How to make capitalism safe from democracy? The intellectual historian Quinn Slobodian has shown how the architects of neoliberal governance have strived to answer that question since the 19th century. In Globalists (2018) he examined how a coalition of politicians, academics and lawyers sought to legally encase and protect capital from democratic reordering. In his latest work, Crack-Up Capitalism, his focus is on the politics of the zone. It is a story of how a quixotic alliance of libertarian ideologues, anti-democratic entrepreneurs and Thatcherite acolytes have carved out states of exception to insulate capitalism from the constraints of the state and its rules. These enclaves are diverse in geography and nature, from colonial-era Hong Kong and apartheid South Africa, to free ports and special economic zones, to cryptocurrencies and visions of start-up “network states”. But, however different the form, zonal politics share the same political content: the effort to establish spaces in the global economy that operate by self-defined laws and regulations, with democratic oversight suspended and market rule unimpeded. In this vision the zone is an accessory and escape hatch to a world of capitalism without democracy.