Hayek and Arendt facing neoliberalism: notes on the penultimate capitalist crisis

Abstract

The serious economic and political crisis that began in the United States in 2007 and quickly spread throughout the world is the result of neoliberal “single thought”, which places an abstract entity - the free market - as untouchable, above individuals and entire countries. While Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom stands as a beacon to neoliberalism, the work of Hannah Arendt, notably The Origins of Totalitarianism, allows to draw parallelisms between this current crisis and the one that led to the emergence and the rise to power of Nazism in Germany, in the mid-twentieth century, with their similarities and their differences and thus accesses to identify totalitarian features in present neoliberal democracies.