She describes how Pinochet’s coup was aided by the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT), a private company owning 70 per cent of the phone company that was to be nationalised under Allende, then offers an anecdote of an ITT executive later called before a US Senate committee to explain why ITT had been in secret talks with US policy advisers on the best way to oust Allende. The executive was genuinely confused: ‘What’s wrong with taking care of number one?’

It’s not the disaster capitalism idea that has provoked Klein’s fiercest critics. It’s her second main thesis: the idea of ‘torture as metaphor’, where she suggests — and the book manages to make the idea sound less ludicrous than it might here — that economic shock policies can be compared to the electronic shock therapy administered during secret CIA psychological experiments carried out during the 1950s, experiments which helped to refine torture techniques.

In both instances, individuals and nations are shocked into a state of vegetative complacency, leaving them defenceless against attack — whether one is facing extraordinary rendition, or an interest rate hike.

Here is where the only major limitation of the book appears. In drawing parallels between neoliberal measures and the CIA use of psychological experiments in the Fifties, Klein misses a far more relevant target: the current effort of US intelligence services, as well as international corporations, to hunt through latest developments in neuroscience in order to refine interrogation techniques, as well as to develop marketing strategies in the growing field of ‘neuroeconomics’ where brain images are used to identify unconscious consumer urges.

Anyone left with the impression, as they may well be following Klein’s book, that CIA experimentation with psychiatric techniques in the Fifties is a relic of the past, should type the words ‘DARPA’ (the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) and ‘neuroscience’ into Google and observe the rather chilling bounty.

This emergence of ‘neurosecurity,’ largely ignored by the press in the US and UK, bolsters the links Klein draws between psychiatric experimentation and national economic and political interests. But she doesn’t explore it.

Maybe she’ll be one of the first to investigate it in future — and the response could prove, like her first books, cataclysmic.

Linsey McGoey is co-founder of the European Neuroscience and Society Network, based at LSE.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP