ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns unravelling the intimate relation of imperialism to capitalism and clears away some of the confusion surrounding it. There are two major problems in the way these two concepts are understood and used in the literature. In the liberal tradition of political science, the projection of imperial power and associated dynamics are normally disconnected from capitalism and its economic dynamics, reducing imperialism to a quest for world domination based on a lust for power or purely geopolitical considerations by the guardians of the national interest in the most powerful countries. It argues that capitalism and imperialism are intimately connected but engage distinct dynamics in the geo-economics and the geopolitics of capital that need to be clearly distinguished. Neoliberalism as an ideology of free-market capitalism and a doctrine of policy reform in the direction of free-market capitalism was some four decades in the making, manufactured by a neoliberal thought collective put together by Van der Hayek.
