Niklas Olsen is associate professor in history and chair of the Center of Modern European Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of The Sovereign Consumer. A New Intellectual History of Neoliberalism.
The Spanish flu of 1918 infected a quarter of the world population and was decisive to the rise of public health-care systems. Today’s COVID-19 crisis is again showing that collective problems demand collective solutions — and a state that provides for all our essential needs.
Right-wing neoliberalism’s assault on the very idea of society laid the groundwork for today’s right-wing nationalist backlash. But the Left’s hands aren’t entirely clean either.
Neoliberalism replaces the citizen with the consumer — pushing people out of political life and into the marketplace.