From New Left Review, no. 155, September - October 2025:
It has become a truism among Anglophone commentators that the world is in the grip of ‘geoeconomics’, the pursuit of geopolitical ends by economic means. In September 2024, Mario Draghi’s report on the future of the European Union spoke of the need for Brussels to ‘act as one country with a single geoeconomic strategy’. In January 2025, the outgoing Biden Administration’s national security team recommended that the United States prepare itself for a ‘new era of geoeconomic competition’. In July, an essay by the Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett declared the start of ‘the new age of geoeconomics’. When the strategist Edward Luttwak coined the term in The National Interest at the end of the Cold War, he expected military conflict between states to ebb away; instead of armed confrontation, countries would compete via their multinationals, vying for market share and technological leadership. Great power clashes would give way to a sublimated commercial rivalry.
But geopolitical conflict has not withered way. From Ethiopia to Myanmar, Ukraine to Gaza, Nagorno-Karabakh to Sudan, open war is proliferating to a degree not seen in decades. The current ‘geoeconomic’ turn entails not the diversion of conflict so much as its expansion into domains hitherto protected from it. Kinetic war and economic war are now advancing side by side. Intensified great power competition has stretched and broken the norms of neoliberal economic policy: the pieties of free-market globalism are being displaced by antagonistic inter-state conduct and an upsurge in coercive economic measures such as sanctions, export controls and tariffs. To be sure, capitalism and its drive to maximize private profit are firmly intact. But states and corporations are pursuing their objectives through ever more assertive political methods. What is novel is that such antagonisms are playing out in a world economy that has reached historically high levels of commercial, financial and technological integration.
Many Western officials describe geoeconomics as a new domain of policy. But since no country has added more instruments to the arsenal of economic coercion than the United States, it must be asked if the proliferation of such practices is not changing the broader structure of international exchange. Washington’s sidelining of the neoliberal architecture of global governance, coupled with the growth of Chinese power and Russian territorial revisionism, suggest that ‘geoeconomics’ is not merely a novel dimension of policy, but the vocabulary through which technocrats are registering a deeper and broader change in the dominant political logic of the world economy. Political leaders and think tankers have rushed to embrace Luttwak’s old rubric to describe a new reality in the international system, one whose emergence they are only partially in control of—private capital is also strongly implicated in it.
Yet besides denoting the vague sense of a paradigm shift, ‘geoeconomics’ is an amorphous term, used in widely varying ways. Little intellectual consensus exists in the commentariat or the academy about how to characterize the ongoing transformation to which it gestures. There are several possibilities. One option, popular among economists such as Daron Acemoglu, is to locate the shift at the level of market organization: a move from economic globalism to economic nationalism. Geoeconomics, on this view, is a rejection of wto-style apolitical commerce and a break with the post-1970 trend towards freer trade: its focus on economic security harkens back to the protectionist projects of the fin-de-siècle and interwar periods. Others, often investors and hedge funds, portray the new dispensation as moving away from laissez-faire and towards interventionist economic policy. This casts geoeconomics as a statist revirement that is superseding neoliberalism, an ideology that itself toppled the post-war Keynesian-developmentalist consensus, which in turn arose on the ruins of an older economic liberalism that had come to grief in the dual catastrophes of 1914 and the Great Depression. Finally, political scientists and lawyers tend to render the shift as a change of ethos and personnel: from cooperative civilian understandings of global exchange to antagonistic weaponizations of such interdependence, as in Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s Underground Empire or Edward Fishman’s Chokepoints.
It is into this conceptual melee that a new book by the French historian and economist Arnaud Orain intervenes with a new, wider-angle formulation. Le monde confisqué is an intellectual history of geoeconomics that examines the cyclical rise, fall and return across the last five centuries of what Orain calls the ‘capitalism of finitude’. This is both a worldview and a real political-economic formation—a Blochian état d’esprit and a set of concrete practices—distinguished by the dominance of the notion that the amount of resources in the world are finite and insufficient to satisfy the needs of all humans and of every state. Orain argues this mentalité has been dominant in three discrete periods: from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, during the six tumultuous decades from the 1880s to 1945, and from 2010 until the present.
Orain, who is director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, was born in 1977 and educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon; he defended his doctoral dissertation at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne on the economic thought of the philosopher-abbot Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–80). His first monograph, La politique du merveilleux (2018), translated as The Politics of Utopia (2024), is a revisionist interpretation of the Mississippi Bubble, the financial-commercial experiment that destabilized Regency France from 1717 to 1721, as the Scottish economist John Law unified French colonial monopolies, created a modern central bank, introduced a paper currency and nationalized the public debt. La politique du merveilleux is a critique of the prevailing liberal understanding of the Law episode, in which his infamous Compagnie des Indes was a failed Bank of England that might have been. The book challenged conventional portrayals of Law as an economic dictator who held the fate of the Bourbon monarchy in his hands and whose failure scuppered French desires for a central bank for eight decades afterwards.
Instead, Orain argued that Law was merely the best-known figure in a wider landscape of utopian thinkers seeking to transform society through the liberation of finance and commerce under the auspices of an all-powerful, benevolent state that had socialized whole sections of the economy. The Compagnie des Indes was in fact a giant social ‘enterprise of general enrichment that had become the goal of the nation united in a body of a new and daring nature’. Its ambition was to ward off a corrosive liberalism but also to move beyond royal absolutism by elaborating visions of a ‘new Potosí’ of material plenty and sexual liberation in the New World. Orain drew attention to a large ‘carnivalesque literature of state’ that used the self-fulfilling power of expectations to overthrow the entire mindset of the society of orders that characterized the ancien régime....
