Book Review: The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Americans removed and interred during WWII and those legally seeking asylum, who are detained in overcrowded and inhumane camps on the border today. Yet the comparison in that case would be an overgeneralization, eliding significant legal and historic specifics. Therefore, despite the comparison that the title of her book encourages, I’d like to think Izumi is referring in this passage to the recurrent and evolving tension between civil liberties and fears about national security that prompted the unfortunate “solution” of “camps” in the U.S. in both the 1950s and the present day (and in many other places around the globe right now). This tension is the most consistent topic of Izumi’s book, and one well worth examining, given its timely and urgent relevance. In that regard, in its examination of the creation and repeal of Title II, and in its thorough research of just over two decades of legislative and juridical responses to the tension between a desire for security driven by anxiety or fear and America’s constitutional commitment to civil liberties, the book makes an informative contribution to scholarship. Though leaving race and the idea of the concentration camp relatively unexplored, Izumi’s study provides a wealth of useful details documenting legal and juridical decision-making and the dangers that a climate of suspicion, anxiety, and war can pose to civil liberties.