“It’s about how Dutch politicians on both sides of the political spectrum implemented neoliberal reforms and austerity measures between the 1980s and now,” I tell a friend who asks what book I’m reading. Although he’s college educated and works for a real estate firm in Amsterdam’s financial district, the look on his face tells me he doesn’t quite know what I’m talking about. I share some more names and details he might recognize — Wim Kok, corporatism, Wassenaar Arrangement, the eurozone crisis — until, finally, he nods his head. “Right,” he says, “the polder model.”

This small interaction is itself an affirmation of what the book — No Nonsense: A History of the Dutch Neoliberal Turn, by University of Amsterdam sociologist Merijn Oudenampsen — is trying to say. Originally published in 2022 and recently translated into English, it’s the second half of a larger history of Dutch political economy written alongside historian Bram Mellink. It insightfully traces how the Netherlands developed from one of Europe’s most robust and ideologically committed welfare states into what French author Michel Houellebecq famously (and not altogether unjustly) described as more of a business than a country.

Similar to other critical texts on the subject – such as Sebastián Edwards’s The Chile Project – Oudenampsen’s research shows that, in a free and fair democracy, neoliberalism can survive politically only by disguising itself as the very thing it aims to undermine: shared prosperity. He also explains why, in the Netherlands as elsewhere in the world, the various far-right movements that arose in neoliberalism’s wake (Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom, MAGA, etc.) are not a response to the neoliberal project so much as its continuation.