Review Essay The Zero Hour of History: Is Neoliberalism Some Sort of ‘Mode of Production’? Philip Mirowski Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Cap- italism. London: Verso, 2014. 192 pp. £14.99 paperback. David Kotz, Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 288 pp. £24.50 hardcover. Damien Cahill, The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embed- ded Neoliberalism. Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014. 224 pp. £20.00 paperback. INTRODUCTION Each of the books under review is based upon a similar premise: that ‘Neo- liberalism’ caused the recent world economic crisis. What is curious, and the presumption that they all share, is that ‘Neoliberalism’ serves as a place- holder term for a particular species of capitalism, and furthermore, that Marxism is seen as a superior intellectual framework with which to com- prehend how this economic structure has broken down. Admittedly, for Wolfgang Streeck this involves the economic specifics of the operation of the European Union, while for David Kotz it instead exclusively concerns American economic history; Damien Cahill, although an Australian, also mostly focuses on US structures. Rather than examine the economic narra- tives on the ground they each construct in detail, in this essay I will explore the possibility that there is a serious confusion lodged at the heart of all these books, one which involves the conflation of neoliberal ideas with an arbitrary set of economic institutions in particular historical circumstances. This unfortunate conflation can be traced directly to the authors’ shared conviction that Marxism as an intellectual tool is ideal to both comprehend Thanks to Dieter Plehwe for helpful discussions on these issues. Development and Change 47(3): 586–597. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12228 C  2016 International Institute of Social Studies.