ABSTRACT
Imagine the impossible: a world without geography. This would be a head-
of-a-pin world where everything takes place at one, and only one, site. Or, to
view things another way, it would be an isotropic planet where all sorts of
different places, peoples and environments were entirely homogenous – and
thus not different at all. Now imagine how this world would look if opposed
theoretical perspectives on neoliberalism were to be made flesh. Friedrich
Hayek and Karl Polanyi, as Michael Watts (Chapter 23, this volume)
reminds us, published their magnum opuses in the same year (1944), the beginning of a period when classical (or ‘disembedded’) liberalism became
yesterday’s news. These days, The Road to Serfdom and The Great Trans-
formation are cited by champions and critics of neoliberalism respectively as
making among the strongest cases for and against the phenomena. So how,
exactly, would our ageographical world look if the arguments of Hayek and
Polanyi were to hold true on the ground?
