The shock doctrine is the unofficial story of how the "free market" came to dominate the world, from Chile to Russia, China to Iraq, South Africa to Canada. But it is a story radically different from the one usually told. It is a story about violence and shock perpetrated on people, on countries, on economies. About a program of social and economic engineering that is driving our world, that Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism."

Introduction : blank is beautiful : three decades of erasing and remaking the world -- The torture lab : Ewen Cameron, the CIA and the maniacal quest to erase and remake the human mind -- The other Doctor Shock : Milton Friedman and the search for a laissez-faire laboratory -- States of shock : the bloody birth of the counterrevolution -- Cleaning the slate : terror does its work -- "Entirely unrelated" : how an ideology was cleansed of its crimes -- Saved by a war : Thatcherism and its useful enemies -- The new Dr. Shock : economic warfare replaces dictatorship -- Crisis works : the packaging of shock therapy -- Slamming the door on history : a crisis in Poland, a massacre in China -- Democracy born in chains : South Africa's constricted freedom -- Bonfire of a young democracy : Russia chooses "the Pinochet option" -- The capitalist ID : Russia and the new era of the boor market -- Let it burn : the looting of Asia and "the fall of a second Berlin Wall" -- Shock therapy in the U.S.A. : the Homeland security bubble -- A corporatist state : removing the revolving door, putting in an archway -- Erasing Iraq : in search of a "model" for the Middle East -- Ideological blowback : a very capitalist disaster -- Full circle : from blank slate to scorched earth -- Blanking the beach : "the second tsunami" -- Disaster apartheid : a world of green zones and red zones -- Losing the peace incentive : Israel as warning -- Conclusion : shock wears off : the rise of people's reconstruction.