Neoliberal World Reduction: Robert Heinlein and Milton Friedman's Free-Market Utopias

In the 1960s and 1970s, sf writer Robert Heinlein and Chicago economist Milton Friedman emerged as voices for the American libertarian right, promoting idealized visions of absolute, laissez-faire capitalism. These visions depended on the authors' use of world reduction (Jameson). They stripped away many of the complexities of global capitalism, creating appealing pictures of a frictionless free market. This essay reads Robert Heinlein as an amateur economist, exploring his fascination with monetary theory from his early H.G. Wells-inspired socialist utopias to later libertarian fictions such as Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). Heinlein's right-ward drift between these fictions hinged on his changing conception of risk, an idea that he at once celebrated and attenuated, rarely exposing the consequences of unfettered laissez-faire. Conversely, the essay reads Friedman as a science-fiction writer whose works for a popular audience (Capitalism and Freedom [1962], Free to Choose [1980]) extrapolate free-market futures that draw on nostalgic recreations of America's frontier past. Heinlein's and Friedman's books made their respective versions of libertarianism compelling for a generation of (mostly) white male middle-class readers. Their world reductions helped usher in a specifically neoliberal vision of the individual's place in society, one that celebrates economic freedoms while disavowing democratic liberties.