Back in 2013, I was reading a lot of books on the economic crisis in Spain, and I came across a book by a guy called César Molinas, who worked in banking. It was titled something like “What to Do with Spain?” From this book I found out about the dismantling of the nation-state and the consequences this process would bring.
It was the most fascinating, insightful thing I’d read in years. What I couldn’t understand was how this no-name dude who worked for Merrill Lynch came up with such a profound theory. I investigated and found out that Molinas simply retold the argument advanced by Philip Bobbitt in The Shield of Achilles. Since then, I read five trillion books on the subject. The antagonism between neoliberalism and the nation-state has become a commonplace in social sciences. So has the understanding that in every Western country the left-leaning political parties neoliberalized faster and harder than right-leaning ones.
So although I’m deeply flattered by people ascribing the authorship of these ideas to me, I can’t take credit for them. All I do is talk about them and apply them to my literary analysis. The ideas I come up with on the basis of this theory are all in the realm of literary criticism.
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