The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
Written by Elisa Garbil – 26.09.2025
George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison’s The Invisible Doctrine is not simply another critique of neoliberalism: it is a detailed dissection of its risks, a charting of the hazards it has embedded into the very fabric of global society. From environmental collapse to democratic erosion, from social precarity to the corrosion of public health systems, neoliberalism is presented as a doctrine that has not only failed but has actively destabilised the conditions that sustain human and planetary wellbeing. The book operates as both a forensic diagnosis and a survival manual, revealing how the system externalises harm and displaces risk onto the very populations it claims to empower.
At its core, the book begins with a damning assessment:
Neoliberalism has failed – and failed spectacularly. It has also inflicted devastating harms on both human society and the living planet, harms from which we’re at risk of never recovering.
The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
The strength of this opening claim lies in its framing. Failure, in this context, is not an abstract verdict but an ongoing condition of heightened risk. The “failure” of neoliberalism is less about its inability to deliver economic stability than about the dangerous instabilities it has created. Instabilities borne not by its architects, but by workers, communities, and ecosystems worldwide. Dominic and Elisa discussed Neoliberalism in Episode 256.
Neoliberalism as Risk Displacement
Monbiot and Hutchison’s central argument is that neoliberalism functions as a machinery of risk redistribution. Risks are never eradicated under its rule; they are displaced downward onto the poor, outward onto ecosystems, and forward onto future generations. This is why the system can appear so resilient even in the face of crises: the true costs are always borne by someone else. The authors emphasise that this displacement is not incidental but structural.
A system of perpetual growth cannot exist without peripheries and externalities.
The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
Growth under neoliberalism depends on extracting wealth from somewhere, whether through low-wage labour, resource depletion, or environmental destruction. What appears as prosperity in one sphere is often catastrophe in another. The global supply chains that deliver cheap goods to wealthy consumers rely on sweatshops, lax regulations, and environments transformed into sacrifice zones. The wealth generated is concentrated at the top, while the risks like pollution, exploitation, health hazards, are diffused downward and outward.
This dynamic also applies temporally. Future generations inherit the deferred costs of present-day growth: climate change, biodiversity collapse, debt burdens, and depleted resources.
Neoliberalism, therefore, is not just unjust in its distribution of wealth but reckless in its distribution of risk, mortgaging the future for the sake of immediate profit.
Class War as Risk Warfare
One of the book’s boldest claims is also one of its clearest:
Neoliberalism is the tool used by the very rich to accumulate more wealth and power. Neoliberalism is class war.
The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
This framing repositions neoliberalism from a neutral ideology to an aggressive strategy of risk manipulation. Class war under neoliberalism is not fought with barricades and rifles but with austerity budgets, deregulation, and privatisation. Workers are subjected to precarious contracts, unstable incomes, and shredded safety nets. Housing becomes unaffordable, healthcare inaccessible, pensions insecure. Each of these policies represents not just economic loss but heightened exposure to risk. The wealthy, by contrast, remain insulated, hedged by financial instruments, shielded by political influence, and often literally protected by gated communities and private security.
The financial crisis of 2008 is perhaps the clearest case study. For decades, neoliberal deregulation allowed financial institutions to gamble recklessly. When the system imploded, governments stepped in with massive bailouts. Profits had been privatised, but losses were socialised. Workers lost jobs, savings, and homes, while financial elites emerged not only unscathed but in many cases richer than before. The risks created by speculative practices were not borne by those who engineered them but shifted onto the public. Monbiot and Hutchison’s framing of neoliberalism as class war highlights this systemic asymmetry: risk itself is weaponised in the service of wealth accumulation.
The Privatisation of Resilience
Few aspects of neoliberalism illustrate risk displacement more starkly than privatisation. The authors are unsparing:
As a general rule, privatisation is legalised theft from the public realm.
The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
Public services function as collective risk-management systems. Healthcare spreads the costs of illness across society. Public education ensures opportunity regardless of background. Social housing provides stability in the face of market fluctuations. By transferring these systems into private hands, neoliberalism dismantles shared resilience and replaces it with individualised vulnerability.
Healthcare under privatisation becomes a gamble. Falling sick can mean bankruptcy. Education becomes a commodity, accessible only to those who can pay tuition fees. Housing is transformed into a speculative asset class, pushing millions into precarity. What was once a system of collective insurance against life’s uncertainties becomes a market of exposure, where those with fewer resources face higher risks.
Privatisation also corrodes quality. Profit-driven providers have little incentive to serve unprofitable communities or invest in long-term infrastructure. Corners are cut, staff are underpaid, and essential services are hollowed out. The risk here is systemic: entire societies become less resilient, less able to absorb shocks. When crises strike, think of pandemics, financial crashes, or climate disasters, the privatised landscape offers little in the way of protection.
The Democratic Risk
Monbiot and Hutchison also draw attention to the political risks neoliberalism generates. As they observe:
The lobby groups funded by oligarchs and corporations were no longer influencing the government. They were the government.
The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
As successive governments quietly delegate policy-making to opaque, corporate-funded lobby groups, democracy is reduced to a sideshow.
The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
This is not merely a matter of corruption but of systemic capture.
When ‘the market’ decides, it means that those who have the most power within the economic system – in other words those with the most money – make the decisions.
The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
Therefore, policy is no longer shaped by public debate or democratic accountability but by the calculus of corporate profit. The risks of such capture are profound. Environmental regulations are gutted under the influence of fossil fuel lobbies. Healthcare policy is dictated by pharmaceutical corporations. Labour protections are eroded at the behest of multinational employers. Each of these shifts exposes populations to greater risks – climate volatility, unaffordable medicines, unsafe working conditions – while insulating the corporations responsible.
The democratic risk extends further. As governance becomes increasingly aligned with corporate interests, public trust erodes. Citizens lose faith in institutions, fuelling populist backlashes and authoritarian tendencies. The erosion of democracy is not just a political loss but a multiplier of risk, leaving societies less capable of coordinated responses to systemic crises.
Mis-framing Risk: The Plastic Straw Syndrome
Another key insight of The Invisible Doctrine is the way neoliberalism manipulates the framing of risk. The authors lament:
Too often, we focus on tiny issues such as plastic straws and coffee cups, rather than the huge structural forces – the power of corporate lobbyists and the money they wield – driving us towards catastrophe.
The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
This shift of attention from structural to symbolic risks is itself a form of risk management, by elites. By encouraging consumers to obsess over recycling habits or coffee cup choices, systemic risks such as fossil fuel dependence, financial deregulation, or corporate capture remain unchallenged. The result is a culture of individualised guilt and micro-solutions, while the engines of catastrophe run unchecked.
From a risk perspective, this is a dangerous diversion. Climate breakdown, for instance, cannot be meaningfully addressed through personal consumption choices alone. Without systemic interventions like ending subsidies for fossil fuels, regulating corporate lobbying, or transitioning to public ownership of energy, individual actions remain drops in a rising ocean. The mis-framing of risk, then, not only distracts but actively delays meaningful action, deepening the crisis.
Ecological Risks: Neoliberalism and Climate Breakdown
Climate change offers perhaps the clearest case of neoliberal risk displacement. For decades, fossil fuel corporations have reaped enormous profits while lobbying to delay regulation and obscure the science. The risks – droughts, floods, wildfires, sea-level rise – are borne by communities, often those least responsible for emissions.
The neoliberal growth imperative exacerbates these risks. As the authors note, a system of perpetual growth requires endless extraction and expansion. Natural systems are treated as externalities, their degradation ignored until it manifests as crisis. This approach is fundamentally unsustainable. The risk is not simply environmental but systemic: climate breakdown threatens food security, migration patterns, infrastructure, and health systems.
Neoliberalism’s emphasis on privatisation further undermines adaptation. Public infrastructure investment is starved, leaving communities vulnerable to climate shocks. Disaster responses are outsourced, often proving inadequate or exploitative. Insurance markets withdraw coverage from high-risk areas, abandoning vulnerable populations. The risks of climate breakdown are thus compounded by neoliberal governance, creating layers of fragility that leave societies less able to withstand ecological shocks.
Public Health Risks
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed in real time the risks generated by decades of neoliberal restructuring. Health systems weakened by privatisation and austerity struggled to cope. Essential workers, which are underpaid, precarious, and often without adequate protections, were exposed to disproportionate risks. Supply chains optimised for efficiency rather than resilience broke down.
Privatisation leads to a decline in both access to, and the quality of, public services.
The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
Neoliberalism had promised efficiency, but it delivered fragility. The risks were borne by those least able to carry them: low-wage workers, marginalised communities, and nations in the global South without access to vaccines or medical supplies. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies used intellectual property regimes to protect profits, even in the midst of global crisis. The pandemic revealed neoliberalism not as a system of resilience but as a system of systemic vulnerability, amplifying the risks of public health emergencies rather than mitigating them.
Collective Agency as Risk Mitigation
Despite its grim analysis, The Invisible Doctrine is not devoid of hope. The authors emphasise that risk can be redistributed differently: more equitably and more sustainably, if collective action is rebuilt.
Together we are powerful, alone we are powerless.
The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
Neoliberalism thrives on atomisation, convincing individuals that they are consumers rather than citizens, isolated rather than collective. Resistance requires reversing this fragmentation. Trade unions, grassroots movements, transnational coalitions: these are the infrastructures of shared risk management. They enable populations to push back against corporate capture, to demand investment in public services, to force systemic responses to climate breakdown.
The authors remind us of the fundamental asymmetry:
Working people don’t need billionaires to run their lives, but the billionaire sure as hell need workers.
The Invisible Doctrine – George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison
This recognition is central to rebalancing risk. By reclaiming solidarity, workers can reassert their collective leverage, forcing elites to absorb the risks they currently offload onto others.
Conclusion: Neoliberalism as a Risk Multiplier
The Invisible Doctrine is not just a political critique but a risk assessment. Neoliberalism, the authors argue, is a risk multiplier. Every policy tool in its arsenal: privatisation, deregulation, austerity, financialisation, functions not to reduce vulnerability but to intensify it, transferring the costs of instability onto the majority while insulating elites.
The risks are social, as inequality deepens. They are political, as democracy is hollowed out. They are ecological, as the climate crisis accelerates. They are public health risks, as weakened systems fail under strain. And above all, they are systemic, intertwining to create a world increasingly incapable of absorbing shocks.
What makes the book so urgent is its insistence that these risks are not invisible at all. They are evident in daily life. In precarious jobs, in unaffordable rents, in polluted air, in the erosion of trust in institutions. The invisibility lies only in the ideological veil that has normalised them. Monbiot and Hutchison tear away that veil, revealing neoliberalism not as a neutral economic order but as an ongoing crisis.
The choice, then, is stark. Either societies continue to accept the doctrine, absorbing ever-greater risks until systems collapse, or they confront it, rebuild solidarity, and reassert collective control. The Invisible Doctrine is both diagnosis and warning: neoliberalism is unsustainable, its risks spiralling beyond control. The longer it persists, the greater the danger. But by making the invisible visible, the book also offers the first step toward resilience: seeing the doctrine for what it is, and refusing to live under its terms.
