knowledge, and from a more
detailed account in his own "Letter to Lord Charlemont on the
Telegraph,"—a political pamphlet, uncommon at least for its
temperate and good-humored tone.
Though all his exertions to establish a telegraph in Ireland were
at this time unsuccessful, yet he persevered in the belief that in
future modes of telegraphic communication would be generally
adopted; and instead of his hopes being depressed, they were raised
and expanded by new consideration of the subject in a scientific
light. In the sixth volume of the "Transactions of the Royal Irish
Academy," he published an "Essay on the Art of Conveying Swift and
Secret Intelligence," in which he gives a comprehensive view of the
uses to which the system may be applied, and a description, with
plates, of his own machinery. Accounts of his apparatus and
specimens of his vocabulary have been copied into various popular
publications, therefore it is sufficient here to refer to them. The
peculiar advantages of his machinery consist, in the first place, in
being as free from friction as possible, consequently in its being
easily moved, and not easily destroyed by use; in the next place, on
its being simple, consequently easy to make and to repair. The
superior advantage of his vocabulary arises from its being
undecipherable. This depends on his employing the numerical
figures instead of the alphabet. With a power of almost infinite
change, and consequently with defiance of detection, he applies the
combination of numerical figures to the words of a common
dictionary, or to any length of phrase in any given vocabulary. He
was the first who made this application of figures to telegraphic
communication.
Much has been urged by various modern claimants for the honor
of the invention of the telegraph. In England the claims of Dr. Hooke
and of the Marquis of Worcester to the original idea are
incontestable. But the invention long lay dormant, till wakened into
active service by the French. Long before the French telegraph
appeared, my father had tried his first telegraphic experiments. As
he mentions in his own narrative, he tried the use of windmill sails in
1767 in Berkshire; and also a nocturnal telegraph with lamps and
illuminated letters, between London and Hampstead. He refers for
the confirmation of the facts to a letter of Mr. Perrot's, a Berkshire
gentleman who was with him at the time. The original of this letter
is now in my possession. It was shown in 1795 to the President of
the Royal Irish Academy. The following is a copy of it:—

Dear Sir,—I perfectly recollect having several conversations with

you in 1767 on the subject of a speedy and secret conveyance of
intelligence. I recollect your going up the hills to see how far and
how distinctly the arms (and the position of them) of Nettlebed
Windmill sails were to be discovered with ease.
As to the experiments from Highgate to London by means of
lamps, I was not present at the time, but I remember your
mentioning the circumstance to me in the same year. All these
particulars were brought very strongly to my memory when the
French, some years ago, conveyed intelligence by signals; and I then
thought and declared that the merit of the invention undoubtedly
belonged to you. I am very glad that I have it in my power to send
you this confirmation, because I imagine there is no other person
now living who can bear witness to your observations in Berkshire.
I remain, dear Sir,
Your affectionate friend,
James L. Perrot.
Bath, Dec. 9, 1795.

Claims of priority of invention are always listened to with doubt,

or, at best, with impatience. To those who bring the invention to
perfection, who actually adapt it to use, mankind are justly most
grateful, and to these, rather than to the original inventors, grant the
honors of a triumph. Sensible of this, the matter is urged no farther,
but left to the justice of posterity.
I am happy to state, however, one plain fact, which stands
independent of all controversy, that my father's was the first, and I
believe the only, telegraph which ever spoke across the Channel
from Ireland to Scotland. He was, as he says in his essay on this
subject, "ambitious of being the first person who should connect the
islands more closely by facilitating their mutual intercourse;" and on
the 24th of August, 1794, my brothers had the satisfaction of
sending by my father's telegraph four messages across the Channel,
and of receiving immediate answers, before a vast concourse of
spectators.

Edgeworth to Dr. Darwin.

Edgeworthtown, Dec. 11, 1794.
I have been employed for two months in experiments upon a
telegraph of my own invention. I tried it partially twenty-six years
ago. It differs from the French in distinctness and expedition, as the
intelligence is not conveyed alphabetically....
 I intended to detail my telegraphs (in the plural), but I find that I
have not room at present. If you think it worth while, you shall have
the whole scheme before you, which I know you will improve for me.
Suffice it, that by day, at eighteen or twenty miles' distance, I show,
by four pointers, isosceles triangles, twenty feet high, on four
imaginary circles, eight imaginary points, which correspond with the
figures
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
So that seven thousand different combinations are formed, of four
figures each, which refer to a dictionary of words that are referred
to,—of lists of the navy, army, militia, lords, commons, geographical
and technical terms, &c., besides an alphabet. So that everything
one wishes may be transmitted with expedition.
By night, white lights are used.

Dr. Darwin to Mr. Edgeworth.

Derby, March 15, 1795.
Dear Sir,—I beg your pardon for not immediately answering your
last favor, which was owing to the great influence the evil demon
has at present in all affairs on this earth. That is, I lost your letter,
and have in vain looked over some scores of papers, and cannot find
it. Secondly, having lost your letter, I daily hoped to find it again—
without success.
The telegraph you described I dare say would answer the
purpose. It would be like a giant wielding his long arms and talking
with his fingers; and those long arms might be covered with lamps
in the night. You would place four or six such gigantic figures in a
line, so that they should spell a whole word at once; and other such
figures in sight of each other, all round the coast of Ireland; and thus
fortify yourselves, instead of Friar Bacon's wall of brass round
England, with the brazen head, which spoke, "Time is! Time was!
Time is past!"
 MR. EDGEWORTH'S MACHINE.
Having slightly mentioned the contrivances made use of by the
ancients for conveying intelligence swiftly, and having pointed out
some of the various important uses to which this art may be applied,
I shall endeavor to give a clear view of my attempts on this subject.
Models of the French telegraph have been so often exhibited,
and the machine itself is so well known, that it is not necessary to
describe it minutely in this place. It is sufficient to say that it consists
of a tall pole, with three movable arms, which may be seen at a
considerable distance through telescopes; these arms may be set in
as many different positions as are requisite to express all the
different letters of the alphabet. By a successive combination of
letters shown in this manner, words and sentences are formed and
intelligence communicated. No doubt can be made of the utility of
this machine, as it has been applied to the most important purposes.
It is obviously liable to mistakes, from the number of changes
requisite for each word, and from the velocity with which it must be
moved to convey intelligence with any tolerable expedition.
The name, however, which is well chosen, has become so
familiar, that I shall, with a slight alteration, adopt it for the
apparatus which I am going to describe. Telegraph is a proper name
for a machine which describes at a distance. Telelograph, or
contractedly Tellograph, is a proper name for a machine that
describes words at a distance.
Dr. Hooke, to whom every mechanic philosopher must recur, has
written an essay upon the subject of conveying swift intelligence, in
which he proposes to use large wooden letters in succession. The
siege of Vienna turned his attention to the business. His method is
more cumbrous than the French telegraph, but far less liable to
error.
I tried it before I had seen Hooke's work, in the year 1767 in
London, and I could distinctly read letters illuminated with lamps in
Hampstead Churchyard, from the house of Mr. Elers in Great Russell
Street, Bloomsbury, to whom I refer for date and circumstance. To
him and to Mr. E. Delaval, F.R.S., to Mr. Perrot, of Hare Hatch, and to
Mr Woulfe the chemist, I refer for the precedency which I claim in
this invention. In that year I invented the idea of my present
tellograph, proposing to make use of windmill sails instead of the
hands or pointers which I now employ. Mr. Perrot was so good as to
accompany me more than once to a hill near his house to observe
with a telescope the windmill at Nettlebed, which places are, I think,
sixteen miles asunder. My intention at that time was to convey not
only a swift but an unsuspected mode of intelligence. By means of
common windmills this might have been effected, before an account
of the French telegraph was made public.
My machinery consists of four triangular pointers or hands [each
upon a separate pedestal, ranged along in a row], each of which
points like the hand of a clock to different situations in the circles
which they describe. It is easy to distinguish whether a hand moving
vertically points perpendicularly downwards or upwards, horizontally
to the right or left, or to any of the four intermediate positions.
The eye can readily perceive the eight different positions in which
one of the pointers is represented [on the plate attached to the
article in the "Transactions," but here omitted]. Of these eight
positions seven only are employed to denote figures, the upright
position of the hand or pointer being reserved to represent o, or
zero. The figures thus denoted refer to a vocabulary in which all the
words are numbered. Of the four pointers, that which appears to the
left hand of the observer represents thousands; the others
hundreds, tens, and units, in succession, as in common numeration.
[By these means, as Mr. Edgeworth showed, numbers from 1 up
to 7,777, omitting those having a digit above 7, could be displayed to
the distant observer, who on referring to his vocabulary discovered
that they meant such expressions as it might seem convenient to
transmit by this excellent invention.]
 Although the electric telegraphs have long since superseded
telegraphs of this class in public use, the young people of Colonel
Ingham's class took great pleasure in the next summer in using Mr.
Edgeworth's telegraph to communicate with each other, by plans
easily made in their different country homes.
It may interest the casual reader to know that the first words in
the first message transmitted on the telegraph between Scotland
and Ireland, alluded to above, were represented by the numbers
2,645, 2,331, 573, 1,113 244, 2,411, 6,336, which being interpreted
are,—
"Hark from basaltic rocks and giant walls,"
and so on with the other lines, seven in number. This is Mr.
Edgeworth's concise history of telegraphy before his time.
The art of conveying intelligence by sounds and signals is of the
highest antiquity. It was practised by Theseus in the Argonautic
expedition, by Agamemnon at the siege of Troy, and by Mardonius in
the time of Xerxes. It is mentioned frequently in Thucydides. It was
used by Tamerlane, who had probably never heard of the black sails
of Theseus; by the Moors in Spain; by the Welsh in Britain; by the
Irish; and by the Chinese on that famous wall by which they
separated themselves from Tartary.

All this detail about Mr. Edgeworth's telegraph resulted in much

search in the older encyclopædias. Quite full accounts were found,
by the young people, of his system, and of the French system
afterwards employed, and worked in France until the electric
telegraph made all such inventions unnecessary.
Before the next meeting, Bedford Long, who lived on Highland
Street in Roxbury, and Hugh, who lived on the side of Corey Hill,
were able to communicate with each other by semaphore; and at
the next meeting they arranged two farther stations, so that John, at
Cambridge, and Jane Fortescue, at Lexington, were in the series.
 There being some half an hour left that afternoon, the children
amused themselves by looking up some other of Mr. Edgeworth's
curious experiments and vagaries.

MORE OF MR. EDGEWORTH'S FANCIES.

During my residence at Hare Hatch another wager was proposed
by me among our acquaintance, the purport of which was that I
undertook to find a man who should, with the assistance of
machinery, walk faster than any other person that could be
produced. The machinery which I intended to employ was a huge
hollow wheel, made very light, withinside of which, in a barrel of six
feet diameter, a man should walk. Whilst he stepped thirty inches,
the circumference of the large wheel, or rather wheels, would
revolve five feet on the ground; and as the machinery was to roll on
planks and on a plane somewhat inclined, when once the vis inertiæ
of the machine should be overcome, it would carry on the man
within it as fast as he could possibly walk. I had provided means of
regulating the motion, so that the wheel should not run away with
its master. I had the wheel made; and when it was so nearly
completed as to require but a few hours' work to finish it, I went to
London for Lord Effingham, to whom I had promised that he should
be present at the first experiment made with it. But the bulk and
extraordinary appearance of my machine had attracted the notice of
the country neighborhood; and, taking advantage of my absence,
some idle curious persons went to the carpenter I employed, who
lived on Hare Hatch Common. From him they obtained the great
wheel which had been left by me in his care. It was not finished. I
had not yet furnished it with the means of stopping or moderating
its motion. A young lad got into it; his companions launched it on a
path which led gently down hill towards a very steep chalk-pit. This
pit was at such a distance as to be out of their thoughts when they
set the wheel in motion. On it ran. The lad withinside plied his legs
with all his might. The spectators, who at first stood still to behold
the operation, were soon alarmed by the shouts of their companion,
who perceived his danger. The vehicle became quite ungovernable;
the velocity increased as it ran down hill. Fortunately the boy
contrived to jump from his rolling prison before it reached the chalk-
pit; but the wheel went on with such velocity as to outstrip its
pursuers, and, rolling over the edge of the precipice, it was dashed
to pieces.
The next day, when I came to look for my machine, intending to
try it on some planks which had been laid for it, I found, to my no
small disappointment, that the object of all my labors and my hopes
was lying at the bottom of a chalk-pit, broken into a thousand
pieces. I could not at that time afford to construct another wheel of
this sort, and I cannot therefore determine what might have been
the success of my scheme.
As I am on the subject of carriages, I shall mention a sailing-
carriage that I tried on this common. The carriage was light, steady,
and ran with amazing velocity. One day, when I was preparing for a
sail in it with my friend and schoolfellow Mr. William Foster, my
wheel-boat escaped from its moorings just as we were going to step
on board. With the utmost difficulty I overtook it; and as I saw three
or four stage-coaches on the road, and feared that this sailing-
chariot might frighten their horses, I, at the hazard of my life, got
into my carriage while it was under full sail, and then, at a favorable
part of the road, I used the means I had of guiding it easily out of
the way. But the sense of the mischief which must have ensued if I
had not succeeded in getting into the machine at the proper place
and stopping it at the right moment was so strong as to deter me
from trying any more experiments on this carriage in such a
dangerous place.
Such should never be attempted except on a large common, at a
distance from a high road. It may not, however, be amiss to suggest
that upon a long extent of iron railway in an open country carriages
properly constructed might make profitable voyages, from time to
time, with sails instead of horses; for though a constant or regular
intercourse could not be thus carried on, yet goods of a certain sort,
that are salable at any time, might be stored till wind and weather
were favorable.

When Bedford had read this passage, John Fordyce said he had
travelled hundreds of miles on the Western railways where Mr.
Edgeworth's sails could have been applied without a "stage-coach"
to be afraid of them.

JACK THE DARTER.

In one of my journeys from Hare Hatch to Birmingham, I
accidentally met with a person whom I, as a mechanic, had a
curiosity to see. This was a sailor, who had amused London with a
singular exhibition of dexterity. He was called Jack the Darter. He
threw his darts, which consisted of thin rods of deal of about half an
inch in diameter and of a yard long, to an amazing height and
distance; for instance, he threw them over what was then called the
New Church in the Strand. Of this feat I had heard, but I entertained
some doubts upon the subject. I had inquired from my friends where
this man could be found, but had not been able to discover him. As I
was driving towards Birmingham in an open carriage of a singular
construction, I overtook a man who walked remarkably fast, but who
stopped as I passed him, and eyed my equipage with uncommon
curiosity. There was something in his manner that made me speak to
him; and from the sort of questions he asked about my carriage, I
found that he was a clever fellow. I soon learned that he had walked
over the greatest part of England, and that he was perfectly
acquainted with London. It came into my head to inquire whether he
had ever seen the exhibition about which I was so desirous to be
informed.
"Lord! sir," said he, "I am myself Jack the Darter." He had a roll
of brown paper in his hand, which he unfolded, and soon produced a
bundle of the light deal sticks which he had the power of darting to
such a distance. He readily consented to gratify my curiosity; and
after he had thrown some of them to a prodigious height, I asked
him to throw some of them horizontally. At the first trial he threw
one of them eighty yards with great ease. I observed that he coiled
a small string round the stick, by which he gave it a rotary motion
that preserved it from altering its course; and at the same time it
allowed the arm which threw it time to exercise its whole force.
If anything be simply thrown from the hand, it is clear that it can
acquire no greater velocity than that of the hand that throws it; but
if the body that is thrown passes through a greater space than the
hand, whilst the hand continues to communicate motion to the body
to be impelled, the body will acquire a velocity nearly double to that
of the hand which throws it. The ancients were aware of this; and
they wrapped a thong of leather round their javelins, by which they
could throw them with additional violence. This invention did not, I
believe, belong to the Greeks; nor do I remember its being
mentioned by Homer or Xenophon. It was in use among the
Romans, but at what time it was introduced or laid aside I know not.
Whoever is acquainted with the science of projectiles will perceive
that this invention is well worthy of their attention.

A ONE-WHEELED CHAISE.
After having satisfied my curiosity about Jack the Darter, I
proceeded to Birmingham. I mentioned that I travelled in a carriage
of a singular construction. It was a one-wheeled chaise, which I had
had made for the purpose of going conveniently in narrow roads. It
was made fast by shafts to the horse's sides, and was furnished with
two weights or counterpoises, that hung below the shafts. The seat
was not more than eight and twenty or thirty inches from the
ground, in order to bring the centre of gravity of the whole as low as
possible. The footboard turned upon hinges fastened to the shafts,
so that when it met with any obstacle it gave way, and my legs were
warned to lift themselves up. In going through water my legs were
secured by leathers, which folded up like the sides of bellows; by
this means I was pretty safe from wet. On my road to Birmingham I
passed through Long Compton, in Warwickshire, on a Sunday. The
people were returning from church, and numbers stopped to gaze at
me. There is, or was, a shallow ford near the town, over which there
was a very narrow bridge for horse and foot passengers, but not
sufficiently wide for wagons or chaises. Towards this bridge I drove.
The people, not perceiving the structure of my one-wheeled vehicle,
called to me with great eagerness to warn me that the bridge was
too narrow for carriages. I had an excellent horse, which went so
fast as to give but little time for examination. The louder they called,
the faster I drove; and when I had passed the bridge, they shouted
after me with surprise. I got on to Shipstone upon Stone; but before
I had dined there I found that my fame had overtaken me. My
carriage was put into a coach-house, so that those who came from
Long Compton, not seeing it, did not recognize me. I therefore had
an opportunity of hearing all the exaggerations and strange
conjectures which were made by those who related my passage over
the narrow bridge. There were posts on the bridge, to prevent, as I
suppose, more than one horseman from passing at once. Some of
the spectators asserted that my carriage had gone over these posts;
others said that it had not wheels, which was indeed literally true;
but they meant to say that it was without any wheel. Some were
sure that no carriage ever went so fast; and all agreed that at the
end of the bridge, where the floods had laid the road for some way
under water, my carriage swam on the surface of the water.
 VIII.

JAMES WATT.

"Uncle Fritz," said Mabel Liddell, the next afternoon that our
friends had gathered together for a reading, "would it not be well for
us all to go down into the kitchen this afternoon, and watch the
steam come out of the kettle as Ellen makes tea for us?"
"Why should it be well, Mabel?" said Colonel Ingham. "For my
part, I should prefer to remain in my own room, more especially as I
consider my armchair to be more suited to the comfort of one
already on the downward path in life than is the kitchen table, where
we should have to sit should we invade the premises of our friends
below."
"I was thinking," said Mabel, "of the manner in which James Watt
when a child invented the steam-engine, from observing the motion
of the top of the teakettle; and as we are to read about Watt this
afternoon I thought we might be in a more fit condition to
understand his invention, and might more fully comprehend his
frame of mind while perfecting his great work, should we also fix our
eyes and minds on the top of the teakettle in Ellen's kitchen."
"Mabel, my child," said Uncle Fritz, "you talk like a book, and a
very interesting one at that; but I think, as the youngest of us would
say, that you are just a little off in your remarks. And as I observe
that Clem, who is going to read this afternoon, desires to deliver a
sermon of which your conversation seems to be the text, I will
request all to listen to him before we consider seriously vacating this
apartment, however poor it may be,"—and he glanced fondly around
at the comfortable arrangements that everywhere pervaded the
study,—"and seek the regions below."
 "I only wanted to say," began Clem, "that although Watt did on
one occasion (in his extreme youth) look at a teakettle with some
interest, he was not in the habit, at the time when he devoted most
thought to the steam-engine, of having a teakettle continually before
him that he might gain inspiration from observing the steam issue
from its nose. And, as Watt dispensed with this aid, I have no doubt
that we may do so as well, contenting ourselves with the results of
the experiments in the vaporization of water, which Ellen is now
conducting in the form of tea. Besides all this, however, I do want to
say some things, before we read aloud this afternoon (I hope this
isn't really too much like a sermon), about the steam-engine and the
part that Watt had in perfecting it."
At this point the irrepressible Mabel was heard to whisper to
Bedford, who sat next her: "Wasn't it curious that the same mind
which grasped the immense capabilities of the steam-engine should
have been able also to construct such a delicate lyric as
'How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour'?"
"Mabel," said Colonel Ingham, "you are absolutely unbearable. If
you do not keep in better order I shall be sorry that I dissuaded you
from descending to the kitchen. I see nothing incongruous myself in
indulging in mechanical experiments, and in throwing one's thoughts
into the form of verse,"—here the old gentleman colored slightly, as
though he recollected something of the sort,—"but it may be well to
counteract the impression your conversation may have made by
stating that Isaac Watts did not invent the steam-engine, nor did
James Watt write the beautiful words you have just quoted.—Now,
Clem, I believe you have the floor."
"Well," said Clem, "I only want the floor for a short time in order
to explain about Watt and the steam-engine, and how much he was
the inventor of it, before we begin to read.
"There are various points about the steam-engine which are
really Watt's invention,—the separate condenser, for instance,—but
the idea of the steam-engine was not original with him; that is,
when he saw the steam in the teakettle raise the lid and drop it
again, he was not the first to speculate on the power of steam."
"Are you going to read us that part in the book, Clem?" asked
Bedford, with some interest.
"Yes, if you like," said Clem. "I guess it tells about it in Mr.
Smiles's 'Life of Watt.'" So he began to overhaul the book he had
brought, and shortly discovered the anecdote referred to by Mabel
with such interest, and read it.
"On one occasion he [James Watt] was reproved by Mrs.
Muirhead, his aunt, for his indolence at the tea-table. 'James Watt,'
said the worthy lady, 'I never saw such an idle boy as you are. Take
a book, or employ yourself usefully; for the last hour you have not
spoken one word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and put it on
again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the steam,
watching how it rises from the spout, catching and counting the
drops it falls into.' In the view of M. Arago, the little James before
the teakettle, becomes the great engineer, preparing the discoveries
which were soon to immortalize him. In our opinion, the judgment of
the aunt was the truest. There is no reason to suppose that the
mind of the boy was occupied with philosophical theories on the
condensation of steam, which he compassed with so much difficulty
in his maturer years. This is more probably an afterthought
borrowed from his subsequent discoveries. Nothing is commoner
than for children to be amused with such phenomena in the same
way that they will form air-bubbles in a cup of tea, and watch them
sailing over the surface till they burst. The probability is that little
James was quite as idle as he seemed."
"That is very interesting," remarked Mabel. "Don't you think now,
Uncle Fritz, we had better go into the kitchen?" And she looked
appealingly at the old gentleman, who merely held up his finger for
silence as Clem continued his lecture.
"What I meant to say," Clem went on, "was that other people
before Watt had found out the power of steam, and had used it too.
There was one Hero of Alexandria, who lived about two thousand
years ago, who used steam for many interesting purposes, notably
for animating various figures that took part in the idolatrous worship
of his time, and thus in deceiving the common people. But his
contrivances, though engines which went by steam, would hardly be
called steam-engines. Between Hero of Alexandria, of 160 b. c., and
the Marquis of Worcester, of 1650 a. d., there does not seem to have
been much doing in the way of inventing the steam-engine. But the
Marquis of Worcester in Charles II.'s time was a great philosopher,
and did nobody knows exactly what with steam. But though he did
great things, he did not produce a particularly capable engine,
though he seems to have known more about steam than anybody
else did at his time. After the Marquis of Worcester and before Watt,
there were three men who did much towards inventing and
improving the steam-engine. Their names were Savery, Papin, and
Newcomen. I don't propose to tell you about the inventions of each
one; but it's well enough to remember that each one did important
service in getting the steam-engine to the point where Watt took
hold of it. As it was on Newcomen's engine that Watt made his first
serious experiments, I think we should all like to know something
about it."

THE NEWCOMEN ENGINE.

Newcomen's engine may be thus briefly described: The steam
was generated in a separate boiler, as in Savery's engine, from which
it was conveyed into a vertical cylinder underneath a piston fitting it
closely, but movable upwards and downwards through its whole
length. The piston was fixed to a rod, which was attached by a joint
or chain to the end of a lever vibrating upon an axis, the other end
being attached to a rod working a pump. When the piston in the
cylinder was raised, steam was let into the vacated space through a
tube fitted into the top of the boiler, and mounted with a stopcock.
The pump-rod at the further end of the lever being thus depressed,
cold water was applied to the sides of the cylinder, on which the
steam within it was condensed, a vacuum was produced, and the
external air, pressing upon the top of the piston, forced it down into
the empty cylinder. The pump-rod was thereby raised; and, the
operation of depressing it being repeated, a power was thus
produced which kept the pump continuously at work. Such, in a few
words, was the construction and action of Newcomen's first engine.
[8]

While the engine was still in its trial state, a curious accident
occurred which led to a change in the mode of condensation, and
proved of essential importance in establishing Newcomen's engine
as a practical working power. The accident was this: in order to keep
the cylinder as free from air as possible, great pains were taken to
prevent it passing down by the side of the piston, which was
carefully wrapped with cloth or leather; and, still further to keep the
cylinder air-tight, a quantity of water was kept constantly on the
upper side of the piston. At one of the early trials the inventors were
surprised to see the engine make several strokes in unusually quick
succession; and on searching for the cause, they found it to consist
in a hole in the piston, which had let the cold water in a jet into the
inside of the cylinder, and thereby produced a rapid vacuum by the
condensation of the continued steam. A new light suddenly broke
upon Newcomen. The idea of condensing by injection of cold water
directly into the cylinder, instead of applying it on the outside, at
once occurred to him; and he proceeded to embody the expedient
which had thus been accidentally suggested as part of his machine.
The result was the addition of the injection pipe, through which,
when the piston was raised and the cylinder full of steam, a jet of
cold water was thrown in, and, the steam being suddenly
condensed, the piston was at once driven down by the pressure of
the atmosphere.
An accident of a different kind shortly after led to the
improvement of Newcomen's engine in another respect. To keep it at
work, one man was required to attend the fire, and another to turn
alternately the two cocks, one admitting the steam into the cylinder,
the other admitting the jet of cold water to condense it. The turning
of these cocks was easy work, usually performed by a boy. It was,
however, a very monotonous duty, though requiring constant
attention. To escape the drudgery and obtain an interval for rest or
perhaps for play, a boy named Humphrey Potter, who turned the
cocks, set himself to discover some method of evading his task. He
must have been an ingenious boy, as is clear from the arrangement
he contrived with this object. Observing the alternate ascent and
descent of the beam above his head, he bethought him of applying
the movement to the alternate raising and lowering of the levers
which governed the cocks. The result was the contrivance of what
he called the scoggan (meaning presumably the loafer or lazy boy),
consisting of a catch worked by strings from the beam of the engine.
This arrangement, when tried, was found to answer the purpose
intended. The action of the engine was thus made automatic; and
the arrangement, though rude, not only enabled Potter to enjoy his
play, but it had the effect of improving the working power of the
engine itself; the number of strokes which it made being increased
from six or eight to fifteen or sixteen in the minute. This invention
was afterward greatly improved by Mr. Henry Beighton, of
Newcastle-on-Tyne, who added the plug-rod and hand-gear. He did
away with the catches and strings of the boy Potter's rude
apparatus, and substituted a rod suspended from the beam, which
alternately opened and shut the tappets attached to the steam and
injection cocks.
Thus, step by step, Newcomen's engine grew in power and
efficiency, and became more and more complete as a self-acting
machine. It will be observed that, like all other inventions, it was not
the product of any one man's ingenuity, but of many. One
contributed one improvement, and another another. The essential
features of the atmospheric engine were not new. The piston and
cylinder had been known as long ago as the time of Hero. The
expansive force of steam and the creation of a vacuum by its
condensation had been known to the Marquis of Worcester, Savery,
Papin, and many more. Newcomen merely combined in his machine
the result of their varied experience; and, assisted by the persons
who worked with him, down to the engine-boy Potter, he advanced
the invention several important stages; so that the steam-engine
was no longer a toy or a scientific curiosity, but had become a
powerful machine capable of doing useful work.

JAMES WATT AND THE STEAM-ENGINE.

It was in the year 1759 that Robison[9] first called the attention
of his friend Watt to the subject of the steam-engine. Robison was
then only in his twentieth, and Watt in his twenty-third year.
Robison's idea was that the power of steam might be
advantageously applied to the driving of wheel-carriages; and he
suggested that it would be the most convenient for the purpose to
place the cylinder with its open end downwards to avoid the
necessity of using a working-beam. Watt admits that he was very
ignorant of the steam-engine at the time; nevertheless, he began
making a model with two cylinders of tin plate, intending that the
pistons and their connecting-rods should act alternately on two
pinions attached to the axles of the carriage-wheels. But the model,
being slightly and inaccurately made, did not answer his
expectations. Other difficulties presented themselves, and the
scheme was laid aside because Robison left Glasgow to go to sea.
Indeed, mechanical science was not yet ripe for the locomotive.
Robison's idea had, however, dropped silently into the mind of his
friend, where it grew from day to day, slowly and at length fruitfully.
At his intervals of leisure and in the quiet of his evenings, Watt
continued to prosecute his various studies. He was shortly attracted
by the science of chemistry, then in its infancy. Dr. Black was at that
time occupied with the investigations which led to his discovery of
the theory of latent heat, and it is probable that his familiar
conversations with Watt on the subject induced the latter to enter
upon a series of experiments with the view of giving the theory
some practical direction. His attention again and again reverted to
the steam-engine, though he had not yet seen even a model of one.
Steam was as yet almost unknown in Scotland as a working power.
The first engine was erected at Elphinstone Colliery, in Stirlingshire,
about the year 1750; and the second more than ten years later, at
Govan Colliery, near Glasgow, where it was known by the startling
name of "The Firework." This had not, however, been set up at the
time Watt had begun to inquire into the subject. But he found that
the college possessed the model of a Newcomen engine for the use
of the Natural Philosophy class, which had been sent to London for
repair. On hearing of its existence, he suggested to his friend Dr.
Anderson, Professor of Natural Philosophy, the propriety of getting
back the model; and a sum of money was placed by the Senatus at
the professor's disposal, "to recover the steam-engine from Mr.
Sisson, instrument-maker in London."
In the mean time Watt sought to learn all that had been written
on the subject of the steam-engine. He ascertained from
Desaguliers, Switzer, and other writers, what had been accomplished
by Savery, Newcomen, Beighton, and others; and he went on with
his own independent experiments. His first apparatus was of the
simplest possible kind. He used common apothecaries' phials for his
steam reservoirs, and canes hollowed out for his steam-pipes. In
1761 he proceeded to experiment on the force of steam by means of
a small Papin's digester and a syringe. The syringe was only the
third of an inch in diameter, fitted with a solid piston; and it was
connected with the digester by a pipe furnished with a stopcock, by
which the steam was admitted or shut off at will. It was also itself
provided with a stopcock, enabling a communication to be opened
between the syringe and the outer air to permit the steam in the
syringe to escape. The apparatus, though rude, enabled the
experimenter to ascertain some important facts. When the steam in
the digester was raised and the cock turned, enabling it to rush
against the lower side of the piston, he found that the expansive
force of the steam raised a weight of fifteen pounds, with which the
piston was loaded. Then on turning on the cock and shutting off the
connection with the digester at the same time that a passage was
opened to the air, the steam was allowed to escape, when the
weight upon the piston, being no longer counteracted, immediately
forced it to descend.
Watt saw that it would be easy to contrive that the cocks should
be turned by the machinery itself with perfect regularity. But there
was an objection to this method. Water is converted into vapor as
soon as its elasticity is sufficient to overcome the weight of the air
which keeps it down. Under the ordinary pressure of the atmosphere
water acquires this necessary elasticity at 212°; but as the steam in
the digester was prevented from escaping, it acquired increased
heat, and by consequence increased elasticity. Hence it was that the
steam which issued from the digester was not only able to support
the piston and the air which pressed upon its upper surface, but the
additional load with which the piston was weighted. With the
imperfect mechanical construction, however, of those days, there
was a risk lest the boiler should be burst by the steam, which was
apt to force its way through the ill-made joints of the machine. This,
conjoined with the great expenditure of steam on the high-pressure
system, led Watt to abandon the plan; and the exigencies of his
business for a time prevented him from pursuing his experiments.
At length the Newcomen model arrived from London; and in
1763 the little engine, which was destined to become so famous,
was put into the hands of Watt. The boiler was somewhat smaller
than an ordinary teakettle. The cylinder of the engine was only of
two inches diameter and six inches stroke. Watt at first regarded it
as merely "a fine plaything." It was, however, enough to set him
upon a track of thinking which led to the most important results.
When he had repaired the model and set it to work, he found that
the boiler, though apparently large enough, could not supply steam
in sufficient quantity, and only a few strokes of the piston could be
obtained, when the engine stopped. The fire was urged by blowing,
and more steam was produced; but still it would not work properly.
Exactly at the point at which another man would have abandoned
the task in despair, the mind of Watt became thoroughly roused.
"Everything," says Professor Robison, "was to him the beginning of a
new and serious study; and I knew that he would not quit it till he
had either discovered its insignificance or had made something of
it." Thus it happened with the phenomena presented by the model
of the steam-engine. Watt referred to his books, and endeavored to
ascertain from them by what means he might remedy the defects
which he found in the model; but they could tell him nothing. He
then proceeded with an independent course of experiments,
resolved to work out the problem for himself. In the course of his
inquiries he came upon a fact which, more than any other, led his
mind into the train of thought which at last conducted him to the
invention of which the results were destined to prove so stupendous.
This fact was the existence of latent heat.
In order to follow the track of investigation pursued by Watt, it is
necessary for a moment to revert to the action of the Newcomen
pumping-engine. A beam, moving upon a centre, had affixed to one
end of it a chain attached to the piston of the pump, and at the
other a chain attached to a piston that fitted into the steam-cylinder.
It was by driving this latter piston up and down the cylinder that the
pump was worked. To communicate the necessary movement to the
piston, the steam generated in a boiler was admitted to the bottom
of the cylinder, forcing out the air through a valve, where its
pressure on the under side of the piston counterbalanced the
pressure of the atmosphere on its upper side. The piston, thus
placed between two equal forces, was drawn up to the top of the
cylinder by the greater weight of the pump-gear at the opposite
extremity of the beam. The steam, so far, only discharged the office
of the air it displaced; but if the air had been allowed to remain, the
piston once at the top of the cylinder could not have returned, being
pressed as much by the atmosphere underneath as by the
atmosphere above it. The steam, on the contrary, which was
admitted by the exclusion of air, could be condensed, and a vacuum
created, by injecting cold water through the bottom of the cylinder.
The piston, being now unsupported, was forced down by the
pressure of the atmosphere on its upper surface. When the piston
reached the bottom, the steam was again let in, and the process
was repeated. Such was the engine in ordinary use for pumping
water at the time that Watt began his investigations.
Among his other experiments, he constructed a boiler which
showed by inspection the quantity of water evaporated in any given
time, and the quantity of steam used in every stroke of the engine.
He was astonished to discover that a small quantity of water in the
form of steam heated a large quantity of cold water injected into the
cylinder for the purpose of cooling it; and upon further examination
he ascertained that steam heated six times its weight of cold water
to 212°, which was the temperature of the steam itself. "Being
struck with this remarkable fact," says Watt, "and not understanding
the reason of it, I mentioned it to my friend Dr. Black, who then
explained to me his doctrine of latent heat, which he had taught for
some time before this period (the summer of 1764); but having
myself been occupied by the pursuits of business, if I had heard of it
I had not attended to it, when I thus stumbled upon one of the
material facts by which that beautiful theory is supported."
When Watt found that water in its conversion into vapor became
such a reservoir of heat, he was more than ever bent on
economizing it; for the great waste of heat involving so heavy a
consumption of fuel was felt to be the principal obstacle to the
extended employment of steam as a motive power. He accordingly
endeavored, with the same quantity of fuel, at once to increase the
production of steam and to diminish its waste. He increased the
heating surface of the boiler by making flues through it; he even
made his boiler of wood, as being a worse conductor of heat than
the brickwork which surrounds common furnaces; and he cased the
cylinders and all the conducting pipes in materials which conducted
heat very slowly. But none of these contrivances were effectual; for
it turned out that the chief expenditure of steam, and consequently
of fuel, in the Newcomen engine, was occasioned by the reheating
of the cylinder after the steam had been condensed, and the
cylinder was consequently cooled by the injection into it of the cold
water. Nearly four fifths of the whole steam employed was
condensed on its first admission, before the surplus could act upon
the piston. Watt therefore came to the conclusion that to make a
perfect steam-engine it was necessary that the cylinder should be
always as hot as the steam that entered it; but it was equally
necessary that the steam should be condensed when the piston
descended, nay, that it should be cooled down below 100°, or a
considerable amount of vapor would be given off, which would resist
the descent of the piston, and diminish the power of the engine.
Thus the cylinder was never to be at a less temperature than 212°,
and yet at each descent of the piston it was to be less than 100°,—
conditions which, on the very face of them, seemed to be wholly
incompatible.
Though still occupied with his inquiries and experiments as to
steam, Watt did not neglect his proper business, but was constantly
on the look-out for improvements in instrument-making. A machine
which he invented for drawing in perspective proved a success; and
he made a considerable number of them to order, for customers in
London as well as abroad. He was also an indefatigable reader, and
continued to extend his knowledge of chemistry and mechanics by
perusal of the best books on these sciences.
Above all subjects, however, the improvement of the steam-
engine continued to keep the fastest hold upon his mind. He still
brooded over his experiments with the Newcomen model, but did
not seem to make much way in introducing any practical
improvement in its mode of working. His friend Robison says he
struggled long to condense with sufficient rapidity without injection,
trying one experiment after another, finding out what would not do,
and exhibiting many beautiful specimens of ingenuity and fertility of
resource. He continued, to use his own words, "to grope in the dark,
misled by many an ignis fatuus." It was a favorite saying of his that
"Nature has a weak side, if we can only find it out;" and he went on
groping and feeling for it, but as yet in vain. At length light burst
upon him, and all at once the problem over which he had been
brooding was solved.
 THE SEPARATE CONDENSER.
One Sunday afternoon, in the spring of 1765, he went to take an
afternoon walk on the Green, then a quiet grassy meadow used as a
bleaching and grazing ground. On week days the Glasgow lasses
came thither with their largest kail-pots to boil their clothes in; and
sturdy queans might be seen, with coats kilted, trampling blankets in
their tubs. On Sundays the place was comparatively deserted; and
hence Watt, who lived close at hand, went there to take a quiet
afternoon stroll. His thoughts were as usual running on the subject
of his unsatisfactory experiments with the Newcomen engine, when
the first idea of the separate condenser suddenly flashed upon his
mind. But the notable discovery is best told in his own words, as
related to Mr. Robert Hart, many years after:—
"I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon. I had
entered the Green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street, and
had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking upon the engine
at the time, and had gone as far as the herd's house, when the idea
came into my mind that as the steam was an elastic body, it would
rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the
cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it and might be
then condensed without cooling the cylinder. I then saw that I must
get rid of the condensed steam and the injection water if I used a
jet, as in Newcomen's engine. Two ways of doing this occurred to
me. First, the water might be run off by a descending pipe, if an off-
let could be got at the depth of 35 or 36 feet, and any air might be
extracted by a small pump. The second was to make the pump large
enough to extract both water and air." He continued: "I had not
walked farther than the Golf-house when the whole thing was
arranged in my mind."
Great and prolific ideas are almost always simple. What seems
impossible at the outset appears so obvious when it is effected, that
we are prone to marvel that it did not force itself at once upon the
mind. Late in life Watt, with his accustomed modesty, declared his
belief that if he had excelled, it had been by chance, and the neglect
of others. To Professor Jardine he said that when it was analyzed the
invention would not appear so great as it seemed to be. "In the
state," said he, "in which I found the steam-engine, it was no great
effort of mind to observe that the quantity of fuel necessary to make
it work would forever prevent its extensive utility. The next step in
my progress was equally easy,—to inquire what was the cause of the
great consumption of fuel: this, too, was readily suggested, viz., the
waste of fuel which was necessary to bring the whole cylinder,
piston, and adjacent parts from the coldness of water to the heat of
steam, no fewer than from fifteen to twenty times in a minute." The
question then occurred, How was this to be avoided or remedied? It
was at this stage that the idea of carrying on the condensation in a
separate vessel flashed upon his mind, and solved the difficulty.
Mankind has been more just to Watt than he was to himself.
There was no accident in the discovery. It had been the result of
close and continuous study; and the idea of the separate condenser
was merely the last step of a long journey, a step which could not
have been taken unless the road which led to it had been traversed.
Dr. Black says, "This capital improvement flashed upon his mind at
once, and filled him with rapture,"—a statement which, in spite of
the unimpassioned nature of Watt, we can readily believe.
On the morning following his Sunday afternoon's walk on
Glasgow Green, Watt was up betimes, making arrangements for a
speedy trial of his new plan. He borrowed from a college friend a
large brass syringe, an inch and a third in diameter, and ten inches
long, of the kind used by anatomists for injecting arteries with wax
previous to dissection. The body of the syringe served for a cylinder,
the piston-rod passing through a collar of leather in its cover. A pipe
connected with the boiler was inserted at both ends for the
admission of steam, and at the upper end was another pipe to
convey the steam to the condenser. The axis of the stem of the
piston was drilled with a hole, fitted with a valve at its lower end, to
permit the water produced by the condensed steam on first filling
the cylinder to escape. The first condenser made use of was an
improvised cistern of tinned plate, provided with a pump to get rid of
the water formed by the condensation of the steam, both the
condensing-pipes and the air-pump being placed in a reservoir of
cold water.
"The steam-pipe," says Watt, "was adjusted to a small boiler.
When the steam was produced, it was admitted into the cylinder,
and soon issued through the perforation of the rod and at the valve
of the condenser; when it was judged that the air was expelled, the
steam-cock was shut, and the air-pump piston-rod was drawn up,
which leaving the small pipes of the condenser in a state of vacuum,
the steam entered them, and was condensed. The piston of the
cylinder immediately rose, and lifted a weight of about eighteen
pounds, which was hung to the lower end of the piston-rod. The
exhaustion-cock was shut, the steam was re-admitted into the
cylinder, and the operation was repeated. The quantity of steam
consumed and the weights it could raise were observed, and,
excepting the non-application of the steam-case and external
covering, the invention was complete in so far as regarded the
savings of steam and fuel."

COMPLETING THE INVENTION.

But although the invention was complete in Watt's mind, it took
him many long and laborious years to work out the details of the
engine. His friend Robison, with whom his intimacy was maintained
during these interesting experiments, has given a graphic account of
the difficulties which he successively encountered and overcame. He
relates that on his return from the country, after the college vacation
in 1765, he went to have a chat with Watt and communicate to him
some observations he had made on Desaguliers' and Belidor's
account of the steam-engine. He went straight into the parlor,
without ceremony, and found Watt sitting before the fire looking at a
little tin cistern which he had on his knee. Robison immediately
started the conversation about steam; his mind, like Watt's, being
occupied with the means of avoiding the excessive waste of heat in
the Newcomen engine. Watt all the while kept looking into the fire,
and after a time laid down the cistern at the foot of his chair, saying
nothing. It seems that Watt felt rather nettled that Robison had
communicated to a mechanic of the town a contrivance which he
had hit upon for turning the cocks of his engine. When Robison
therefore pressed his inquiry, Watt at length looked at him and said
briskly, "You need not fash yourself any more about that, man. I
have now made an engine that shall not waste a particle of steam. It
shall all be boiling hot,—ay, and hot water injected, if I please." He
then pushed the little tin cistern with his foot under the table.
Robison could learn no more of the new contrivance from Watt at
that time; but on the same evening he accidentally met a mutual
acquaintance, who, supposing he knew as usual the progress of
Watt's experiments, observed to him, "Well, have you seen Jamie
Watt?" "Yes." "He'll be in fine spirits now with his engine?" "Yes,"
said Robison, "very fine spirits." "Gad!" said the other, "the separate
condenser's the thing; keep it but cold enough, and you may have a
perfect vacuum, whatever be the heat of the cylinder." This was
Watt's secret, and the nature of the contrivance was clear to Robison
at once.
It will be observed that Watt had not made a secret of it to his
other friends. Indeed, Robison himself admitted that one of Watt's
greatest delights was to communicate the results of his experiments
to others, and set them upon the same road to knowledge with
himself; and that no one could display less of the small jealousy of
the tradesman than he did. To his intimate friend Dr. Black he
communicated the progress made by him at every stage. The Doctor
kindly encouraged him in his struggles, cheered him in his encounter
with difficulty, and, what was of still more practical value at the time,
helped him with money to enable him to prosecute his invention.
Communicative though Watt was disposed to be, he learnt reticence
when he found himself exposed to the depredations of the smaller
fry of inventors. Robison says that had he lived in Birmingham or
London at the time, the probability is that some one or other of the
numerous harpies who live by sucking other people's brains would
have secured patents for his more important inventions, and thereby
deprived him of the benefits of his skill, science, and labor. As yet,
however, there were but few mechanics in Glasgow capable of
understanding or appreciating the steam-engine; and the intimate
friends to whom he freely spoke of his discovery were too honorable
to take advantage of his confidence. Shortly after Watt
communicated to Robison the different stages of his invention, and
the results at which he had arrived, much to the delight of his friend.
It will be remembered that in the Newcomen engine the steam
was only employed for the purpose of producing a vacuum, and that
its working power was in the down stroke, which was effected by
the pressure of the air upon the piston; hence it is now usual to call
it the atmospheric engine. Watt perceived that the air which followed
the piston down the cylinder would cool the latter, and that steam
would be wasted by reheating it. In order, therefore, to avoid this
loss of heat, he resolved to put an air-tight cover upon the cylinder,
with a hole and stuffing-box for the piston-rod to slide through, and
to admit steam above the piston, to act upon it instead of the
atmosphere. When the steam had done its duty in driving down the
piston, a communication was opened between the upper and lower
part of the cylinder; and the same steam, distributing itself equally
in both compartments, sufficed to restore equilibrium. The piston
was now drawn up by the weight of the pump-gear; the steam
beneath it was then condensed in the separate vessel so as to
produce a vacuum, and a fresh jet of steam from the boiler was let
in above the piston, which forced it again to the bottom of the
cylinder. From an atmospheric engine it had thus become a true
steam-engine, and with much greater economy of steam than when
the air did half the duty. But it was not only important to keep the
air from flowing down the inside of the cylinder; the air which
circulated within cooled the metal and condensed a portion of the
steam within; and this Watt proposed to remedy by a second
cylinder, surrounding the first, with an interval between the two
which was to be kept full of steam.
 One by one these various contrivances were struck out, modified,
settled, and reduced to definite plans,—the separate condenser, the
air and water pumps, the use of fat and oil (instead of water, as in
the Newcomen engine) to keep the piston working in the cylinder
air-tight, and the enclosing of the cylinder itself within another to
prevent the loss of heat. These were all emanations from the first
idea of inventing an engine working by a piston, in which the
cylinder should be continually hot and perfectly dry. "When once,"
says Watt, "the idea of separate condensation was started, all these
improvements followed as corollaries in quick succession, so that in
the course of one or two days the invention was thus far complete in
my mind."

WATT MAKES HIS MODEL.

The next step was to construct a model engine for the purpose of
embodying the invention in a working form. With this object, Watt
hired an old cellar, situated in the first wide entry to the north of the
beef-market in King Street, and then proceeded with his model. He
found it much easier, however, to prepare his plan than to execute it.
Like most ingenious and inventive men, Watt was extremely
fastidious; and this occasioned considerable delay in the execution of
the work. His very inventiveness to some extent proved a hindrance;
for new expedients were perpetually occurring to him, which he
thought would be improvements, and which he, by turns,
endeavored to introduce. Some of these expedients he admits
proved fruitless, and all of them occasioned delay. Another of his
chief difficulties was in finding competent workmen to execute his
plans. He himself had been accustomed only to small metal work,
with comparatively delicate tools, and had very little experience "in
the practice of mechanics in great" as he termed it. He was
therefore under the necessity of depending, in a great measure,
upon the handiwork of others. But mechanics capable of working out
Watt's designs in metal were then with difficulty to be found. The
beautiful self-action and workmanship which have since been called
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