"Freedom is incompatible with democracy"It seemed like a joke from the Trumpian universe, designed to create noise and legitimize the president's nihilism and the conviction of the oligarchs who surround him that, for them, there are no limits: they can get away with anything. But the idea is spreading with a disturbing contagion effect, as if it were meant to be the new economic, social, and communicational one.

Some books stand the test of time remarkably well. False dawnJohn Gray's book offers a good example. It was published in 1998, before the euro, before Vladimir Putin, before social media, but its diagnosis of the effects of the "free market" (a concept invented in the mid-19th century) and its logical evolution, "global capitalism," remains accurate: social disintegration, the impotence of politics, and a brutal rise in inequality.

Neoliberalism, an economic doctrine quite alien to Adam Smith's classical liberalism, used Chile as an experimental laboratory. Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état enjoyed the political and military sponsorship of the United States, but in terms of ideology, discounting the typical soldierly and curial mantras, it drew almost exclusively from the so-called Chicago School. That is, from the doctrine formulated by economists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman: the State is a mafia gang, taxes are theft, there is no freedom other than that of the market, solidarity hinders the system, and so on.

Neoliberalism was neither new nor particularly liberal when it was imposed fifty years ago. Its great advantage was its marked departure from classical liberalism: although it deferred to liberal thinkers, it shared neither their method nor their idea of the market. Today we are on the verge of another equally profound ideological innovation.