Many Americans believe that something fundamental has gone wrong in their country. Why does full-time work no longer guarantee financial stability? Why does college cost a lifetime of debt? And why have decades of free-market promises yielded not more freedom and liberty but more debt and constraints? In The Quiet Coup, Mehrsa Baradaran, a premier public intellectual, argues that America's problems stem from the market-centred doctrine of neoliberalism. Far more than a mere economic theory, neoliberalism and its adherents transformed American law—yielding not fewer laws but more-complex laws and regulations that benefit the wealthy. From neoliberalism’s role as a tool of ideological warfare against racial justice movements in the 1960s to its complete institutional takeover in the 1980s to the crypto meltdowns of the 2020s, Baradaran’s essential chronicle shows that the neoliberal era—and legalised mass looting—is far from over and in fact is only accelerating.

"Dangerous times call for bold interventions. Baradaran’s latest book pulls no punches. Reframing neoliberalism as a legal and political heist engineered by the forces of reaction, she shows us how it has brought us to the brink of fascism. And how we might pull back from the edge. Baradaran is analytically devastating and politically galvanizing." -- Melinda Cooper, author of Family Values
"The Quiet Coup demonstrates how powerful interests under the guise of a ‘free market’ were able to rig the laws and regulations in order to capture and loot from the U.S. economy. The irony is that neoliberalism did the very opposite of making markets more ‘free’ and government less ‘active.’ What’s more, the neoliberal coup itself stemmed from deep within the same bureaucracy it purported to dismantle. Mehrsa Baradaran has done it again—her rigor, receipts, and insights distinguish her as an unsurpassed public intellectual." -- Darrick Hamilton, founding director, Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, The New School
"[A]n impassioned, expansive consideration of the particular brand of free-market capitalism linked to Milton Friedman and (wrongly) labelled 'neoliberalism'." -- Libby Lewis - The Times Literary Supplement

Mehrsa Baradaran is a law professor at University of California, Irvine, and the acclaimed author of The Color of Money and How the Other Half Banks. She lives in Irvine, California.