Rethinking Russia: Transnational Perspectives on Authoritarianism, Society & Resistance – A Symposium

In this special Symposium edition of our podcast series Beyond Neo-Liberalism, we dive into Anna Schwenck’s monograph, Flexible Authoritarianism, alongside a panel of leading scholars: Jeremy Morris, Greg Yudin, and Johanna K. Bockman. 

How do ambition, loyalty, status, and inequality take shape inside an authoritarian regime? Can neoliberal aspirations thrive under authoritarian rule? And how does everyday life—and innovation—unfold within a war-driven economy? Our guests unpack these questions, debate the concepts we use to understand Russian society today, and offer fresh perspectives on authoritarianism, social change, and resistance.

Academic Reference: 

Anna Schwenck, Jeremy Morris, Johanna Bockman, Greg Yudin, Hagen Schulz-Forberg; Rethinking Russia: Transnational Perspectives on Authoritarianism, Society & Resistance—A Symposium. Global Perspectives 14 May 2026; 7 (1): 161510. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2026.161510

This podcast was created and produced by the Research Center for New Critical Politics and Governance (CPG).

To watch the video version of this episode, please visit the link below:
https://cas.au.dk/en/cpg/podcast/mapping-the-planetary

Transcript

Hagen: Welcome to our podcast symposium here on Global Perspectives podcast, Planetary Choices. Today we're going to record a symposium, a conversation about Anna Schwenck's still pretty new book, Flexible Authoritarianism: Cultivating Ambition and Loyalty. It came out with OUP in 2024 and we're finally able to have a nice long discussion about it. Here with me in order to talk about Anna is of course Anna, Anna Schwenck herself, who is a cultural and political sociologist, has been working on her case for at least a decade, being in Russia and out of Russia, thinking about her project and finally coming up with that book that I just mentioned. It caused a lot of debate and it's very inspiring to many of us as she points to questions that I think are really important these days. What is the role of, you know, let's say, the individual in a strong man regime, bluntly put, and you're investigating this in very innovative ways that we will be talking about. Anna is particularly interested in how cultural understandings, whether they're locally specific or transnationally salient, enable and restrain political legitimation, if I may say that much, Anna. Welcome and thank you for writing that book to make us all talk about it. Discussing Anna's work are Jeremy Morris, who is Professor of Global and Russian Studies here at Aarhus University. He's an anthropologist interested in all things Russian and he has recently published — maybe not all things — he has recently published another book called Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance, which came out with Bloomsbury. There's been quite a debate about that book as well. We had the chance of talking about it here at our department and I really look forward to hearing what Jeremy has to say to Anna's work and engaging in a conversation. Next up we have Johanna Bockman. Johanna is Associate Professor of Global Affairs and Sociology at George Mason University. Her book, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism, which has caused quite a discussion among neoliberal scholars, I may say. We keep discussing it, which is a long-lasting legacy of that work, Johanna, which is great. It was published by Stanford University Press. She's been working on a book project on Washington DC and she has returned to a project on the 80s debt crisis focusing on Costa Rica, Tanzania, Yugoslavia recently. Welcome Johanna, it's great to have you as well. Finally we have Greg Yudin. Greg is a political theorist, specialized in plebiscitary democracy and public opinion polling. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and has worked and held research scholarships at several universities, both in Russia and the United States. More recently at Princeton University, where he was from 2022 to 2025. Currently you're completing your second PhD in politics at the New School for Social Research in New York. This is my illustrious panel here and we will first give the floor to Anna to introduce us to the book and some of her main points.

Anna: Thank you very much, Hagen, for organizing this panel and podcast. Thanks very much for everyone who took the time to read and make up their minds. So I feel very honored to present some of the main parts as a start. And so just to give you an overall sense, the book is about the interweaving of authoritarian practices and neoliberal techniques. What I found and what I show in the book is intriguing about this style of government, that I call flexible authoritarianism, is that the state employs entrepreneurial incentives to legitimate authoritarian rule. Yet in the book I'm not only interested in these state strategies but also how they resonate. So I investigated the subjectivities of a group of young adults who are ambitious and loyal to the flexible authoritarian regime that I describe as well in the book. So what is important to say from the very beginning is that the research took place way before the 2022 escalation of the war against Ukraine. So that will come up in the discussion for sure. And it's also important to say that the strategies I look at and the young people that I interviewed, this is not a general picture of Russian youth, but it's a specific category, I would say. And these are potential strategic elites. This is people who of themselves think that they could make it maybe within that flexible authoritarian system. But these are also people that get a special treatment of the state. And I think we will have time in the discussion also to think about different categories in state politics.

So really, how my book started and this idea, and the framing of the book was, that it calls into question this idea that the rise of authoritarianism we see now in many parts of the world is a backlash to neoliberal globalization. And I would say not just in the Russian case, but in many cases authoritarian governments actually adopt neoliberal and flexible policies or continue neoliberal reforms that have already been in place before they came to power. And because it's a huge debate what neoliberalism is and Russia is usually not a textbook example of neoliberalism, I want to just very quickly clarify how I use the term in the book. So by neoliberalism basically I mean that states and state organs shift the responsibility for the well-being of citizens from the polity or the state to the individual person. So for instance governments declare that people need to provide on an individual basis for accidents, for old age and for education. So this is a Foucauldian approach and there will be much room for discussion. But I wanted to end this part of the presentation with just summarizing what I mean by flexible authoritarianism. So I would say it's a government approach that incentivizes using incentives to elicit a neoliberal can-do spirit among individual citizens and a thinking outside the box, a kind of a creativity. And at the same time there are still policies and laws that systematically suppress dissent and reward the obedience to authority.

And what I say in the book and what justifies this approach is the question why do authoritarian states even need an active citizen? Why is this at all important? Because it jeopardizes the stability of authoritarian rule to have these active people who are thinking in their own way, at least in part. So here I change the level of my analysis and I go more to what sociologists call a macro level and I look at the work in the book of Richard Sennett, who speaks of a flexible capitalism and this operates on different levels. So, by flexible, Sennett means the perceived need of states but also of companies and citizens to always quickly adapt to the ever-changing demands of markets. So proving one's flexibility also on a state level is important if we want to compete for foreign investments and good credit ratings because the well-being of the economy and this is what many economists also would teach to emerging economies depends on these factors. So, how I frame the book is that I say in this overall mental setting, states seek to align their citizen skills and self-understandings with global capitalist demands of flexibility. And this is something everyone of us knows: good citizens should be innovative and show initiatives and are very happy to look longer hours when it's needed.

So I already mentioned that there are emerging economies and emerging economies have competitive disadvantages when it comes to established markets. So the idea of innovations, an idea that is also now very much pushed in the European Union was for a long time actually a strategy that was portrayed as instrumental for emerging economies to fill that gap of this kind of economic disadvantage. So in a very optimistic reading by institutions as the World Bank, the idea was that there could be breakthrough innovations that would sustain economic growth but also provide that catch-up experience. And then examples for so-called breakthrough innovations are usually the smartphone or the car if you want to go back to another phase of capitalist development. So, another tricky thing about innovations is that also many economists find that you actually need democratic group atmospheres for innovations to come about. You need people contradicting their superiors. You need people who think for themselves. And of course democracy and democratic values sit uneasily with ideas like authoritarian obedience to the higher ranks.

So far to democracy and authoritarianism and the title of the book could suggest that I have a very rigid idea in terms of freedom house; so these are democracies and here are our authoritarian countries. It's a bit more complicated than that. I think it's important to continue speaking of democracy and authoritarianism. I'm not with Foucault here for whom democracy was not an issue. But I want to emphasize that there is an important study by a political scientist from the Netherlands called Marlies Glasius and she writes about authoritarian practices. And that rather than operating with these rigid system level notions we should actually look at the actual practices that are happening in different state systems. So of course in many democracies there are authoritarian practices that are used and that are actually getting more and more. However I would still say that when we look at Russia we see a heavy institutionalization of these authoritarian practices. So democratic procedures are broken systematically and on a continuous basis. And this has very important implications for the role of public protest, for instance, and the ability of people, and I'm sure Jeremy has a lot to say about that, to counter authoritarian politics and the way that political expression makes its way in these settings.

So what I look at empirically in the book are actually sites where I found that these ideas come together. The neoliberal, let's say, techniques and the deployment of the aesthetics of cool startup capitalism to show young people you can do this here. This is a great place and you can self-realize here. You don't have to go to the US. You don't have to go to Berlin or Seoul to realize your potential. You can do this here in Russia and we have actually a good setting for you. We have grants here and we have these youth leadership summer camps where you learn how to use all that. And of course the state is interested in having these innovations and people who do something. So there is a big discourse on actually dealing with a futility that might have emerged during Soviet times for some politicians. But there is also this idea that we have to prevent brain drain and this very much speaks to the years before the war I would say. And this is all directed to potential strategic elites who would leave the country. And these strategic elites are important for legitimacy because they are the ones that are usually associated with a promotion of economic growth and scientific advance, but also with things like the health system so that it's working, or other administrative sectors.

So of course the third system is also to create loyal citizens who embrace the authoritarian values such as leaders' opinions must be right. But these loyal citizens should invest in themselves and make projects that would be at the same time, and this is a contradictory idea, be for the advance of the state and especially the Russian state. So, to come to those... what I want to highlight before that is that I'm also looking at the role of cultural understandings that are already circulating in the society before actually the state makes these policies. And that circulate not only through state organs but for instance through self-help books, through podcasts and these are transnational cultural understandings. And this is also I think what makes the book interesting for scholars of many regions and for young people because, I mean, that's a vignette. So when the book came out I did research in South Africa and the person where I would always buy my coffee said "oh you wrote a book, can I read it?" and he said "actually, I mean the people in your book they're struggling with the same things that I struggle that's how to actually create a good life within an economic system that's so harsh and that tells you, you should just invest in yourself over and over again". So I would say these cultural understandings are not Russia specific as often as actually the case when we think about cultural understandings in Russia and in that large literature that exists but many of them are actually transnational and these self-help books and podcasts tell you to use your elbows and to make your way up against all odds.

So maybe very quickly to some of the findings and I end with these. So what I say is that what I find is that the fabric of loyalty in Russia at least for the time that I researched these Russian young adults and their loyalty was one that is a bit more difficult than just oh they're all following Putin and they think Putin is great and the United Russia party will bring peace and prosperity. No, of course not, but there is a lot of criticism actually among these young adults that is interwoven with the support that at times could sound very desperate and I'm sure that Greg will have a lot of things to say about this criticism and the kind of disappointment, and maybe desperation that, I would say, anyway leads to a kind of support in the sense of how David Easton is using the concept of support of the regime in general that is not flowing into an organized opposition. What I would also highlight is that what I found is that the young potential strategic elites with whom I was talking were not interested in regaining a great power status for Russia, that was not their immediate interest that was not what animated their motivation. So, what I argue in the book is that their complicity with the authoritarian state is created through such ambitious desires for upward mobility or someone at a book talk that said actually a fear of downward mobility so maybe that's the more accurate way to put it. They want to work in creative industries and lead what many of them called a normal life and this idea of the normal life was to live as middle classes in advanced economic societies. And what I would say and I want to end with that. 

Hagen: [noise] Sorry about that.

Anna: No, I’m sorry. Going again from Russia to a more global idea is that we can detect such comparable tendencies in many countries where strongman rule is on the rise and that I hope that the book actually also will inspire some research along the same lines that it's not about Russia. Thanks very much.

Hagen: Thank you, Anna. I mean, this was very inspiring already a great introduction. I take two points, Jeremy, before moving on to you that stuck with me. If the authoritarian regimes are now able to implement innovative systems into a non-democratic society, then the old differences between how they may be more efficient in building airports overnight, but they don't have innovation, which would be the one privilege or the one thing that the liberal democracies would have to counter the efficiency of, you know, China's speed train buildings, then that's gone. So they've squared, they would have squared that circle. So that's clearly an incentive, I guess. And the other thing that I found very interesting is that it's also an interest to keep that social mobility. From the studies we know, or that I know, that's for example on the GDR and why there was such disenchantment with the late GDR is precisely that social mobility had stopped. The first generation of GDR citizens, they could develop, they could grow, they could go to university, they could become more prosperous or they could develop also on a personal level. And that social mobility stopped. And this was a decisive factor in the sociological setup of the late GDR that was important for its downfall. At least these elements are there. So these two points seem to resonate with me and maybe also for a wider debate here that we take from the Russian case to others. Jeremy, please take the floor and let us know what you think.

Jeremy: Thank you for inviting me. And it's a privilege and a pleasure to engage with Anna's work. And so what I'll start by saying is kind of, perhaps a bit, of a recap on the book. And then I'll dip into some empirical moments from the book, because I think one of the things that makes this book important is that so much that is written about authoritarian regimes and societies is done increasingly through a telescope and through a kind of methodological and theoretical telescope, which can sometimes bring some problems with it. Then I'll quickly wrap up by going through, I think, some key points that resonate with other people's work, with my own work and my key takeaways. But as Anna notes at the beginning of the book, what she's looking at is the desire of promising young adults to... which is interesting that Anna, you called them here in your talk these potential strategic elites. And that's something that we could come back to. But in the book, you use this term "promising young adults" and their desire to become competitive in their society renders their support vital for both the, quote, "fiscal survival" and "political legitimacy" of regimes like the one in Russia. Now, as such, their doubts, hopes, fears, ambiguities are crucial to a better understanding of present-day authoritarian trajectories, right? And as we've already started discussing today, it's not really about Russia. And again, this is where I think your and my work connects very strongly. When I'm writing, I'm writing from a comparative perspective. And I'm drawing attention to tendencies, practices that, as you said, are present in our own societies. So once again, it's about authoritarian processes as much as regimes.

Having said that, what you argue is that authoritarian regimes actively manufacture and exploit conditions of uncertainty, such as economic instability or war. And as in the case of Russia, Ukraine since 2022, which then undermine people's ability to secure their basic needs and direct them either into state-sanctioned pathways, such as this state led youth camps where they're hoping to network with people and then learn how to write up applications to grant funded projects. Which then come to kind of replace what we think of as an independent civil society. That's the first thing that I think Anna is doing. And to build on that, the argument is that the ideal type of citizenship is increasingly modeled on, in authoritarian states, is increasingly modeled on this flexible, creative entrepreneur, which is why the book and the argument is relevant to any reflection on the evolution of neoliberal capitalism, if we want to call it that. Of course, we can whether or not the emphasis should be more on the neoliberal or more on the capitalist. And I have my own view, which I'll come back to on that. But Anna's insights clarify why these practices have emerged. The neoliberal term was picked up by the Russian state to encourage young people to embody these entrepreneurial states, not just for economic success, but as a form of project performance, as well. And so such behavior as a response to the institutional logic that rewards it. Flexibility, creativity, strategic communication, become markers of loyalty and civic engagement.

And so her argument speaks to a broader body of research in the Russian context and beyond, which demonstrates how neoliberal rationality is. Again, Anna talked about how this is a Foucauldian kind of prism or lens. And so we are talking about a particular form of rationality, right? How these sustain and legitimize regimes by merging market mechanisms with latent or legacy tendencies such as Soviet era developmentalism and, of course, open demands for loyalty. But as such, young people are transformed into service providers with a quasi-market, constantly refining the outputs, deliverables to meet state demands. Again, this language of neoliberalism, outputs, deliverables, metrics are continually evoked, not just in Anna's work, but again, in any research that would look at kinds of public discourses in Russia. So that's how I initially read the book. But what I want to emphasize again is that as a sociologist, what Anna is doing is vital because she's putting much needed empirical flesh on the bones of an argument that many people make. But very often without an empirical, a strong empirical basis. And so right in our first chapter, what happens is we're introduced to Anna as a researcher encountering different actors, young Russian people at a youth summer camp. And these, she says, we could describe them as up and coming socially mobile young people or as potential strategic future elites.

And what's so striking about the opening of the book is that the uninitiated reader may be expecting a very polished performative alignment between these young people who are, after all, self-selected. And what is a state sponsored event. But no, what Anna highlights is that in fact, these people are kind of just like anybody else in Russia, they're in fact quite highly critical of the political economy status quo in Russia. So Anna meets a local agricultural entrepreneur from the Far East, from Eastern Siberia. And he says he criticizes the "Selkhoz". I said we're all dependent on a few people with his ambiguous statement that says, yes, it's good that we've got this strong leader, but essentially, it's a mission that Russia is a highly networked insider closed access order state. And so he's summarizing both the strengths and the weaknesses of the system. And yet then thinks that despite these issues, the idea of self-improvement or entrepreneurialism of the self, not only could benefit him, but could benefit Russian society. So right in this first vignette that Anna has in chapter one, we have all these alignments with that makes Russian society a variety of neoliberalism. The individual is the only driver of change, the voluntarism of small deeds can overcome structural barriers. You know, in other in other vocabulary, we could call this a kind of near double bootstrapping, right? That one, regardless of one's background, can pull oneself up by one's own happiness.

And so, this overriding concept of the book, flexible authoritarianism, I think is a really important not only contribution to political sociology and work on authoritarian states and Russia in particular, it's also a corrective. It's a far too simplistic and sometimes domineering set of voices that become visible through mainstream media, and that includes scholarly voices who argue that there's a kind of stable enduring and monolithic source of legitimacy to start. And while, of course, they may have a point here, it also has the pernicious effect in that it means that we can quite often just in the view of these observers stop there and not look any further because legitimacy, keyword here, and regime stability are not worthy of further investigation. And so what Anna shows is that that's not the case. And she also shows that depoliticization, which I think we can agree on as a key artifact of the way that these regimes reproduce themselves, is not the same. Depoliticization is not the same as atomization or inaction, right? What Anna shows is that human capital as an abstract concept is well understood by all different kinds of people. And again, I would add that perhaps our knowledge comes here a little bit too modest in that at all levels of society, what I argue in my own work is that these categories are operative. The idea of working on oneself, bettering oneself because there is no alternative. In the famous words of Margaret Thatcher, there is no alternative. And so even in a highly unequal society like Russia, human capital is seen reflexively as something to be leveraged through self-efficacy and through, of course, wiggling in to make one's connections at these key kinds of events that Anna was able to be present in.

These, if you like, networking, youth networking events for potential elites. And so, you know, it's not the first time when I was reading Anna's work that I was forced to reflect on how for a European, sometimes these dramaturgical illustrations of these arguments come across as Russians being in some ways far more Americanized than one would give them credit for. So from that second point about the empirical value of this work, what else does Anna's book offer me, and I think any other interested reader? She's very careful to point out, and as she has done today, that her informants, respondents, interlocutors are a self-selected, potentially upwardly mobile group, and that we should remain aware that for the vast majority of people in Russia, of course, the prospects for upward mobility are as bleak as ever. And that's a point that she makes in the book. And that again, we should talk about, because of course, so much has changed since the fieldwork that she carried out, and of course since the invasion of Ukraine. What else Anna points to is, of course, how there's also a strong imprint of the past in how these ideas and discourses kind of get imprinted in everyday life. So here, as no doubt, Johanna Bockman will talk about, there is a Soviet legacy here of the active life, positive disposition, as Anna calls it. So it's not, you know, neoliberalism or, however we want to use the term neoliberalism, it is a domesticated form, both historically and in terms of the lived experience, right? It's a reaction both to the past, but also to the everyday experience of people in Russia since 1991.

What else I want to very quickly draw attention to things that stuck out for me that I made notes on when I reread the book for our podcast is Anna drawing attention to how, and maybe she'd like to make a bit more of this than she does in the book, how there's always a tension inherent between this go-getting drive that people try to harness and performatively express, and the continual backdrop in Russian society of what she calls accountability sabotage, right? And that's a central defining characteristic that she says of authoritarianism, that actually things that don't work are intentionally obfuscated as nobody's fault. Just we can't do these things because the system won't allow us to do that. So I would encourage her to say something more about this implicit tension between the neoliberal mindset and the idea that in a sense we are all hostages to fortune. And there's also a point that she makes about building on the work of Daniel Green and Graham Robertson, that at the same time as responsibility is hyper individualized, at the same time there's also a backdrop of the inevitability of one person rule and the social consensus around that, which is again an interesting point that I would perfectly agree with. And again, I don't think we should be like political scientists and get too hung up on terminology. I think at the outset, Hagen, you said strong man rule, and sure, that's fine. But again, some people would say, since Anna wrote this book and published it, Russia became a fully-fledged Bonapartist regime or a personalistic dictatorship. And again, regardless of these terms, it's interesting to put them in to have that understanding by all kinds of different Russian people, sticks with this other extremely strong internalized, discursive understanding that they are their own boss and that they make their own fate, right? They live in a “fateless” society, a fated society rather, and yet they make their own fate.

And then fifth point, I really enjoyed in the introduction where Anna rejects a culturally reductivist and essentializing vision of the eternals of the Russian, the Russian bowl or all that again that history is wholly deterministic. This is the great anthropological insight rejecting this soft concept of culture as having strong explanatory power, right? So that's also good that she pushes back against the misuse of culture as an explanatory container. And then, six point, which she mentioned at the top of this talk, which was how she mentioned neo-Foucauldians have shown that neoliberalism has evolved from an economic theory into a mindset. And again, here's where I would say we can link her sociology with work done in anthropology, which looks at how cosmologies develop. So they wouldn't use the term mindset, but they would use the term cosmology, which does become quite often an unquestioning, unreflexive set of beliefs. And so, where I strongly agree with what Anna's done, is that in certain respects, neoliberalizing concepts and ideas almost become so embedded and internalized that alternatives almost are unthinkable for many people. And so we can call that a form of cosmological thinking. And again, I'm sure Joanna will have something to say about that because she's cited in the point that Anna makes at this juncture in Anna's book. And then just to wrap up, point seven in my list was complementarity, again, of Anna's work and many other researchers from many different disciplinary vantage points, right? So what I like is that she's looking at policy, think tanks, sub-elite networks, at the dominant economic thinking of our time. She's picking up also on sociology that is being done in a particular Russian tradition. And so I think that's how ideas are diffused at institutional and organizational level. So it's nice to see her engage with scholars like Bikbov on that. But also, yeah, that her work is highly complementary to anthropologists, to political scientists, to people who are also studying things like social media, or mainstream media messaging. And at that point, I think there are most of the key points that I wanted to cover, at least in this opening discussion, that I hope would give an interested reader even more of an impetus to get hold of this book.

Hagen: Thank you, Jeremy. This was great. Again, if I take two snapshots, yes, of course. I did say strongman. Why did I say it? It sort of came to my head as an effort at finding a category. And of course, the Bonapartist terminology, more of a Gramscian take on things, and it is out there as well. And I hope, Greg will talk about that later on. That's a big question. How do we get a terminology in order to grasp this complex phenomenon that Anna has studied and that we are faced, not only in Russia, as you both have pointed out, but all over the transnational realities of this new post neoliberal global governance that we're facing. And the second point is, who is the strategic elite? That seems to be an interesting point to me. Maybe we can elaborate later, but I pulled this out also from your reader's interest and I would edit myself that yeah, who are these people? Maybe you can enlighten us later on that. But first, I would love to move on to Johanna Bockman and share her insights and ideas after reading Anna's book. Please, Johanna.

Johanna: Hi, well thank you so much. This is really, very interesting and I really like the discussion already. It's been very helpful for me. And I really enjoyed reading the book the way that talking about how these authoritarians create a new feeling and experience of authoritarianism with neoliberalism and then in the surprising ways that we see this show up. And so that was cool to see. I could see also resonances with my work with the cooptation of Soviet rituals and ideas for a new authoritarianism. And I was also very received clearly the vision that this is a warning to us all that these neoliberal projects are easily cooptable by authoritarians. And so we can see this in the United States right now too. So we're experiencing this and so it makes me worried about some of my workshops I went to learn about my own project management. So this is a warning to us all.

And so I have maybe more of a series of questions that I have. So the first question that I had while reading this is I was wondering about exactly what was new about this work because there were so many people that have written about it, which you very clearly Anna, you say, you know, this is the Foucauldians have been doing the cultural side of this. We've been talking about authoritarians and using neoliberalism and works in all sorts of traditional regimes. And so the reason this came up to me is that I kept on seeing Julie Hemment work and then there was this person, Koma'i, who had done a work on camps and then Sakwa had done work on Putin and I was like, well, these all come out at the time when you did your research. And I was like, well, I'm not. What, you know, the thing that this is this problem is, you know, these days people just cite, just put in the footnotes, the site rather than that they don't, the book publishers don't encourage actually a dialogue with those. And it really, for me it really is a problem because I'd like to know like how you are building on their work and how you're different from them. And I think that's something I'd like maybe to hear more about that that period of time from 2009 to 2015 was a time of rich work in this area and how are you doing something that's different than that.

I have some glimmer of that because I read the book, but I wanted to know about that. The second thing is, is that I'm just finishing teaching methods this semester. So methods are on my mind. And I found the method discussion very difficult to get a handle on. And page 81 and then it ends up in the appendix and you know, and I know why it goes to the appendix. That's what they want you to do. But, the first question I had, and this also brings in Jeremy is like it, technically to answer the research question, which was about the campers, there was a two weeks of ethnography and then a third week, I think it's a third week but I couldn't tell of interviews and another ethnography of sorts. And so I'm wondering, it seemed problematic to answer the research question about the campers with a three week ethnography but I am not an ethnographer, I've only taught ethnography. But also the other question I had it's it seemed as if, you know, you would say in the appendix more explicitly that you're quite angry at the people, and that this becomes hard to ask them questions sometimes. And this was through the text it seemed that it didn't take maybe Jeremy has some idea about this, is there a traditional way of approaching questioning that may be a different that this when, maybe when dealing with people you just do not agree with is too hard I don't know so I'm just wondering about that problem of ethnography, because it seemed to me that it wasn't fully letting them speak, and to lay out their cosmology in a more full sense.

I wanted to see a fullness but, but also that was you know that that is maybe the way that this ethnography went. But also, I was thinking about. I mean I very much agree with the approach to neoliberalism, I think of neoliberalism as a, as a thing that is quite that people can use in the ways that make sense with their people they study and this is the way you're using it is excellent, I myself do not use a Foucauldian approach. I find that not useful with me with economists they're dealing with a very different situation. So I think using this in this particular case makes a whole bunch of sense. One particular thing that stuck out to me was as in the, in the very end of the book it talks about that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was using the camps to popularize its ideology among young people. And I was like, well if the Communist Party is doing that maybe a whole bunch of other groups are doing that and also these campers might be ideal logs for all sorts of things for the, or some, you know, some religion, some, you know, some neurolinguistic programme, you know like all everyone could have been indoctrinating everybody. So I wanted to think I wanted to ask a little bit more about the multiple projects that have might have been going on in the camps, or were there no multiple projects as it's possible that this was so highly regimented that it was really difficult to say.

That was very…I myself have thought a lot about spying. And so, especially social scientists actually look a lot like spies I personally have always felt that we have informants, you know we hide our intentions and some small not totally you know you're up front about what you're doing but you're also hiding some, some stuff right. And the Soviet Union and in Russia there were many scholars that have been arrested and so this is not an unknown thing to think about foreigners being spies, and them either being spies or not being spies. And so, what I thought was more important was that I couldn't really understand why it wasn't brought up that possibly the people around you were spies so I thought you probably had handlers that were making you have a really good time in the second camp. The first camp maybe the handlers weren't certain what you to do with you and then the second group, they were like oh yeah let's make certain she has a really good time. The reason I say that is because we had a handler when I was in Budapest in 1988 and 89. And his job was to have us have a fabulous time he threw parties for us he met he, you know, he got us to have friends he hired people to be friends with us. I mean like it was just like the role of these, these agents can be quite, you know, problematic for a methodological issues we're dealing with people that are agents, then we have to ask what are they providing us and so I was just wondering if you thought about, like, the how you think about this problem.

But also this made me then think about the KGB more because I thought I just like to think about the KGB. But also the thing about it is is that I was reading the work of Sanshiro Hosaka, and he had talked about how, how the KGB right from during perestroika was becoming entrepreneurial, and that they were putting agents into the KGB created the first he says the first joint ventures and import export banks. And so they were KGB agents were entrepreneurial they were creating businesses and being and running those businesses in an entrepreneurial way so to think about this is not part of your work at all but just think about the early forms of entrepreneurial ism in the origins of this in the KGB is something I think is kind of interesting. And just one other thing I kept on also thinking but this is a probably, I think it probably goes against the idea of your idea of neoliberalism which I agree with, but I kept on thinking also of Stalinism as a miss as flexible authoritarianism. The thing about Loïc Wacquant's idea of neoliberalism is that neoliberalism is something that nurtures one group and punishes another. And in this case we see this yet again just what maybe neoliberal is that the Stalinism in fact, had some of that and you were looking at the Soviet origins of this and so I was just wondering if to think about Stalinism or other forms of late say Soviet socialism is very much interested in individualism in the work of Oleg Kharkhordin's work. But that is not the most important thing. The most important thing is that I very much enjoyed reading this book and it made me think a lot about it a lot of things and I look forward to your answers and our discussion. Thank you.

Hagen: Thank you very much, Johanna. Thanks. That was a, that was another very, you know, take in another angle and I'm very happy to add more to the layer I hope you're taking good notes of all these questions and that we can get into a discussion later. I'm picking up the state of the art, which is of course true that some of these book editors and the publishers, they make you say, as some scholars have written and that's all you're engaging in, in a discussion so that will be really interesting as well to follow up on that later on and, and also now, you mentioned, you made me as a historian think of my sources in a new way, Johanna, or in an extra way, like it's a whole new dimension of source criticism when I need to think that my source is an actual spy playing games with me. So that's interesting, but it of course as there's a more serious question here to be asked to how you dealt with this with these situations in these camps there and as you were there, quite fascinating but now I would like to give the floor to you Greg and to add your point of view to our discussion and your reading of Anna's book, please.

Greg: Thank you, Hagen. Many thanks for inviting me. It is an honor to be part of this conversation and I really enjoyed reading the book, I actually practically devoured it simply couldn't put it down. So enjoyed it a lot. Thanks Anna for writing it. Well, the book is innovative and at times, I think groundbreaking in many respects. It asserts that Russia is not a backward, but in many respects a vanguard country with respect to several global trends including anti-democratic technological and ideological solutions. It provides rich and convincing materials showing Putin's Russia as a thoroughly new liberal project, carefully reconstructing the mindset of individual responsibilities, self-entrepreneurship and deep distrust in collective action. It also raises important questions about the relationships between several concepts that are often used colloquially I would say and critically to describe present day Russian, like democracy, authoritarianism, capitalism and less frequently but, perhaps, increasingly frequently, neoliberalism. So it is this last thread that I would like to pursue, suggesting some questions I have been thinking about recently and for which this book actually provides extremely valuable material.

So the book seeks to grasp the essence of the regime by introducing the concept of flexible authoritarianism defined as the incorporation of neoliberal techniques into authoritarian government. Anna challenges the belief, as she mentioned in her opening remarks, the belief that is common especially on the left, that neoliberalism is a property of Western liberal democracies and that regimes like such as Orban's or Putin's or Erdogan's are actually reactions against the eels of neoliberalism and by the way therefore deserve some sympathy. So the literature on authoritarian neoliberalism has grown in recent years, showing that these two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But I think that the book ultimately makes an even stronger point. It shows that neoliberalism is inherently anti-democratic, which is evident from the writings of its own ideologues. And I particularly appreciate Anna's inclusion of Joseph Schumpeter, not only because the significance of his Nietzschean theory of entrepreneurship for neoliberal thought is largely underestimated, even now with all those new publications. But also because his minimalist definition of democracy has become the baseline in comparative politics. Let's not forget about that. In other words, the leading field that studies democracies does so using a definition crafted by an openly anti-democratic figure. And this means that we should not be surprised that neoliberalism understood as an ethos of total economization of the South, that neoliberalism turns out to be compatible with anti-democratic regimes. Instead, I guess we should rather ask whether democracy can coexist with neoliberalism at all. And the answer to this question is no, or rather yes, but only if democracy is defined in Schumpeterian terms as the rule of strongmen with a will to power, periodically receiving electoral acclamations from the people and here comes the Bonne-Partiste tune. So that is essentially Schumpeter's view of democracy. This is what he says in plain words in his famous book.

And that now brings me to my concern with the concept that Anna proposes. What analytical work does the term authoritarianism actually do here? In comparative politics, authoritarianism designates the opposite of Schumpeterian democracy. And Anna said that she still thinks that the concept could be valuable. Well, I'm not so sure about that. The term itself actually has a curious history that to my knowledge still lacks a proper intellectual genealogy. In the field of comparative politics, it was popularized by Juan Linz, of course, who distinguished authoritarian from totalitarian regimes in 1975. Everybody knows that very well. So Linz primarily had in mind Latin American juntas who usually suspended elections and in that sense did not fit the Schumpeterian definition of democracy. They just didn't have elections. So Schumpeter's minimal democracy didn't work. Now, Linz built on a similar distinction made earlier by Arendt, who in turn was influenced by the famous authoritarian personality study conducted by Frankfurt School emigres around Adorno. And very intriguingly, Anna's book points to an even earlier source, which is almost always forgotten, which was Kurt Lewin's typology of "führungsstile", which included the authoritarian style as one of them. He had two or three of them, depending on which paper you read, but there was an authoritarian style among them. And she is absolutely right to note that this was originally a highly political concept that was later depoliticized in social psychology.

Although it's not clear if Adorno's and Lewin's teams discussed the concept openly, they knew of each other's work, but I'm not sure if they actually communicated about that. It is more likely that Adorno and Horkheimer actually borrowed the concept from Lewin than the other way around. Although I'm not certain about that still that that requires some genealogical work. But that's not that important for my point here. So what I'm saying is that the history of this concept is actually a long history of distortion. In 1938, Lewin, meant by authoritarian style, a group atmosphere in which a leader dictates all policies and means to implement that, assigns the tasks and channels all communication vertically. This is what Lewin meant by authoritarianism. Now fast forward to today, and authoritarianism simply means a country that doesn't run elections or doesn't run them properly. They call it a fair and free elections. And if it does, it immediately becomes a hybrid regime, or in Russia's case an illiberal democracy or authoritarian democracy. Why? Because you know Putin is popularly supported. And if you look at the trans-Russian elections, then the Levada Center tells you so. And at this point, I'm not convinced that authoritarianism has much analytical value left.

Excuse me. Well, first it obscures how regimes generate normative legitimacy. Nobody calls themselves authoritarian. And it is always an outsider's insult. So using the term diverts attention from understanding legitimation, which is precisely what Anna's book illuminates so powerful. Now second, it entrenches the illusion that Schumpeterian democracies are qualitatively different from autocracies. This is something Anna has alluded to. This is an illusion that this book itself, I guess, undermines, but the concept doesn't work for dispelling it. I think it rather works for reinforcing it. And finally, it encourages a very dubious game of authoritarianism with objectives. You know, there was this game of democracies with objectives. Now we have the authoritarians with objectives. As if neoliberal was just one additional qualifier among others. But this, I guess, misses the point. It is not that some authoritarians adopted neoliberal techniques. Rather, neoliberalism has always been a deeply anti-democratic project. And even where it existed with party democratic institutions, it worked against democracy. So in general, I think there is something profoundly wrong with the narrative that there were authoritarian states, such as Franco, Spain, or Pinochet in Chile, which later learned to be flexible from the so-called liberal democracies. I would like to push back strongly against this narrative. And I think Anna's book actually provides plenty of evidence for a totally different narrative. That within the so-called liberal democracies, there was a mix of generally democratic institutions that encouraged popular power, solidarity, public engagement with anti-democratic, I would actually say monarchical, and neoliberal elements. And this neoliberal trend was developed to its extreme in countries where there was no counterweight of communal life of solidarity. Countries such as post-Soviet Russia, which was basically, totally atomized in the 1990s, and devoid of any tradition to rely on. And now we see how these neoliberal techniques refined in countries like Russia travel back. Russian democratic institutions in the so-called liberal democracies and making them conform more closely to Schumpeter's vision. Once again, the United States in 2025 is like a perfect Schumpeterian democracy. Now, let me finish with this. So Russia under Putin is a profoundly neoliberal society, one in which even suggesting —in a Foucauldian sense— one in which even suggesting that people might work together for a common good immediately invites mockery and humiliation. Many people know it just from their experience. Actually, Jeremy's work, I think, is very instructive of that. The book convincingly shows how this mindset is instilled in the young and what Anna calls "future strategic elites". Well, now Russia is also authoritarian in Lewin's original sense. There is a society where everyone knows that everything depends on the boss, and all attempts at building solidarity are punished. This is true. But it is not authoritarian in the sense of failing to meet Schumpeter's criteria. Schumpeter would have been thrilled by contemporary Russia. And I worry that by calling such regimes authoritarian, we actually obscure the reasons they are becoming increasingly more powerful, but also more ubiquitous. And perhaps it's time to rethink the concept, maybe by returning to Lewin's meaning, as Anna's book invites us to do, but actually doesn't carry the project to the end. Or perhaps it is time to abandon it for good. Thank you.

Hagen: Thank you, Greg. Now, I'm sure I have a long list. I would like to again bracket a little bit here and add to the list a discussion on neoliberalism. I can't resist right now, but now that Greg has just said authoritarianism, maybe we shouldn't even use it, maybe we need to find a better word for what you're describing. Okay, we have agreed on a working definition of the Foucauldian notion of neoliberalism here. But to make Schumpeter, I just want to flag it here, to make Schumpeter a representative of neoliberalism, I would say it can be argued that he's not, okay, that he's not part of the camp of the neoliberals. He doesn't really appear in much of the history of neoliberalism as one of the major actors. I know, of course, there are some who take the idea of the entrepreneur and all of his ideas as being neoliberal. But I think I just want to flag it out there. I don't mean to say that you can't do it. But I would say when anyone needs to qualify that, maybe a little more, what one needs to say, and particularly the point that Greg made about self-proclaiming authoritarians, there are very few self-proclaiming neoliberals. And those who were self-proclaiming neoliberals in the 30s and 40s and maybe still the 50s, they were not really Schumpeterian. But then, of course, this takes a different life, and there's a whole complex genealogy of neoliberalism. But I just think I just needed to take this point down there that neoliberalism is also such a difficult term to pin down.

I think you're doing really well to say, this is how I look at it. But maybe one needs to be aware also of the limits of this. And sometimes it seems to me that we're talking about a capitalist function or more of a capitalist drive than this neoliberalism from the 30s, 40s and 50s. It seems to be more a neoliberalism from the 80s, that we kind of put into this equation, which is not a self-proclaimed neoliberalism. I think that's important to note. And maybe you disagree with me as well. I hope so. Maybe not. Schumpeter also wrote in '42. I mean, he wrote at a time when democracies were out and he tried to kind of save some kind of capitalism. He asked the question, can we save this part at least? Can we save some kind of self-incentive and attach it to socialism? Again, I don't want to defend him. I just mean to say that it's probably a little more complicated. But let's dive into some of the questions on your list and then we'll take it from there.

Anna: Yeah, thanks very much. Maybe I start with you, just what you just said, Hagen, which kind of circles back also to what Johanna said about her definition of neoliberalism. I mean, the definition for neoliberalism you have been using is the definition that I see in Quinns Slobodian's work, which is very historical and looks at the ideas and mindsets or cosmologies, maybe even, of economists. And that would be also very close to what Johanna is doing. And if I understood Greg correctly, and I would say my own work goes in a similar direction, we're looking more at what happens to these thoughts once they become very banal, but also very widespread in society. And you also alluded to the question of what's actually the relationship between capitalism and neoliberalism. And I would say my very short answer to that would be that neoliberalism is currently, for me, the playform of capitalism in a certain period. And the playform of capitalism as it enters mindsets and subjectivities. So this is the first very big discussion and attempt to pin it down.And in that respect…

Johanna: You said what form? You said neoliberalism? A playform? 

Anna: A playform? Like one period? One period or one way? 

Hagen: There may be a German metaphor behind that, right? A "Spielform", a variation. Maybe it doesn't translate that way. 

Anna: Yeah, a variation. A variation. That is not to say that neoliberal incentives cannot go well within communist or state socialist forms of economics. I think I would here be with Johanna, but going back to the question regarding Schumpeter, I think Schumpeter becomes important because he's so widely used. When you look at these podcasts that I've been speaking about in the self-help books, it's all about Schumpeter and disruptive innovation. Because you mentioned Germany, you open the biggest tabloid and it's about how great disruptive innovation is. And when we think about US politics and more recently, it was also very big there, just this one concept of disruptive innovation. So from here, I would go to the other very, very big discussion. And thank you, Greg, for provoking me into maybe telling the story full circle and engaging more deeply with the term of authoritarianism.

And I think you hinted at something that has caused a lot of misunderstandings. Why does she use this big concept that's so much associated with this system-level work? So maybe I tell the story of where this comes from in relation to something Johanna asked, and that was basically how does my work relate to that of Julie Hemment at the time, who would also, for instance, look at these youth forums that I call Youth Leadership Summer Camps. So I printed out actually my book proposal. I'm happy I did it because there's all the discussion to the other books that were written at the time. So I found that Hemment study and I wrote in 2015 before writing the book, I wrote for a Russian sociology journal, actually a review about her book. I found that the work she does actually uses this idea of neoliberalism that many of us have been pushing back against and that neoliberalism is basically this US Western ideological project that now many non-Western countries are pushing back against by coming up with like an authoritarian project. And I would say Julie Hemment's work is more nuanced than that. It would be wrong to say this is basically what she's saying. But she says...but how she frames the use of neoliberal techniques in these programs is more in form of a pushback. And what I also found difficult about it is that this idea of pushback kind of underestimates the global economic competition in which the countries find themselves in. So there are actually good reasons for countries to boost innovations, at least in that mindset that is dominant. So it actually makes sense to use these neoliberal innovations in a way.

And also what I found missing in Hemment's work was this idea that this pushback, is an authoritarian pushback that comes with a lot of difficulties for the people who are living under these regimes. And there's one part in her book that I remember I found especially troubling is when she's discussing her view of the world with that of her Russian colleague, which she finds is trapped into this idea of Russia as an authoritarian state. And I found that very difficult because it reminded me of this idea of many people on the left in Germany for whom Russia is this kind of place for longing. And when things are bad here, we just go to Russia because they hold up this kind of alternative, whatever that I don't see when I'm in Russia. So this was my idea. And I didn't start the project like that. I started the project with authoritarianism literature. I don't want to have anything to do with it. And then on my committee, it was a person who worked in Hungary and who was getting very angry and saying, really, you want to say Russia doesn't have anything to do with authoritarianism, go to Hungary. So partly why I also use the work of Marlies Glasius, and Greg, I'm not sure if you're familiar with her work because she's not too much in political theory, I fear, is that she's speaking about this concept of the sabotage of accountability. And I think that's something that's very important to see that institutionalization of these authoritarian practices. And I think this is something that neoliberalism cannot do on itself.

Unless we say neoliberalism is also the state, this would be a very economistic view of how things work, right? And then we can only analyze neoliberalism where kind of then everything comes together, there's the state and there's the economy, but we know that things are a bit more difficult and complex and complicated. So if we still want to do some kind of empirical work, I would still say that it's actually not such a bad idea to keep these concepts, at least ideal-typically, to speak with Max Weber apart. So then we can show how they actually come together and interplay in different ways, in different parts of the world. So this is why I still use the term authoritarian. And also I find it quite encompassing. Yes, I could speak about a dictatorship, but what is dictatorship? Where does it come from? And I would say with Levine, but also partly the work that is also not...

Greg: Very bad concept. Yeah, so I'm not I'm not arguing in favor of dictatorship. That's perhaps even worse.

Anna: Yes, I’m just taking a red herring here. 

Hagen: Sorry, it’s okay to open your microphones, and we have about 20 minutes left. So, continue with the conversation. 

Anna: Okay, sorry. I also will be quick. So I think the work of Wilhelm Heitmeyer is also illuminating here because it's another strand of, I would say sociologically informed authoritarianism research that has been largely confined to discussions in the German-speaking social sciences. And I want to respond to some of the things that Johanna said and this is very important to me. So, because I was speaking about what made me angry, something about people in the German left. So I would say anger was really not a motivation that was predominant during my interviews, to the contrary. And I would say that most of the interviews were actually one where I trusted the people I spoke with. I think that's also interesting when it comes to this idea of there's fights all around. So, especially with the young people. I mean, to me, they were basically students who were trying to make up their minds. And I think there was also a lot of trust towards me. They were opening up quite a lot. I think Jeremy maybe can say more about this, because I think the kind of material I gathered, it wouldn't have been possible to gather without there being a good rapport. A rapport is the better word than trust. I think trust is too big, but there was a good rapport and anger was not necessarily something that came up in the methodological appendix. I'm actually referring here to social movement studies and to the work of Kathleen Blee in particular, who's working on women in the hate movement.

And I think the example I gave is I talked to a young man who was basically telling me that women should be in the household and that they shouldn't be thinkers. And so what I did with that kind of anger is that I said, oh, you are actually the head of a youth forum component that's called, I don't know, the great Russian tradition. What do you do about the tradition of famous Russian feminists? How do you represent them? And so what came up due to that, so I wasn't holding back, but I was kind of channeling it in a provocative question, was that he said, oh, if they were famous, then of course not because they were feminists, but because they were Russian. I found that very telling also when we think about what was going on there. But this was a very politicized individual working for Molodaya Gvardiya. So I wouldn't say the kind of material I developed was...it would have been possible to develop in that way if anger was here like an emotion that was dominant. It was more like I really wanted to understand what was going on and it was more curiosity. Talking about methods, I hope I never write in any part of the book that this is an ethnography. It is not. It doesn't, it uses ethnographic methods in a sociological way, but it's by far not an ethnography and I wouldn't claim that.

And I think I write that one of the large limitations of the book is actually that I cannot go with people into everyday situations outside the camp. And this is some of Hemment's work that's actually great because she can do that and she does like a long-term panel study and she shows that people actually get disappointed with these kinds of projects. So this is something I couldn't do also in the framework of my funding and I hope I never claimed to do it. So I'm using ethnographic methods to go to these camps and conduct observations about the different camps. I mean what I tried to do actually also in parts of the chapter is to say that the camp forum, there's something very... there's an international history of camp right now in Canada and I read about all kinds of hockey summer camps, and so there's this going back to the boy scouts and Baden-Powell, but this is actually then sees the permanent revolutionary Russia. I have that in a chapter. And then it becomes part of the of the Bolsheviks at first vanguard and later all Russian youth politics eventually. But I look at different camps in the methodological appendix, not in terms of all kind of summer camps, partly to say, okay, there is an idea of camp as something that is so cosmological, to use Jeremy's terms, that's so taken for granted that many of these authoritarian group atmospheres that Lewin described actually don't seem authoritarian at all because it's just a way of how you deal with camps. And it's interesting to think back of Baden-Powell as a general who fought in the Boer War. So this is where the international part comes in. But then I look at different camps that are politicized within Russia and there's also young communists actually who are quite racist and, just as a sidetrack, who also have their summer camps. So I go there and I see what's actually different there. Are they also using neoliberal techniques and they don't. They read and they have like a car demonstration in central Siberia. And then one last thing here about the handlers and about the spies. Yes, you're completely right. I didn't even think that someone could be spying on me. I don't think I was particularly interesting at the time. I think it would be different now. I don't think I was interesting. I think I look more like a Western German dupe who wants to see the world and who has kind of a PhD project and wants to see all these active people. I think they were actually more trying really as I say also in the appendix, to use me as a fig leaf of hey, the Westerners are coming. This is a great forum. You should come there too and advertise me. I would stop it here and I hope I covered most of the big and also the smaller questions.

Jeremy: Can I just come in and say what you just said, and I think about Julie Hemment's work is a really good point because, once again, the value of your work is reading you as in a conversation with people from different disciplines. And Julie Hemment is an anthropologist, like you said, conducting methodologically a different kind of research. And yet you're showing one side of the equation, and she's showing another and they're entirely complementary ways of studying this phenomenon, right, which is state-sponsored youth networking in a particular closed time and space, right? So again, I don't think there's anything for you to say that makes your work less valuable because it was done in a particular mode, right? Again, what you just said reminded me that, yeah, essentially your work, even though it was carried out after Julie's work, I guess, actually then shows the power of her essential argument in that she's talking about how essentially because of the system that is in place, this internalized set of ideas, neoliberal ideas, will always be disappointed, right, in a particular individual because it meets essentially a closed system. So I should add that again, which is why I'm so interested in your term, the initial term that you used, which was "projected potential elites," and more often than not they will always remain potential and not realized, which is a measure of the strength of the self-indoctrination, if you like, if you want to call it that with a very strong term. But you essentially then anticipate Julie's main argument, which is, well, Julie's most important insight, which I think is the eventual inevitable realization of the limitation of this cosmology, which is that it ends in disappointment for most people.

Hagen: Anybody else? Some initial reaction or questions?

Johanna: Well, I just want to say that I was talking about, I don't want to say that neoliberalism is not socialist. So even though I was sitting there musing about Stalinism, I don't believe it's actually neoliberalism. So I just want to say that. Just keep it in the record.

Greg: Yeah, just to also be on the record, I don't necessarily claim Schumpeter was a neoliberal. He was a peculiar, I mean, he endorsed a peculiar sort of vision. And in many ways, also in terms of his metaphysics, he could be different from many new liberals of the first time. But what is important and what I think Anna makes also clear is that particularly his theory of entrepreneurship, his view of entrepreneurship, but also his theory of democracy has significantly influenced the neoliberal thought and the neoliberal experiments of the last 30 to 40 years. So that shouldn't be underestimated. So we are not speaking of neoliberalism in 2010s or 2020s, as if it was like coined by four meters. No, it's already a fusion of different ideas. And Schumpeter, I think, plays an outsized role here that he had to be, but he's yet to be recognized. I think in that sense, Anna's contribution is very important.

Anna: Sorry, I just wanted to add on Johanna said about the socialism in Schumpeter... and, I mean he made this, I think I quote him in the introduction, where he basically says Yes, I mean, these democratic ideas don't place in people's heads, that they could be, that they don't have to be... I mean, this goes back to Hegel, right, the master and the slave, that they don't have to be the slaves. Don't plant them in their heads. And I think one reason why he turns to socialism is that he says, socialism will provide us with more means, actually, to keep that crazy democratic ideas down and keep people working in these routine jobs so that we have all this workforce to actually create the genius works of a few outstanding minds. And I think this is, these are quotes... So his type of socialism is not a democratic socialism, where it's about the liberation of the people. It's the opposite. I found that quite striking that when Schumpeter thinks about socialism, he thinks about better ways of actually controlling people and not about the kind of socialism that I would see in there, starting in the late 19th, earliest 20th century, that is basically about a liberation of mankind from alienation and also kind of non democracy that is very material because it's embedded in the need to work and to sell yourself or your work in capacity to make a living.

So, yeah, Schumpeter is a big idea, but I think the larger topic that is important to me rather than Schumpeter as a thinker is, and you said that too, Johanna, is that these neoliberal projects are now actually mushrooming. Just look at the EU's ideas of how to protect their democracy. This is all about innovation and militarization. So when we don't see innovation so much tied to democracy anymore, and I hope my book shows that, then we are actually with something that's not very democratic and with militarization, which has not a very long history of being idealized as something safeguarding democracy, at least not domestically. So this is something where I think why this research answers a kind of a so what question and the question, okay, what would be an alternative to this kind of innovation? Innovation talk in a way even, but maybe the first step is to expose that as maybe a very hollow idea of how to safeguard democracy and then see what's happening, how different people go further and work with that exposure.

Greg: Hagen, if I may, just a couple words here. So Anna is historically right that Schumpeter was interested in socialism because it was a sort of path to discipline, but also because he had a certain view of history significantly influenced by people like Weber or Sombart, for that matter, which was a sort of teleology of decay. And in that teleology of decay, things like socialism and democracy were also inevitable. So he was interested in them also because he thought it was more or less inevitable for that these things are here to stay. And therefore, he developed a pragmatic attitude towards them. So rather than going with the conservatives of, with many conservatives his time in trying to reverse that, he tried to instrumentalize that. Without, of course, endorsing neither socialism nor democracy, trying to instrumentalize that. So why I'm talking about that is that because this is also an attitude adopted by many of those anti-democratic ideologues of today who don't want to go back to pre-democratic times or pre-socialist times. Well, democracy is probably more of the point here, but rather want to instrumentalize that. And that's, that I think is also partly the reasoning behind those techniques that I like those that Anna describes that are implemented in those contexts. So Schumpeter is also influencing them and sort of, you know, philosophical historical view, making them sound very pragmatic. And that's part of the secret of his popularity. He doesn't, like, really try to go back 200 years, but actually he says, well, you can leave with that. The will to power will triumph anyway. You just have to instrumentalize this, the masses and their strive for what they call self-government or socialism doesn't matter. So that's part of the secret.

Hagen: Yeah. And then of course, Greg, I think you can add this fixation on the entrepreneur, you know, in Schumpeter's work, which is so catchy and which speaks to the disruptive spirit that seems to be transpiring in these YouTube videos or these self-teaching videos that you make yourself this, you know, sparehead of capitalism or of innovation by embodying that form. And of course, then again, we can say, well, is this, I don't want to split hairs again over neoliberalism or not, but of course, entrepreneurs, you know, I guess the second French word that we have in the language of capitalism after laissez-faire is entrepreneur. And that means it comes from the ideologues of the late 18th, you know, early 19th, late 17th, 18th century, early 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Say and these guys who would, you know, describe this entrepreneur as the sparehead of capitalism. And which is catchy and definitely part of what is now a neoliberal narrative. I totally agree. 

We have to wrap this up, I'm afraid... this is super inspiring. And maybe if I were to upload this to a bigger discussion, and I would love to have one or two of you maybe help me with this. We learnt here that Anna's study and all of your remarks point at something that is really important to learn in our contemporary constellation of a global governance that is shifting and, one may dare say, in crisis. So, but rather than, you know, there's a lot of focus on US-China rivalry, there's a lot of focus on geopolitics and even geoeconomics as well in this terminology. But we learnt that these societies from, you know, learning from Putin's Russia, have this inbuilt ability of absorbing a kind of capitalist neoliberal lifestyle, cultural incentives, morphing with an authoritarian regime. And that this becomes a pattern that is copied inside a non-Western and even Western societies undermining democracies. Am I right in distilling this a little bit from our conversation?

Anna: Maybe I jump in, because it's one question I didn't answer and that was Greg's question, whether with flexible authoritarianism, we just have one more definition of authoritarianism with adjectives, and the idea being that there is electoral authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism, and so on and so on. And I'm very happy for the comment and also what you just pointed out, Hagen, because I would say this was not my idea to come up with another adjective in a variety of authoritarianisms. But the idea was rather to say we are entering a period in which the dominant way authoritarian politics show themselves, if actually flexible and entrepreneurial and neoliberal, if you want so. And there is a lot more we could study from the past. I think Chile is a very interesting case, also in terms of sequences. So I don't say this is the sine qua non of what we can find out about this particular relationship, but I would say what Greg, who unfortunately had to leave us, also pointed out several times that actually Russia is a vanguard here, but not in a very normatively positive way. But it's an vanguard in that kind of mixing together of things that, especially maybe a post-war consensus and political science, saw as firmly apart. And that is a kind of neoliberal, I would say, economic politics and authoritarianism where for a long time, and I think therefore, of course, actually very, very good in the lectures at the Collège de France to say that the kind of liberal economy is seen after World War II as the bulwark against all kinds of authoritarianisms. And I think that discourse is taken up by the book's title and says actually, this seems to be outdated. This is not what we're actually empirically seeing, not only in Russia, but in many countries today.

Hagen: Thank you. I think we all deserve a cup of tea or coffee or maybe a first aperitivo, I don't know, wherever you are, whatever time it is. Thank you so much, Anna, Jeremy, Johanna and Greg, for being here and for talking about this. This should be continued, hopefully in the future and by others and lots of inspiring, inspiring questions and some answers. Thank you so much.

Anna: Thanks very much. Thank you, everyone. And thanks a lot to you, especially, Hagen, for making it all happen. It's my pleasure.

Further Readings:

• Adorno, Theodor W, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1944.
• Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken, 1951.
• Bikbov, Alexander . “The Grammar of Order: A Historical Sociology of the Concepts That Change Our Reality .” Publishing House of Higher School of Economics, 2014.
• Easton, David. “A Re-Assessment of the Concept of Political Support.” British Journal of Political Science 5, no. 4 (1975): 435–57. https://www.jstor.org/stable/193437 
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975.
• Frankenberg, Günter, and Wilhelm Heitmeyer. Drivers of Authoritarianism. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024.
• Glasius, Marlies. “What Authoritarianism Is … and Is Not: A Practice Perspective.” International Affairs 94, no. 3 (May 1, 2018): 515–33. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiy060 
• Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. S.L.: Univ Of Notre Dame Press, 1807.
• Hosaka, Sanshiro. “Perestroika of the KGB: Chekists Penetrate Politics.” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 36, no. 3 (July 7, 2022): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/08850607.2022.2074810 
• Kharkhordin, Oleg. “The Collective and the Individual in Russia.” University of California Press 32, no. 1 (April 28, 2023): 418. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.2392263 
• Kurt Lewin (Psychologe. Principles of Topological Psychology : Transl. By Fritz Heider and Grace M. Heider. New York: Mcgraw-Hill, 1936.
• Lewin, Kurt, and Ronald Lippitt. “An Experimental Approach to the Study of Autocracy and Democracy: A Preliminary Note.” Sociometry 1, no. 3/4 (January 1938): 292. https://doi.org/10.2307/2785585 
• Linz, Juan José. Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1975.
• Marlies Glasius. “Authoritarian Practices as Accountability Sabotage.” Oxford University Press EBooks, January 5, 2023, 10–38. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192862655.003.0002 
• Schumpeter, Joseph. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942.
• Slobodian, Quinn. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018.
• Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Duke University Press, 2009.
• World Bank. 2026. Global Economic Prospects, January 2026. Washington, DC: World Bank. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0 IGO 
• www.margaretthatcher.org. “Speech to Conservative Women’s Conference | Margaret Thatcher Foundation,” n.d. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104368