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Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
How neoliberals turned to nature to defend inequality after the end of the Cold War
Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the chameleon of communism changing colors from red to green. The poison of civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism ran through the veins of the body politic and they needed an antidote.
To defy demands for equality, many neoliberals turned to nature. Race, intelligence, territory, and precious metal would be bulwarks against progressive politics. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they articulated a philosophy of three hards—hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money—and forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists, and goldbugs that would become known as the alt-right.
Following Hayek’s bastards from Murray Rothbard to Charles Murray to Javier Milei, we find that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash. This history of ideas shows us that the reported clash of opposites is more like a family feud.
Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the chameleon of communism changing colors from red to green. The poison of civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism ran through the veins of the body politic and they needed an antidote.
To defy demands for equality, many neoliberals turned to nature. Race, intelligence, territory, and precious metal would be bulwarks against progressive politics. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they articulated a philosophy of three hards—hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money—and forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists, and goldbugs that would become known as the alt-right.
Following Hayek’s bastards from Murray Rothbard to Charles Murray to Javier Milei, we find that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash. This history of ideas shows us that the reported clash of opposites is more like a family feud.
279 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 15, 2025
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June 7, 2025
Full disclosure: Quinn Slobodian is my Marxist intellectual crush 😻 One of them. So I did enjoy his latest book "Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right" (Zone Books, April 2025). I also loved his 2024 book "Crack-Up Capitalism" (hence crush!).
What a political theory rabbit hole this guy has gotten himself into - an important one though to make sense of today's resurgence of the Far Right, showing that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. "What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash."
The book traces the intellectual mutation of free-market ideology into a today's hybrid of libertarian economics and far-right racial thinking. The book follows a group of post-Cold War thinkers—whom Slobodian calls “Hayek’s bastards”—who broke from Friedrich Hayek’s more nuanced views on social evolution and cultural learning. Instead, they embraced a worldview that justifies inequality as natural and immutable, often invoking race, genetics, or pseudo-scientific IQ theories. These actors—ranging from Silicon Valley libertarians to Austrian-school economists and gold standard evangelists—advocate for market orders divorced from democracy, promoting gated forms of capitalism that privilege hierarchy over inclusion.
Slobodian argues that this ideology is not an aberration but a logical, if extreme, outgrowth of neoliberal though. Rather than viewing right-wing populism as a revolt against neoliberalism, Hayek’s Bastards frames it as a perverse culmination: a vision where the market rules, democracy retreats, and only the “fit” deserve sovereignty. By unearthing the intellectual scaffolding behind contemporary illiberalism, Slobodian shows how market fundamentalism can coexist—and even thrive—with racial exclusion and authoritarian politics.
A few key points/ take-aways:
#1 Moments of global economic crisis allow for the breakthrough of eccentric and (for some) exhilaratingly novel forms of politics, but they do not appear from nowhere: they have their own intellectual lineages and material preconditions. We cannot understand the peculiar hybrids of extreme market ideology, Far Right authoritarianism, and social conservatism without familiarizing ourselves with the often-tangled genealogies traced in this book. Well-funded networks of think tanks, conferences, gatherings, and workshops, as well as investment forums, comments sections, and Reddit groups, offer nurseries for new adaptive ideological strains. Mises Institutes are a case in point.
#2 "The book is a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing. Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it.
#3 This book argues that the appeal to nature was a central part of the neoliberal solution to a problem they faced in the decades after the Cold War. This was an era in which communism was dead but, as they put it, Leviathan lived on. Public spending continued to expand even as capitalism became the only surviving economic system. Behind this was a political problem. The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had injected the poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative
Neoliberals needed an antidote.
Confounded by persistent demands for the redress of inequality at the expense of efficiency, stability, and order, neoliberals turned to nature in matters of race, intelligence, territory, and money as a way to erect a bulwark against the encroaching demands of progressives and hopefully roll back social changes to return to a hierarchy of gender, race, and cultural difference they imagined to be rooted in genetics as well as tradition.
# 4 QS calls the new strain of the neoliberal movement that crystallized in the 1990s the “new fusionism.” While the original fusionism of the 1950s and 1960s and the New Right melded libertarianism and religious traditionalism in the style of William F. Buckley and the National Review, the new fusionism defended neoliberal policies through arguments borrowed from cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary psychology and in some cases genetics, genomics, and biological anthropology.
#5 As early as 1987 the conservative historian Paul Gottfried, who coined the term “alternative right” with Richard Spencer, identified that new fusionism on the Right. Whereas older conservatives may have used a language of religion to back up claims about human differences, Gottfried noted that they had begun to use disciplines like sociobiology, the discipline created by ecologist E.O. Wilson to, in Wilson’s words, “biologicize” questions of human ethics. New fusionism uses the language of science to justify the extension of competitive dynamics ever deeper into social life.
# 6 Good reflections also on the intellectual roots of Germany's fa right party "Alternative für Deutschland" , stressing that despite the journalistic treatments of the AfD which tend to focus on its anti-immigration policy, its Islamophobia, and its nativist pronatalism, the original “alternative” they presented was not an alternative to nonwhite migration or “Islamification” but an alternative to the euro as a German currency. German paleos broke into mainstream politics in the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, an example of the paleo alliance in action with a vision of both monetary and moral order at its core. The AfD was founded in 2013 by economics professors in protest against what they saw as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mishandling of the Eurozone crisis.
What a political theory rabbit hole this guy has gotten himself into - an important one though to make sense of today's resurgence of the Far Right, showing that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. "What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash."
The book traces the intellectual mutation of free-market ideology into a today's hybrid of libertarian economics and far-right racial thinking. The book follows a group of post-Cold War thinkers—whom Slobodian calls “Hayek’s bastards”—who broke from Friedrich Hayek’s more nuanced views on social evolution and cultural learning. Instead, they embraced a worldview that justifies inequality as natural and immutable, often invoking race, genetics, or pseudo-scientific IQ theories. These actors—ranging from Silicon Valley libertarians to Austrian-school economists and gold standard evangelists—advocate for market orders divorced from democracy, promoting gated forms of capitalism that privilege hierarchy over inclusion.
Slobodian argues that this ideology is not an aberration but a logical, if extreme, outgrowth of neoliberal though. Rather than viewing right-wing populism as a revolt against neoliberalism, Hayek’s Bastards frames it as a perverse culmination: a vision where the market rules, democracy retreats, and only the “fit” deserve sovereignty. By unearthing the intellectual scaffolding behind contemporary illiberalism, Slobodian shows how market fundamentalism can coexist—and even thrive—with racial exclusion and authoritarian politics.
A few key points/ take-aways:
#1 Moments of global economic crisis allow for the breakthrough of eccentric and (for some) exhilaratingly novel forms of politics, but they do not appear from nowhere: they have their own intellectual lineages and material preconditions. We cannot understand the peculiar hybrids of extreme market ideology, Far Right authoritarianism, and social conservatism without familiarizing ourselves with the often-tangled genealogies traced in this book. Well-funded networks of think tanks, conferences, gatherings, and workshops, as well as investment forums, comments sections, and Reddit groups, offer nurseries for new adaptive ideological strains. Mises Institutes are a case in point.
#2 "The book is a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing. Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it.
#3 This book argues that the appeal to nature was a central part of the neoliberal solution to a problem they faced in the decades after the Cold War. This was an era in which communism was dead but, as they put it, Leviathan lived on. Public spending continued to expand even as capitalism became the only surviving economic system. Behind this was a political problem. The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had injected the poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative
Neoliberals needed an antidote.
Confounded by persistent demands for the redress of inequality at the expense of efficiency, stability, and order, neoliberals turned to nature in matters of race, intelligence, territory, and money as a way to erect a bulwark against the encroaching demands of progressives and hopefully roll back social changes to return to a hierarchy of gender, race, and cultural difference they imagined to be rooted in genetics as well as tradition.
# 4 QS calls the new strain of the neoliberal movement that crystallized in the 1990s the “new fusionism.” While the original fusionism of the 1950s and 1960s and the New Right melded libertarianism and religious traditionalism in the style of William F. Buckley and the National Review, the new fusionism defended neoliberal policies through arguments borrowed from cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary psychology and in some cases genetics, genomics, and biological anthropology.
#5 As early as 1987 the conservative historian Paul Gottfried, who coined the term “alternative right” with Richard Spencer, identified that new fusionism on the Right. Whereas older conservatives may have used a language of religion to back up claims about human differences, Gottfried noted that they had begun to use disciplines like sociobiology, the discipline created by ecologist E.O. Wilson to, in Wilson’s words, “biologicize” questions of human ethics. New fusionism uses the language of science to justify the extension of competitive dynamics ever deeper into social life.
# 6 Good reflections also on the intellectual roots of Germany's fa right party "Alternative für Deutschland" , stressing that despite the journalistic treatments of the AfD which tend to focus on its anti-immigration policy, its Islamophobia, and its nativist pronatalism, the original “alternative” they presented was not an alternative to nonwhite migration or “Islamification” but an alternative to the euro as a German currency. German paleos broke into mainstream politics in the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, an example of the paleo alliance in action with a vision of both monetary and moral order at its core. The AfD was founded in 2013 by economics professors in protest against what they saw as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mishandling of the Eurozone crisis.
August 20, 2025
took me longer than it should have to figure out that neoliberalism was not pristine, but was rather a highly racialised, gendered and agitational political programme. it again took me more than one Slobodian book before I started to figure this out - first one I found very dry, second more episodic, I'd be recommending this as the best ones to start for people who might still be trying to think through this stuff - but it really has helped a lot of things click.
I blame i) books which used the word austerity and neoliberalism more often than capitalism or imperialism ii) adam curtis' popularisation of the term neo-conservative iii) left intellectuals giving very ingenuous accounts of Hayek et al.'s thought while skimming over the foaming-at-the-mouth race stuff
I blame i) books which used the word austerity and neoliberalism more often than capitalism or imperialism ii) adam curtis' popularisation of the term neo-conservative iii) left intellectuals giving very ingenuous accounts of Hayek et al.'s thought while skimming over the foaming-at-the-mouth race stuff
April 28, 2025
What of Hayek's Legitimate Children?
A few decades ago, the American historian Richard Weikart published From Darwin to Hitler, a book that tried to draw a line between Darwinism and the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust.
While few of his factual assertions could be disputed, the overall direction of the book — namely, assigning Darwinists a large share of responsibility — felt like a remarkable stretch, and mostly ended up giving ammunition to people who wanted to discredit Darwinism for ideological reasons.
Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards reminds me of that book. His reconstruction is not to be dismissed lightly, of course. It’s hard to deny that some parts of the neoliberal tradition went beyond flirting with ideas about closed borders, racial difference, social exclusion (if not worse) — and sometimes openly embraced them.
But once you acknowledge that, you’re left with two options:
You can try to rescue Hayek, Mises, and the Austrian School by showing the valuable parts of their work (like their insights into knowledge dispersion) and argue that their ideas also gave birth to at least another, more virtuous intellectual lineage. Or you can be content with Slobodian’s version of the story as the one that matters.
I certainly cannot blame Slobodian for what he chose not to write. But I observe that his decision to follow the second path — rather than the first — is but a matter of agenda, not historiography. To mention the most controversial policies of Milei, or the fact that Bolsonaro posed for photographs while holding Mises’ Human Action, or to hint at libertarian support for Trump, does not do full justice to the title, leaving the reader with the impression that such a legacy of Hayek is not only real, but perhaps even the most legitimate one.
A major problem I had with the book is that it contains such a massive amount of information that it becomes difficult to tell when its reconstruction holds solidly, and when its conclusions feel like stretches, based on the mere juxtaposition of quotations. For example, I was particularly struck to see economist Bryan Caplan allusively thrown into the cauldron of the "bad guys," without any mention of his overt and consistent advocacy of open borders. And if it is so with Caplan — someone I happen to know, and who surely belongs among Hayek’s "legitimate children" — how can I be sure about the authors I am less familiar with?
A few decades ago, the American historian Richard Weikart published From Darwin to Hitler, a book that tried to draw a line between Darwinism and the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust.
While few of his factual assertions could be disputed, the overall direction of the book — namely, assigning Darwinists a large share of responsibility — felt like a remarkable stretch, and mostly ended up giving ammunition to people who wanted to discredit Darwinism for ideological reasons.
Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards reminds me of that book. His reconstruction is not to be dismissed lightly, of course. It’s hard to deny that some parts of the neoliberal tradition went beyond flirting with ideas about closed borders, racial difference, social exclusion (if not worse) — and sometimes openly embraced them.
But once you acknowledge that, you’re left with two options:
You can try to rescue Hayek, Mises, and the Austrian School by showing the valuable parts of their work (like their insights into knowledge dispersion) and argue that their ideas also gave birth to at least another, more virtuous intellectual lineage. Or you can be content with Slobodian’s version of the story as the one that matters.
I certainly cannot blame Slobodian for what he chose not to write. But I observe that his decision to follow the second path — rather than the first — is but a matter of agenda, not historiography. To mention the most controversial policies of Milei, or the fact that Bolsonaro posed for photographs while holding Mises’ Human Action, or to hint at libertarian support for Trump, does not do full justice to the title, leaving the reader with the impression that such a legacy of Hayek is not only real, but perhaps even the most legitimate one.
A major problem I had with the book is that it contains such a massive amount of information that it becomes difficult to tell when its reconstruction holds solidly, and when its conclusions feel like stretches, based on the mere juxtaposition of quotations. For example, I was particularly struck to see economist Bryan Caplan allusively thrown into the cauldron of the "bad guys," without any mention of his overt and consistent advocacy of open borders. And if it is so with Caplan — someone I happen to know, and who surely belongs among Hayek’s "legitimate children" — how can I be sure about the authors I am less familiar with?
December 16, 2025
An outstanding dive into the ideological currents that pushed market extremism and its attendant hierarchical essentialism into the mainstream of world politics. A breezy 175 pages, Slobodian traces the intellectual genealogy of the modern far right from Mises and Hayek to Rothbard and Murray to Stephen Miller and the Silicon Valley Techbro Mafia. One of the best books I've read all year, very helpful for understanding the idealogues of the class enemy.
May 3, 2025
Along with John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, the best analysis of the paleo-libertarian strain that is taking over the Right. A convincing argument that this movement is a mutation and evolution of neoliberalism rather than a backlash against it.
July 23, 2025
Whether in the form of the Trump MAGA, Farage’s ReformUK, the German AfD, the French Rassemblement national or the Italian Fratelli d'Italia, the far right is united in its claim to be leading the fight against the liberal elite’s plans for globalisation. Against cosmopolitan diversity they represent a popular revolt standing for national patriotism, cultural homogeneity, and the traditional family.
The usual version of the history of right wing political activism tells us that it tracks back to the intellectuals gathered around Mount Pelerin who were intent on following the teachings of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. In this free market utopia, the factors of production – capital, labour, and goods - flow unimpeded across the globe. Its genius would perform magic in spontaneously optimisating of output to the benefit of all, maintaining its equilibrium without the interference of politics and the state.
But despite the significant wins for this ideology achieved by Pinochet’s overthrow of Chilean democracy in 1973, the partnership between Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, and the Washington Consensus that rolled on from the 1980s into the 90s and the collapse of Russian-style state socialism, the free market utopia never really arrived. In its place we got stagnant wage growth, declining public services and rising inequality.
In Hayek’s Bastards Quinn Slobodian looks at the evolution in right wing thought which has been attempting an escape route for an ideology which promised so much freedom but only opened the gates to much more misery. The name for this progression is paleolibertarianism.
As Slobodian explains, both Mises and Hayek had anticipated the weakness in reasoning that saw the liberation of the homo economicus who supposedly lay at the heart of human existence as the surest way to secure universal freedom. Human nature was making a prior claim on the way people related to each other, and that had been conditioned across tens of thousands of years to place a high value on cooperation and collective life. The neoliberal doctrine had to pull back from gratification of human needs by way of the market to complete its appeal, and that meant reaching beyond simple economics to build roots in the social and the political.
The result was a new fusionism in right wing thinking promoted by such luminaries as Lew Rockwell, Charles Murray, Gerrard Radnitzky, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Peter Brimelow and others. Making use of a network of think tanks and academic networks they worked to close the gap between capitalist libertarians and the more traditional conservative right, which anchored its programme in the values of Kinder, Küche, Kirche – children, church and kitchen. If Mises and Hayek had once, mistakenly, signalled an interest in open borders and radical cosmopolitan outlooks, all this was to be reviled and replaced with a return to the patriarchal social order, with fealty to nation kith and kin at its centre.
The advocates of the fusion of neoliberal libertarianism with old-style conservativism claims a scientific basis for its claims about human society. Social order is seen as arising from the ascendancy of the most able to the top spot, which cues IQ measurement as the guide as to who is best fitted. Charles Murray’s infamous claims about racial difference as set out in the Bell Curve have a revered place in paleolibertarian writings. Apartheid and Jim Crow segregation are praised as a rational means to regulate relations between ethnic groups, and firmly applied immigration control a routine feature at national borders. To cap it all, the paleos make gold-based money a part of their credo, though for Nayib Bukele, the paleolibertarian president of El Salvador, there is a ‘new gold’ option available courtesy of the blockchain based cryptocurrencies.
Is all this really a counterblast to the ‘globalists’ so reviled by the populist right? Not really. An elite – looking a lot like the tech bros of Silicon Valley - will remain at the top of the global order, capital will rule the roost and roam footloose across the world, the disadvantaged will be left to scrabble for the crumbs, and the universal principle of property rights over human rights will ensure that those of use without our own Lear jets will live and die wherever we are born. Sounds just like old-style neoliberalism
The usual version of the history of right wing political activism tells us that it tracks back to the intellectuals gathered around Mount Pelerin who were intent on following the teachings of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. In this free market utopia, the factors of production – capital, labour, and goods - flow unimpeded across the globe. Its genius would perform magic in spontaneously optimisating of output to the benefit of all, maintaining its equilibrium without the interference of politics and the state.
But despite the significant wins for this ideology achieved by Pinochet’s overthrow of Chilean democracy in 1973, the partnership between Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, and the Washington Consensus that rolled on from the 1980s into the 90s and the collapse of Russian-style state socialism, the free market utopia never really arrived. In its place we got stagnant wage growth, declining public services and rising inequality.
In Hayek’s Bastards Quinn Slobodian looks at the evolution in right wing thought which has been attempting an escape route for an ideology which promised so much freedom but only opened the gates to much more misery. The name for this progression is paleolibertarianism.
As Slobodian explains, both Mises and Hayek had anticipated the weakness in reasoning that saw the liberation of the homo economicus who supposedly lay at the heart of human existence as the surest way to secure universal freedom. Human nature was making a prior claim on the way people related to each other, and that had been conditioned across tens of thousands of years to place a high value on cooperation and collective life. The neoliberal doctrine had to pull back from gratification of human needs by way of the market to complete its appeal, and that meant reaching beyond simple economics to build roots in the social and the political.
The result was a new fusionism in right wing thinking promoted by such luminaries as Lew Rockwell, Charles Murray, Gerrard Radnitzky, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Peter Brimelow and others. Making use of a network of think tanks and academic networks they worked to close the gap between capitalist libertarians and the more traditional conservative right, which anchored its programme in the values of Kinder, Küche, Kirche – children, church and kitchen. If Mises and Hayek had once, mistakenly, signalled an interest in open borders and radical cosmopolitan outlooks, all this was to be reviled and replaced with a return to the patriarchal social order, with fealty to nation kith and kin at its centre.
The advocates of the fusion of neoliberal libertarianism with old-style conservativism claims a scientific basis for its claims about human society. Social order is seen as arising from the ascendancy of the most able to the top spot, which cues IQ measurement as the guide as to who is best fitted. Charles Murray’s infamous claims about racial difference as set out in the Bell Curve have a revered place in paleolibertarian writings. Apartheid and Jim Crow segregation are praised as a rational means to regulate relations between ethnic groups, and firmly applied immigration control a routine feature at national borders. To cap it all, the paleos make gold-based money a part of their credo, though for Nayib Bukele, the paleolibertarian president of El Salvador, there is a ‘new gold’ option available courtesy of the blockchain based cryptocurrencies.
Is all this really a counterblast to the ‘globalists’ so reviled by the populist right? Not really. An elite – looking a lot like the tech bros of Silicon Valley - will remain at the top of the global order, capital will rule the roost and roam footloose across the world, the disadvantaged will be left to scrabble for the crumbs, and the universal principle of property rights over human rights will ensure that those of use without our own Lear jets will live and die wherever we are born. Sounds just like old-style neoliberalism
December 11, 2025
The land of libertarianism is one I know well, and many of its neighborhoods and personalities are quite dear to me. I have an especially soft spot in my heart for Friedrich Hayek, though I will admit that in a certain mood I find von Mises quite stirring. But libertarianism has its darker corners as well, places where the appeal of property rights is not so much their protection of individual autonomy or incentivizing effects, but their utility as a tool to keep out the "wrong" sort of folk.
Slobodian is someone who has spent a good deal of time in these darker corners, and this book is his travelogue. The story he tells is a horrifying one, an important one, and one that sheds a good deal light on how we got to a place where a good portion of the libertarian movement is cheering on while masked, armed agents of the state kidnap workers whose only crime was to cross a political border without authorization from the state, and where rolling back wokeness has come to be regarded as a task so important it overrides almost any other moral or political consideration.
In cataloguing and documenting the shadows that lurk in these horrors, Slobodian's book is persuasive and compelling. Slobodian doesn't limit himself to the obvious targets - the Lew Rockwells, the Hans-Hermann Hoppes. He brings in figures like Charles Murray and Peter Brimelow as well, documenting their connection to (and the support they received from) the libertarian movement.
It is when Slobodian tries to speak about what lies outside of the shadows that he becomes significantly less reliable as a guide. Slobodian's book is an extended effort to draw connections a wide variety of different figures - Trump, Brimelow, Rothbard, Hayek - all, to Slobodian’s eye, are part of the same web of libertarian/neoliberal influence. Occasionally he does acknowledge that there are some holes in this web. The title of the book, "Hayek's Bastards," is meant to suggest that much of what we see in Rothbard et al. is a bastardization of the classical liberalism of Hayek (and Mises). But, despite these concessions, Slobodian can't help suggesting that the seeds of Trumpism were there in Mises (and his flirtation with race science) and Hayek (and his 'savannah story') from the beginning. For reasons that Phil Magness has pointed out in his Reason Magazine review of this book, I think there are good grounds for skepticism regarding these claims, and fair criticism to be made of Slobodian for playing fast and loose with his quotations.
By focusing so much on the shadows, the book gives a distorted picture of the lay of the land as a whole. I guess it's true that the virulently anti-immigrant writer Peter Brimelow spent some time in libertarian land. For my part, I never saw him there during my roughly thirty years of residence. I saw Hoppe around a few times, but most of the people I spoke with saw him for what he is: a mean little buffoon whose arrogance far outstripped his arguments. I admit, most of my time in the land was spent in a fairly particular set of neighborhoods - mostly college towns, a few centers of public policy. So perhaps my own view of the land suffers from distortions of its own. But still. My story is at least a part of the story of libertarianism, and it is nowhere to be found in Slobodian's book.
There's a line to be drawn from libertarianism to the alt-right. But it is a complicated, messy, indirect one. And it is far from the only, or even the dominant line one might take from that starting point. Slobodian shows us some of the folks who have travelled down that path. But he does not tell us about the ways in which the post liberal right has explicitly sought to distance itself from the liberalism of Hayek and Mises, viewing it as an enemy force rather than as a source of inspiration. He does not explore the division between "freshwater" and "saltwater" Austrians, or the way in which actual libertarian politicians like Javier Milei write Hoppe off as an "economic idiot."
That doesn't make Slobodian's book worthless. Not at all. But it does make it radically incomplete. Read it. But take it with a grain of salt. Or a tumbler.
Slobodian is someone who has spent a good deal of time in these darker corners, and this book is his travelogue. The story he tells is a horrifying one, an important one, and one that sheds a good deal light on how we got to a place where a good portion of the libertarian movement is cheering on while masked, armed agents of the state kidnap workers whose only crime was to cross a political border without authorization from the state, and where rolling back wokeness has come to be regarded as a task so important it overrides almost any other moral or political consideration.
In cataloguing and documenting the shadows that lurk in these horrors, Slobodian's book is persuasive and compelling. Slobodian doesn't limit himself to the obvious targets - the Lew Rockwells, the Hans-Hermann Hoppes. He brings in figures like Charles Murray and Peter Brimelow as well, documenting their connection to (and the support they received from) the libertarian movement.
It is when Slobodian tries to speak about what lies outside of the shadows that he becomes significantly less reliable as a guide. Slobodian's book is an extended effort to draw connections a wide variety of different figures - Trump, Brimelow, Rothbard, Hayek - all, to Slobodian’s eye, are part of the same web of libertarian/neoliberal influence. Occasionally he does acknowledge that there are some holes in this web. The title of the book, "Hayek's Bastards," is meant to suggest that much of what we see in Rothbard et al. is a bastardization of the classical liberalism of Hayek (and Mises). But, despite these concessions, Slobodian can't help suggesting that the seeds of Trumpism were there in Mises (and his flirtation with race science) and Hayek (and his 'savannah story') from the beginning. For reasons that Phil Magness has pointed out in his Reason Magazine review of this book, I think there are good grounds for skepticism regarding these claims, and fair criticism to be made of Slobodian for playing fast and loose with his quotations.
By focusing so much on the shadows, the book gives a distorted picture of the lay of the land as a whole. I guess it's true that the virulently anti-immigrant writer Peter Brimelow spent some time in libertarian land. For my part, I never saw him there during my roughly thirty years of residence. I saw Hoppe around a few times, but most of the people I spoke with saw him for what he is: a mean little buffoon whose arrogance far outstripped his arguments. I admit, most of my time in the land was spent in a fairly particular set of neighborhoods - mostly college towns, a few centers of public policy. So perhaps my own view of the land suffers from distortions of its own. But still. My story is at least a part of the story of libertarianism, and it is nowhere to be found in Slobodian's book.
There's a line to be drawn from libertarianism to the alt-right. But it is a complicated, messy, indirect one. And it is far from the only, or even the dominant line one might take from that starting point. Slobodian shows us some of the folks who have travelled down that path. But he does not tell us about the ways in which the post liberal right has explicitly sought to distance itself from the liberalism of Hayek and Mises, viewing it as an enemy force rather than as a source of inspiration. He does not explore the division between "freshwater" and "saltwater" Austrians, or the way in which actual libertarian politicians like Javier Milei write Hoppe off as an "economic idiot."
That doesn't make Slobodian's book worthless. Not at all. But it does make it radically incomplete. Read it. But take it with a grain of salt. Or a tumbler.
April 30, 2025
Brilliant genealogy of the libertarian far right. Tad short, but offering I think many new ways of thinking about local dialects of libertarianism in the far right elsewhere.
November 11, 2025
It takes a historian to contextual the rot that flowed from Hayek.
A racist without Christianity is often a libertarian, neo-libertarian, or paleo-libertarian. The label is a way for them to hide behind their racism. The paleo version gives them a chance to shit on ‘elites’ and usually by most definitions they themselves are the elite such as Steve Bannon, Trump, Thiel, Musk and so on. The neo-liberals start with Hayek and end with MAGA and its hate.
Charles Murray clearly a person with racist beliefs decided to embrace God today. At least that’s what his new memoir will claim (I haven’t yet read it but I read the review in the WSJ). He recently wrote a book defending God in general and Christianity in particular. His racism didn’t need religion until now. MAGA is destroying white-evangelical Christianity by systematically taking away the theology and replacing it with ideology. White-evangelical Christianity is becoming obsolete and politicizing religion is not helping them. See the recently published book, “Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America” by Christian Smith.
Peter Thiel one of the self-proclaimed libertarians from Hayek’s bastard children featured in this book requires a scape-goat with his twisted re-incarnation of Rene Girard’s mimetic sacrifice for the sake of the greater good when the greater good includes the self-appointed ‘elites’ privileging themselves over the hoi-polloi. There’s a fun book I would recommend to partially understand the insanity inherent within the pseudo-intellectual nonsense espoused by libertarians justifying their superiority and that would be “Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 1 and 2: The Great Mediations of the Classical World.” It’s part of the Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (SVMC) Series.
Gold bugs love fictions that make them relevant. This book brought back memories of me reading Harry Browne’s book “How to profit from the coming economic devaluation.” They were obviously meant to embrace the great replacement theory and warn against globalist (i.e. Jews). Those kinds flowed out of Hayek’s worldview and were toxic in their implicit superiority.
Maury Rothbard mentioned in this book is another one that sucked me into their racist world view and this author brings receipts on what they really meant in their guise of anarcho-libertarianism.
I’m positively inclined towards this book because at one time I was a true believer in the bastards of Hayek and have no one to blame but myself for my wrong headedness, mea maxima culpa. Today, I see the same rot coming from MAGA and they have usurped the ideologies of the racist featured in this book. They haven’t disappeared they’ve just renamed themselves. Rand Paul had to defend as real the immigration super highway cutting across the country from Mexico to Canada back in 2016. The bigots still exist they just have different conspiracy theories that they embrace.
I’m sort of loving the split in Hayek’s step-bastard children between Nick Fuentes and the Ben Shapiro wings of MAGA over the last week or so. They both hate women, brown and black people, gay people, transgender, Democrats, atheists, but differ on Jews verse Muslims. MAGA sublimates libertarians who usually don’t care about religion. They all fall under the same umbrella while MAGA wants Christian Nationalists and Libertarians prefer no religion at all for their nationalism. They both want the hate and division and Thiel and Musk want to sacrifice us on their imaginary altars while acting as our saviors. Hayek is their north star. It’s not hard to read Hayek and realize that fascists, racists, Christianists, Libertarians, and MAGA would evolve from his writings.
I enjoyed seeing the history of how I deceived myself into believing Hayek’s bunk and his bastard children. This shows the rot behind the ideology and how at their core they want to make us their servants through their conspiratorial substance free ‘science.’
A racist without Christianity is often a libertarian, neo-libertarian, or paleo-libertarian. The label is a way for them to hide behind their racism. The paleo version gives them a chance to shit on ‘elites’ and usually by most definitions they themselves are the elite such as Steve Bannon, Trump, Thiel, Musk and so on. The neo-liberals start with Hayek and end with MAGA and its hate.
Charles Murray clearly a person with racist beliefs decided to embrace God today. At least that’s what his new memoir will claim (I haven’t yet read it but I read the review in the WSJ). He recently wrote a book defending God in general and Christianity in particular. His racism didn’t need religion until now. MAGA is destroying white-evangelical Christianity by systematically taking away the theology and replacing it with ideology. White-evangelical Christianity is becoming obsolete and politicizing religion is not helping them. See the recently published book, “Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America” by Christian Smith.
Peter Thiel one of the self-proclaimed libertarians from Hayek’s bastard children featured in this book requires a scape-goat with his twisted re-incarnation of Rene Girard’s mimetic sacrifice for the sake of the greater good when the greater good includes the self-appointed ‘elites’ privileging themselves over the hoi-polloi. There’s a fun book I would recommend to partially understand the insanity inherent within the pseudo-intellectual nonsense espoused by libertarians justifying their superiority and that would be “Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 1 and 2: The Great Mediations of the Classical World.” It’s part of the Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (SVMC) Series.
Gold bugs love fictions that make them relevant. This book brought back memories of me reading Harry Browne’s book “How to profit from the coming economic devaluation.” They were obviously meant to embrace the great replacement theory and warn against globalist (i.e. Jews). Those kinds flowed out of Hayek’s worldview and were toxic in their implicit superiority.
Maury Rothbard mentioned in this book is another one that sucked me into their racist world view and this author brings receipts on what they really meant in their guise of anarcho-libertarianism.
I’m positively inclined towards this book because at one time I was a true believer in the bastards of Hayek and have no one to blame but myself for my wrong headedness, mea maxima culpa. Today, I see the same rot coming from MAGA and they have usurped the ideologies of the racist featured in this book. They haven’t disappeared they’ve just renamed themselves. Rand Paul had to defend as real the immigration super highway cutting across the country from Mexico to Canada back in 2016. The bigots still exist they just have different conspiracy theories that they embrace.
I’m sort of loving the split in Hayek’s step-bastard children between Nick Fuentes and the Ben Shapiro wings of MAGA over the last week or so. They both hate women, brown and black people, gay people, transgender, Democrats, atheists, but differ on Jews verse Muslims. MAGA sublimates libertarians who usually don’t care about religion. They all fall under the same umbrella while MAGA wants Christian Nationalists and Libertarians prefer no religion at all for their nationalism. They both want the hate and division and Thiel and Musk want to sacrifice us on their imaginary altars while acting as our saviors. Hayek is their north star. It’s not hard to read Hayek and realize that fascists, racists, Christianists, Libertarians, and MAGA would evolve from his writings.
I enjoyed seeing the history of how I deceived myself into believing Hayek’s bunk and his bastard children. This shows the rot behind the ideology and how at their core they want to make us their servants through their conspiratorial substance free ‘science.’
September 28, 2025
“This book is a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing. Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it. Our genealogies of their ideas are X-rays that leave little doubt.”
So ends this exhaustive (and exhausting) examination by Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian of the multiple (and multiplying) ideological strains that make up the relentless surge of right-wing authoritarianism and deformed libertarianism now evident around the world - from Trump in the US to Modi in India to Milei in Argentina.
A common assessment of the right-wing backlash of the years since the global financial crisis is that it represents a popular revolt against neoliberalism - the dominant ideology of the 1980s to early 2000s. But Slobodian’s thesis is that the rise of today’s alt-right, new right, new fusionist, paleo-libertarian and all the other byzantine flavours of reactionary politics in the 2020s are an extension of neo-liberalism, not an opposition to it.
As many other recent books on political economy have charted, neoliberalism was first championed after WWII by a group of public intellectuals who believed fascism had been a knee-jerk response to the growth of socialism. These thinkers, led by Austrian philosopher Friedrich Hayek and meeting under the name of the Mt Pelerin Society, argued for what they called ‘free markets’ and the rights of the individual against an ever encroaching totalitarian state.
However, In the 30 years after 1945, a period when capital in western democracies made a highly successful accommodation with labour in the face of opposition from Soviet Communism, the neo-libertarians were largely ignored as a fringe group fighting old wars. What altered this landscape was the sudden breakdown of the Keynesian consensus on economics in the stagflation of the early 1970s. A new operating system was called for and in came Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. Indeed, the latter famously confronted doubtful Cabinet colleagues by pulling a copy of Hayek’s 1944 classic ‘The Road to Serfdom’ out of her handbag and declaring: “THIS is what we believe.”
A decade or so later after the imposition of this revolution - marked by inflation-crushing interest rates, privatisation, market liberalisation and the defeat of trade union solidarity - neo-liberalism looked to have won. The Soviet empire had collapsed, communism had been defeated and intellectuals were lining up to declare victory for western liberal democracy and free market economics.
But many in the neoliberal camp, high on their own supply, were still not happy. While the ‘reds’ had been defeated, they saw new threats in the rise of green politics, environmentalism, civil rights, social programs, feminist theory and racial diversity programs. An economic revolution was not enough. The entire post-war program of liberal social policy also had to be unwound. Biology now replaced economic theory as their touchstone.
Hayek’s ‘bastards’, to quote the title of Slobodian’s book, were committed to removing these new ‘roadblocks’ to ‘freedom’, as they saw it - in reality, the right of rich white men to make as much money as possible at the expense of everyone else’s and to not such much eliminate the state, but capture it for their own ends. (‘Drill, baby, drill’.)
So from the 1990s, we have seen wave after wave of ‘thinkers’ claiming a scientific basis for ideas like racial and male supremacy, authoritarianism, the rule of intellectual elites and the unwinding of rights to abortion, equality of education and state-funded healthcare. There wasn’t much about this that was ‘liberal’. It was the ugliest form of reactionary politics, but it served the same ends as post-Cold War neoliberalism in increasing inequality, destroying safety nets and unwinding social democracy.
Indeed, Slobodian explains that much of what these offspring of Hayek proclaim reflects not a thought-out ideology but a superficial grab for attention using shock tactics in an economy overloaded with information. The resentment of ordinary people at the excesses of neoliberalism is real and understandable, but Hayek’s bastards are redirecting the popular anger toward the very victims of market fundamentalism. And in doing so, they serve the real powerbases - the billionaires of Silicon Valley, the fossil fuel-funded think tanks of Washington and London, the media owners seeking to monetise outrage and the outright fascists seeking a cloak of respectability for their vile ideas.
The currency for these nasty, opportunist thugs - Argentina’s bouffant-haired, chainsaw-wielding president Milei is a typical example - is hatred of women, a celebration of violent machismo and a desire for attention. They thrive and profit on prophecies of doom and they persuade ordinary people that the uncertainty they feel is due to the people trying to use the resources of the state to end the suffering of the least fortunate. In contrast, using the state to feather the nests of their wealthy patrons is just fine.
“Moments of global economic crisis allow for the breakthrough of eccentric and (for some) exhilaratingly novel forms of politics, but they do not appear from nowhere: they have their own intellectual lineages and material preconditions,” Slobodian writes.
‘These are attention plays in an economy where attention is a scarce resource. Their strategy is to hit the same notes with a sledgehammer, the ones their consumers expected to hear: The crisis is around the corner. The crash is coming. The status quo is doomed. All assumptions must be undone. Taboos must shatter, the unspoken said aloud. Your liberty is at risk. Act now and act quickly. The centralisers are coming. The socialists are coming. The refugees are coming. The gold requisitioners are coming. The authorities are coming. The state is coming (even if we are the state). The alarmism is entrepreneurial. The klaxon is a pitch.”
The grim, destructive nature of these appalling people and their crackpot, half-baked ideas is depressing. Even more so is their success in not just influencing power, but in the case of the people behind Trump II, capturing the state itself and attempting to destroy what is left of democratic institutions.
My criticism of the book is about the level of detail it goes to in the middle chapters about the many, many strands of this disease in western ‘thought’. It becomes pretty clear early on in Slobodian’s account that most of Hayek’s illegitimate ideological offspring are flakes. Most of them are closet (or overt) racists or men who have a problem with smart, capable women or just opportunistic attention seekers whose business model is manufacturing outrage. In other words, there is not a lot of substance to their ‘ideas’. They are trawling for clicks among (mainly) poorly educated white men resentful about diversity, inclusion, the social safety net and the energy transition, while applying to their diatribes a patina of intellectual respectability.
I kept thinking: ‘Yes, we get it. They’re idiots. But WHY is this happening and why are these clearly crackpot chancers chewing up so much bandwidth?’ We knew there was a ready market for a backlash to the injustices and obscene inequality wrought by neoliberalism, but why has it been these bastard offspring of the movement’s own intellectual godfather who have best exploited that need??
In other words, I could have done with less of the forensic study of the evolution of the far right’s many rancid tributaries and more of an examination of the vacuum on the left that has paved the way for the ascension of this miserable, opportunistic bunch of reprobates.
But maybe that’s another book - ‘Keynes’ Kids’?
So ends this exhaustive (and exhausting) examination by Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian of the multiple (and multiplying) ideological strains that make up the relentless surge of right-wing authoritarianism and deformed libertarianism now evident around the world - from Trump in the US to Modi in India to Milei in Argentina.
A common assessment of the right-wing backlash of the years since the global financial crisis is that it represents a popular revolt against neoliberalism - the dominant ideology of the 1980s to early 2000s. But Slobodian’s thesis is that the rise of today’s alt-right, new right, new fusionist, paleo-libertarian and all the other byzantine flavours of reactionary politics in the 2020s are an extension of neo-liberalism, not an opposition to it.
As many other recent books on political economy have charted, neoliberalism was first championed after WWII by a group of public intellectuals who believed fascism had been a knee-jerk response to the growth of socialism. These thinkers, led by Austrian philosopher Friedrich Hayek and meeting under the name of the Mt Pelerin Society, argued for what they called ‘free markets’ and the rights of the individual against an ever encroaching totalitarian state.
However, In the 30 years after 1945, a period when capital in western democracies made a highly successful accommodation with labour in the face of opposition from Soviet Communism, the neo-libertarians were largely ignored as a fringe group fighting old wars. What altered this landscape was the sudden breakdown of the Keynesian consensus on economics in the stagflation of the early 1970s. A new operating system was called for and in came Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. Indeed, the latter famously confronted doubtful Cabinet colleagues by pulling a copy of Hayek’s 1944 classic ‘The Road to Serfdom’ out of her handbag and declaring: “THIS is what we believe.”
A decade or so later after the imposition of this revolution - marked by inflation-crushing interest rates, privatisation, market liberalisation and the defeat of trade union solidarity - neo-liberalism looked to have won. The Soviet empire had collapsed, communism had been defeated and intellectuals were lining up to declare victory for western liberal democracy and free market economics.
But many in the neoliberal camp, high on their own supply, were still not happy. While the ‘reds’ had been defeated, they saw new threats in the rise of green politics, environmentalism, civil rights, social programs, feminist theory and racial diversity programs. An economic revolution was not enough. The entire post-war program of liberal social policy also had to be unwound. Biology now replaced economic theory as their touchstone.
Hayek’s ‘bastards’, to quote the title of Slobodian’s book, were committed to removing these new ‘roadblocks’ to ‘freedom’, as they saw it - in reality, the right of rich white men to make as much money as possible at the expense of everyone else’s and to not such much eliminate the state, but capture it for their own ends. (‘Drill, baby, drill’.)
So from the 1990s, we have seen wave after wave of ‘thinkers’ claiming a scientific basis for ideas like racial and male supremacy, authoritarianism, the rule of intellectual elites and the unwinding of rights to abortion, equality of education and state-funded healthcare. There wasn’t much about this that was ‘liberal’. It was the ugliest form of reactionary politics, but it served the same ends as post-Cold War neoliberalism in increasing inequality, destroying safety nets and unwinding social democracy.
Indeed, Slobodian explains that much of what these offspring of Hayek proclaim reflects not a thought-out ideology but a superficial grab for attention using shock tactics in an economy overloaded with information. The resentment of ordinary people at the excesses of neoliberalism is real and understandable, but Hayek’s bastards are redirecting the popular anger toward the very victims of market fundamentalism. And in doing so, they serve the real powerbases - the billionaires of Silicon Valley, the fossil fuel-funded think tanks of Washington and London, the media owners seeking to monetise outrage and the outright fascists seeking a cloak of respectability for their vile ideas.
The currency for these nasty, opportunist thugs - Argentina’s bouffant-haired, chainsaw-wielding president Milei is a typical example - is hatred of women, a celebration of violent machismo and a desire for attention. They thrive and profit on prophecies of doom and they persuade ordinary people that the uncertainty they feel is due to the people trying to use the resources of the state to end the suffering of the least fortunate. In contrast, using the state to feather the nests of their wealthy patrons is just fine.
“Moments of global economic crisis allow for the breakthrough of eccentric and (for some) exhilaratingly novel forms of politics, but they do not appear from nowhere: they have their own intellectual lineages and material preconditions,” Slobodian writes.
‘These are attention plays in an economy where attention is a scarce resource. Their strategy is to hit the same notes with a sledgehammer, the ones their consumers expected to hear: The crisis is around the corner. The crash is coming. The status quo is doomed. All assumptions must be undone. Taboos must shatter, the unspoken said aloud. Your liberty is at risk. Act now and act quickly. The centralisers are coming. The socialists are coming. The refugees are coming. The gold requisitioners are coming. The authorities are coming. The state is coming (even if we are the state). The alarmism is entrepreneurial. The klaxon is a pitch.”
The grim, destructive nature of these appalling people and their crackpot, half-baked ideas is depressing. Even more so is their success in not just influencing power, but in the case of the people behind Trump II, capturing the state itself and attempting to destroy what is left of democratic institutions.
My criticism of the book is about the level of detail it goes to in the middle chapters about the many, many strands of this disease in western ‘thought’. It becomes pretty clear early on in Slobodian’s account that most of Hayek’s illegitimate ideological offspring are flakes. Most of them are closet (or overt) racists or men who have a problem with smart, capable women or just opportunistic attention seekers whose business model is manufacturing outrage. In other words, there is not a lot of substance to their ‘ideas’. They are trawling for clicks among (mainly) poorly educated white men resentful about diversity, inclusion, the social safety net and the energy transition, while applying to their diatribes a patina of intellectual respectability.
I kept thinking: ‘Yes, we get it. They’re idiots. But WHY is this happening and why are these clearly crackpot chancers chewing up so much bandwidth?’ We knew there was a ready market for a backlash to the injustices and obscene inequality wrought by neoliberalism, but why has it been these bastard offspring of the movement’s own intellectual godfather who have best exploited that need??
In other words, I could have done with less of the forensic study of the evolution of the far right’s many rancid tributaries and more of an examination of the vacuum on the left that has paved the way for the ascension of this miserable, opportunistic bunch of reprobates.
But maybe that’s another book - ‘Keynes’ Kids’?
September 21, 2025
One of those books that re-affirms the opposing views it intends to denigrate.
Nonetheless, it was a good book on the history of the modern far right, starting from the libertarian roots all the way to current day figures like Curtis Yarvin.
But the supposed links between hard money and race realism, hereditary genetics etc. are not really explored, only shown as shared ideas between this sect of the right. Why is one attracted towards ideas of hard borders if one is also attracted towards ideas of hard money? Or why do the opposite set of beliefs tend to accommodate each other? Maybe one should read some Moldbug to figure that out.
Nonetheless, it was a good book on the history of the modern far right, starting from the libertarian roots all the way to current day figures like Curtis Yarvin.
But the supposed links between hard money and race realism, hereditary genetics etc. are not really explored, only shown as shared ideas between this sect of the right. Why is one attracted towards ideas of hard borders if one is also attracted towards ideas of hard money? Or why do the opposite set of beliefs tend to accommodate each other? Maybe one should read some Moldbug to figure that out.
August 2, 2025
This book does very important work of showing how old-fashioned race science and eugenics are a driving force for seemingly dry economic ideas. Really eloquently portrays how destructive this pernicious far-right ideology is, and how bananas these shitheads are. If only they didn't have so much power now....
May 24, 2025
It's fantastic. We think of the far-right as racist and identitarian, and this book really narrows down that that did not come out of nowhere. As Slobodian notes, modern scholarship on the far-right barely mentions capitalism, and he really adds to the body of work by slotting the economic aspect in.
Must read for understanding and combating hate everywhere.
Must read for understanding and combating hate everywhere.
July 31, 2025
"Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a 'frontlash' within it. Our genealogies of their ideas are X-rays that leave little doubt."
A deeply considered and thorough work that charts the interplay between neoliberalism and contemporary 'far right' ideology, and concludes, successfully, that our current reactionary turn is not a backlash to neoliberal capitalism - but an intensification of its logics and its project. The detail is overwhelming, and it charts a global network of thinkers and thoughts, recurring and mutating in diverse national, economic and political contexts.
The only gap in Slobodian's work, in my view, is a brief explorations of the ubiquitous funders and purveyors of dark money - they're ever-present in this book through the vast astro-turfed network of bullshit think tanks, societies and foundations which characterise the Right, but their agency and influence is not directly explored.
A deeply considered and thorough work that charts the interplay between neoliberalism and contemporary 'far right' ideology, and concludes, successfully, that our current reactionary turn is not a backlash to neoliberal capitalism - but an intensification of its logics and its project. The detail is overwhelming, and it charts a global network of thinkers and thoughts, recurring and mutating in diverse national, economic and political contexts.
The only gap in Slobodian's work, in my view, is a brief explorations of the ubiquitous funders and purveyors of dark money - they're ever-present in this book through the vast astro-turfed network of bullshit think tanks, societies and foundations which characterise the Right, but their agency and influence is not directly explored.
Read
June 15, 2025Es muy interesante como muchos de los elementos aquí presentes, constituyentes de la ideología reaccionaria actual, ya fueron analizados por Lukács, allá por los 50s, en el infáme Asalto a la Razón. El viraje a las ciencias "duras", a la biología y la genética, el no tan oculto tanteo con el darwinismo social, y la adecuación de un legado "anarquista" (anti-estatal, anti-fronteras) que se contradice con el marco de políticas de estado sostenidas por tales autores (desde el control de fronteras, de la "pileta" genética de los estado nación, la herencia de la raza y el coeficiente intelectual, etc); todas ellas, constituyen el nuevo conjunto de estrategias políticas, hoy en día ya de masas, de la reacción más pútrida y rampante del capital, cada vez más cercana a su hermana de los años 30s del siglo pasado.
August 9, 2025
A lot more formal than I expected, written with intricate argumentation with references to economic and political writers/scholars and their publications, but nonetheless engaging in exposing the banality of widespread pseudoscientific prejudice within these circles, as well their apparent immortality over the last century, and resurgence in our time.
One would have to be better read in theory to really appreciate this but it fills a few gaps in understanding the very faint background to today’s combative and contradictory far right
One would have to be better read in theory to really appreciate this but it fills a few gaps in understanding the very faint background to today’s combative and contradictory far right
October 4, 2025
Go read!
November 8, 2025
Needed to be much longer. A very important text though in connecting the history of libertarians to the far-right.
May 1, 2025
im besten Sinne gegenwärtige Ideengeschichte, die tief im Dreck wühlt, manchmal aber doch zu anekdotisch bleibt
October 27, 2025
pwn the (paleoneo)lib(ertarian)s
June 11, 2025
I found the first 80 or so pages of this book incredibly engaging and enlightening. But then, for me at least, it turned into a slog, and it was very difficult to keep turning the pages because it felt like, "Haven't we already gone over this?"
I would recommend this book if you're looking for a definitive, well-cited, well-researched exposé on the racist foundations of neoliberal economics and how figures like those in the Mont Pelerin Society use biological determinism and claims about IQ differences to argue against equality. It's a useful resource for understanding how these ideas have bolstered violent, racist economic paradigms. You can see that what is happening today (2025) in America have their roots in discussions happening in the late 1940's early 1950's.
However, after about 80 pages, I was ready to move on. This seems to be a pattern for me with Quinn's books. His previous work Cracked Up Capitalism had the same issue. The books start strong but lose momentum due to repetition and what feels like piling on when the point has already been made.
In my opinion, this would make a great 10,000-word piece in the New Left Review that you could read in an hour and a half on a weekend. I think you'd learn the exact same amount as reading this entire book.
I would recommend this book if you're looking for a definitive, well-cited, well-researched exposé on the racist foundations of neoliberal economics and how figures like those in the Mont Pelerin Society use biological determinism and claims about IQ differences to argue against equality. It's a useful resource for understanding how these ideas have bolstered violent, racist economic paradigms. You can see that what is happening today (2025) in America have their roots in discussions happening in the late 1940's early 1950's.
However, after about 80 pages, I was ready to move on. This seems to be a pattern for me with Quinn's books. His previous work Cracked Up Capitalism had the same issue. The books start strong but lose momentum due to repetition and what feels like piling on when the point has already been made.
In my opinion, this would make a great 10,000-word piece in the New Left Review that you could read in an hour and a half on a weekend. I think you'd learn the exact same amount as reading this entire book.
October 20, 2025
I have been waiting for this book for some time. Probably it is no wonder that (sadly) Quinn Slobodian has deleted his accounts (both TW and blsky - from what I gather). It has been infinitely rewarding to follow his quips about the various antics of the ancaps and also his sheer discombobulation at how weird it has become to see some of the intellectual strains he zoomed in -land in governmental positions, and now constantly promote the "Volk Capital" party line.
I am aware that he could have dedicated a bit more to the media - and the conduits that produced the recent far-right market fundamentalist hybrids, but he did a nice job with following up the investment direct mail newsletters from the 1970s or how Ron Paul and other distributed to a their publics and readers conspiracy trash, antisemitic propaganda combined with alarmism about the imminent collapse of the world economy, while providing a promised antidote for a buck (or a bar or gold).
He follows the usual paleolibertarian villains (Rothbard Murray, Hans-Hermann Hoppe), the various schisms and splits, their conferences, statements, and articles, so you don't have to. His history is part of a new generation of historians of "bad ideas" (as he himself puts it), of ideas that have been churned in response to liberal democracy, Keynesian, and Bretton Woods, as well as the Communist/Marxist theoretical and practical output. What is new is that the moment of triumphalism of the early 1990s has been misread (in their view) as unanimous or as ideologically inert, while in fact the three hard (hard money, hard borders, and hard culture/genes) have been fused under the "new fusionist" strain (in contrast with the old fusionist that combined traditional values, religion with free market ideas). Hayek's Bastards also expands on the often quoted "Whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism" by Horkheimer.
Instead of a backlash, we are now in the midst of a frontlash between various factions and right-wing alliances of ancaps, economic nativists, ethno-nationalists, techno-fascists, sovereignists (especially in Romania), and paleolibertarians.
Hayek's Bastards is notable in that it goes to the masters of Austrian libertarian economics (Hayek, Mises) orthodoxy while pointing up the various ways their thinking was bent, misread, or completely remade by the new fusionists, while at the same time never letting the masters off the hook, when they actually left room for interpretation or claims about race theory let's say. For many still, this new right-wing zoo is absolutely impenetrable, and nobody really cares to taxonomize them or even try to discern their ideological makeup. It takes someone with lots of wit and patience like Slobodian to actually attend to the aberrations, hate-mongering, and operative dogmas of lunatics that actually hold positions of power nowadays and have been enjoying unparalleled structural advantages under late capitalism. Recently on a short visit back home in Romania, I had the chance to check out an economy history book from the 1950s socialist Romania, it was quite sobering to read the slim neoliberal chapter and the Austrian economics (Eugen von Böhm-Bawer, Carl Menger). It baffling to realize how marginal or at least how small this group was - and what a follow-up it had. Slobodian tracks this switch from the US paleos to the German post-Eurozone crisis paleolibertarian branching, but this 1950s book already mentions the German connection in regard to ordoliberalalism.
The best chapter in the book for me was the one dedicated to "auripatriots" or goldbugs. This book actually developed out of the previous Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy one and he had much more time to dig out the various venal links uniting the say Afd, finance, and various disaster capitalism promoters (let us go back to the gold standard schemes). In another crazy overlap, a lot of the work done on Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s, even those that identify Nixon's unmaking of the Bretton Woods as the true Singularity (from a leftist critical perspective), seems superficially to join the goldbugs in their general enmity against the powers of financialization. But here the comparison must stop since the Agorist (SEK3) anti-economist has quite different profit-making incentives in mind when he attacks central bankers. I also dealt with the Agorist frefan elsewhere https://sfitze.substack.com/p/sfitze-... on my substack.
Another thing that I thoroughly enjoy is the way Slobodian uses the speculative fictions/science fiction so beloved by frefans and the misreading of the SF literature by the ancaps and Volk Capitalists (something that Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right does at length) to delineate the libidinal charge of these movements. Many such books (Turner Diaries etc) have been analyzed elsewhere (including movies).
A key example is Alongside Night that works as a very literal manifestation and what if meta-narrative to the current goldbug and cryptobro paranoid worldview. It is also a book that none other than Milton Friedman called "A cautionary tale with a disturbing resemblance to past history and future possibilities".
The left (and the libs) risk disregarding such SF books and their potential literalization at their peril, and there are a few out there - and few are as important in being actively used to exacerbate and feed the xenophobic imaginary of today's European (and US) right-wing parties as the The Camp of the Saints. Slobodian takes turns with all of these books and imaginaries, including ones like more proper cyberpunk ones from the 80s and 90s Snow Crash, specifically explaining why they were never read as warnings or satires or warnings but as blueprints for the new fusionists and anti-democratic exiters.
I am aware that he could have dedicated a bit more to the media - and the conduits that produced the recent far-right market fundamentalist hybrids, but he did a nice job with following up the investment direct mail newsletters from the 1970s or how Ron Paul and other distributed to a their publics and readers conspiracy trash, antisemitic propaganda combined with alarmism about the imminent collapse of the world economy, while providing a promised antidote for a buck (or a bar or gold).
He follows the usual paleolibertarian villains (Rothbard Murray, Hans-Hermann Hoppe), the various schisms and splits, their conferences, statements, and articles, so you don't have to. His history is part of a new generation of historians of "bad ideas" (as he himself puts it), of ideas that have been churned in response to liberal democracy, Keynesian, and Bretton Woods, as well as the Communist/Marxist theoretical and practical output. What is new is that the moment of triumphalism of the early 1990s has been misread (in their view) as unanimous or as ideologically inert, while in fact the three hard (hard money, hard borders, and hard culture/genes) have been fused under the "new fusionist" strain (in contrast with the old fusionist that combined traditional values, religion with free market ideas). Hayek's Bastards also expands on the often quoted "Whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism" by Horkheimer.
Instead of a backlash, we are now in the midst of a frontlash between various factions and right-wing alliances of ancaps, economic nativists, ethno-nationalists, techno-fascists, sovereignists (especially in Romania), and paleolibertarians.
Hayek's Bastards is notable in that it goes to the masters of Austrian libertarian economics (Hayek, Mises) orthodoxy while pointing up the various ways their thinking was bent, misread, or completely remade by the new fusionists, while at the same time never letting the masters off the hook, when they actually left room for interpretation or claims about race theory let's say. For many still, this new right-wing zoo is absolutely impenetrable, and nobody really cares to taxonomize them or even try to discern their ideological makeup. It takes someone with lots of wit and patience like Slobodian to actually attend to the aberrations, hate-mongering, and operative dogmas of lunatics that actually hold positions of power nowadays and have been enjoying unparalleled structural advantages under late capitalism. Recently on a short visit back home in Romania, I had the chance to check out an economy history book from the 1950s socialist Romania, it was quite sobering to read the slim neoliberal chapter and the Austrian economics (Eugen von Böhm-Bawer, Carl Menger). It baffling to realize how marginal or at least how small this group was - and what a follow-up it had. Slobodian tracks this switch from the US paleos to the German post-Eurozone crisis paleolibertarian branching, but this 1950s book already mentions the German connection in regard to ordoliberalalism.
The best chapter in the book for me was the one dedicated to "auripatriots" or goldbugs. This book actually developed out of the previous Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy one and he had much more time to dig out the various venal links uniting the say Afd, finance, and various disaster capitalism promoters (let us go back to the gold standard schemes). In another crazy overlap, a lot of the work done on Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s, even those that identify Nixon's unmaking of the Bretton Woods as the true Singularity (from a leftist critical perspective), seems superficially to join the goldbugs in their general enmity against the powers of financialization. But here the comparison must stop since the Agorist (SEK3) anti-economist has quite different profit-making incentives in mind when he attacks central bankers. I also dealt with the Agorist frefan elsewhere https://sfitze.substack.com/p/sfitze-... on my substack.
Another thing that I thoroughly enjoy is the way Slobodian uses the speculative fictions/science fiction so beloved by frefans and the misreading of the SF literature by the ancaps and Volk Capitalists (something that Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right does at length) to delineate the libidinal charge of these movements. Many such books (Turner Diaries etc) have been analyzed elsewhere (including movies).
A key example is Alongside Night that works as a very literal manifestation and what if meta-narrative to the current goldbug and cryptobro paranoid worldview. It is also a book that none other than Milton Friedman called "A cautionary tale with a disturbing resemblance to past history and future possibilities".
The left (and the libs) risk disregarding such SF books and their potential literalization at their peril, and there are a few out there - and few are as important in being actively used to exacerbate and feed the xenophobic imaginary of today's European (and US) right-wing parties as the The Camp of the Saints. Slobodian takes turns with all of these books and imaginaries, including ones like more proper cyberpunk ones from the 80s and 90s Snow Crash, specifically explaining why they were never read as warnings or satires or warnings but as blueprints for the new fusionists and anti-democratic exiters.
July 23, 2025
This is a tough review to write.
For starters, Slobodian is a fine writer, and he provides an engaging historical review of the libertarian to far/alt/hard right pipeline (he views this as an extension of neo-liberalism as opposed to a backlash - a questionable claim).
However, his missives against hereditary genetics, population/group differences, IQ studies, dysgenic public policies, unfettered immigration, anti-elitism, and push back to central bank fiat creation are little more than just that - emotive hand-wringing and pearl clutching.
He provides little to no counter-arguments and there's a good reason for that: the blank-slatists/extreme egalitarians have little to none. Arguments against hard-wired culture, hard money, and hard borders are scant.
Nonetheless, a worthwhile read, if for no reason to simply understand a thread of the right albeit from the mouth of the screeching left.
For starters, Slobodian is a fine writer, and he provides an engaging historical review of the libertarian to far/alt/hard right pipeline (he views this as an extension of neo-liberalism as opposed to a backlash - a questionable claim).
However, his missives against hereditary genetics, population/group differences, IQ studies, dysgenic public policies, unfettered immigration, anti-elitism, and push back to central bank fiat creation are little more than just that - emotive hand-wringing and pearl clutching.
He provides little to no counter-arguments and there's a good reason for that: the blank-slatists/extreme egalitarians have little to none. Arguments against hard-wired culture, hard money, and hard borders are scant.
Nonetheless, a worthwhile read, if for no reason to simply understand a thread of the right albeit from the mouth of the screeching left.
April 24, 2025
I’ve been a fan of Slobodian’s work for a while, and he delivers another essential work here. This continues in the vein of his earlier monographs Globalists and Crack-Up Capitalism in historicizing the relationship between capitalism, liberalism, and the global right. I think Slobodian’s project is especially poignant for me, as I distinctly remember when it seemed that there was much more daylight between free market/libertarian ideology and white supremacy, war, and authoritarianism than there actually was. I was never sympathetic, but I thought maybe the ideology could stand on its own more than it has.
What Slobodian shows here is how, in the “End of History” era after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many free market zealots couldn’t rest easily on their laurels. Between the very real preexisting far-right commitments of many of the original neoliberals, the crises that the end of the Cold War left unresolved, and a need for a hook for further political action, a subsection of capitalist ideologues made a “new fusionism.” If post WWII American conservatism rested on a coalition of the religious, anti-government free-market proponents, and anticommunists (this was in their own telling- notice it doesn’t say “racists”), the new right-wing fusion would be between free market neoliberals and “paleos,” that is, racists, ethnonationalists, etc. Arguably, the most symbolic figure of the “new synthesis” is Murray Rothbard, the “anarcho-capitalist” ideologue. I say “arguably” because, at the end of the day, the neoliberal-paleocon synthesis, as I think Slobodian shows, advances more by the action of those who took some, but not all, of its premises, and agreed to fudge the rest to work towards the common goal of defeating anything progressive: Pat Buchanan, Charles Murray, Peter Brimelow, the hundreds of journalists and academics who smuggled their rank bigotries and sophistries into mainstream conversations, eventually the influencers and meme-lords of today, up to and including the actual current president of Argentina and, in a less direct way, the president of the United States.
Slobodian finely threads the needle between the original neoliberals around the Mont Pelerin Society and the new synthesis. They truly are Friedrich von Hayek’s bastards- not his legitimate heirs, but sharing plenty of his DNA. It’s true that Hayek turned towards “cultural explanations” for inequality towards the end of his life, and agreed that efforts to protect/advance the cultures that supposedly allowed for liberal capitalism were necessary to undertake. True to form though, he refused to quantify these cultural differences or assign them firmly to any given demographics. You could more or less tell what they meant- it was pretty consistently white people they were “defending” from “forced integration” and/or “aggression,” from the Jim Crow US South to apartheid South Africa. This, more than any other issue, is what kickstarted political libertarianism in the US. That said, Hayek, Friedman, and political epigones like Goldwater and Reagan all claimed that the free market was for everyone, foreswore bigotry as irrational, etc. That they had to deflect to “freedom of association” to fight civil rights is the hypocrisy-tax they paid to the virtue they understood broad human freedom to be. But from Rothbard on down, other libertarians who rubbed elbows at Mont Pelerin conferences were more than happy to spell the implications out, aloud, along predictable lines.
The new fusion didn’t just provide an alliance between cultural conservatism and neoliberalism, one that could outlast the disastrous neoconservative coalition when it shat the bed in the Middle East and everywhere else. It also reestablished the right in an intellectual foundation of supposedly hard realities. For all the emphasis the likes of Milton Friedman put on the “free flow” of money, goods, ideas, and sometimes people, their ideological neighbors in the new fusion preferred more solid metaphors. IQ, supposedly, is “hard-wired,” in the genes. These genes in turn supposedly run along hard lines of descent bound to racial, ethnic, and national groups. They then reinscribe these supposedly immutable differences (based on made up and arbitrary racial and national groups) to insist on the need for need hard borders, in order to keep undesirables, those not programmed by the aforementioned genes to succeed in capitalism, out. Hard money, too, in the form of gold or, eventually, the hard logic of the blockchain, would separate the strong, thoughtful, and provident from the weak suckers who think that society, in the form of government and its papers, could, would, or should care about them (they’d be the ones who could fight off the low-IQ foreign hordes, too, in their own imagining). Slobodian combs through a wonderful array of sources, from the performatively (pseudo)-intellectual world of post-war eugenics, to goldbug survivalist fora which dovetailed with the once-lively world of investment advice newsletters to a few different flavors of science fiction to show us how this new fusion formed and spread. Among other things, Hayek’s Bastards shines as an example of a growing historical literature of just how fucking weird the nineties and aughts really were.
That all of this is based in junk science ala Charles Murray, junk economics, fetishism of various kinds (commodity, race, gender, violence, take your pick), doesn’t really deter anyone invested in this new fusionism or its constituent parts. These supposedly hard facts that ground them in reality are more like feelings, and the right is going to oblige all of us to care about them. Slobodian was also co-author of the paper that introduced the concept of “diagonalism” to explain the appeal of authoritarian movements – MAGA, AfD in Germany, anti-vax and transphobia everywhere – hooked in crunchy, notionally-libertarian or apolitical types in a sort of united front of “alternative facts” believers against the oppressive regime of… well, reality, and its harsh vibes. Diagonalism and the new fusionism are, at the very least, sitting at the same lunch table, if not cousins (or weird scifi clones).
The neoliberal project, from its beginnings in interwar Vienna, has always been about encasing the market as an institution from democratic pressure. More than the chaos that free marketeers supposedly thrive off of, the most important neoliberal thinkers emphasized institutions (constitutions, nations, banking authorities, courts, etc) that could act as bulwarks against the supposedly corrosive action of the masses. I would say it wasn’t just fringe kooks taking the neoliberal oriflamme from the “respectable” hands of the Hayeks of the world. Post-Cold War (and post 9/11, post-GWOT, post-2008, post-Tea Party, on and on), it was those kooks who helped give the right, as a broader project of the defense of privilege, and neoliberalism with it, new life. And Slobodian produces an uncanny effect in his writing (at least for this child of the end of history period) by displaying just how porous the line between kook and respectable always was, not just intellectually but institutionally and even socially- the connections have always been there. And he does this without the kind of reductionism you so often see in “the discourse” - “of course, they were always nazis from the word go,” etc etc, which might be handy in a social media dustup but less so for a thoroughgoing understanding of what’s going on.
All this, in a slim (under 200 pages), readable, and often highly entertaining book. Go read it!
What Slobodian shows here is how, in the “End of History” era after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many free market zealots couldn’t rest easily on their laurels. Between the very real preexisting far-right commitments of many of the original neoliberals, the crises that the end of the Cold War left unresolved, and a need for a hook for further political action, a subsection of capitalist ideologues made a “new fusionism.” If post WWII American conservatism rested on a coalition of the religious, anti-government free-market proponents, and anticommunists (this was in their own telling- notice it doesn’t say “racists”), the new right-wing fusion would be between free market neoliberals and “paleos,” that is, racists, ethnonationalists, etc. Arguably, the most symbolic figure of the “new synthesis” is Murray Rothbard, the “anarcho-capitalist” ideologue. I say “arguably” because, at the end of the day, the neoliberal-paleocon synthesis, as I think Slobodian shows, advances more by the action of those who took some, but not all, of its premises, and agreed to fudge the rest to work towards the common goal of defeating anything progressive: Pat Buchanan, Charles Murray, Peter Brimelow, the hundreds of journalists and academics who smuggled their rank bigotries and sophistries into mainstream conversations, eventually the influencers and meme-lords of today, up to and including the actual current president of Argentina and, in a less direct way, the president of the United States.
Slobodian finely threads the needle between the original neoliberals around the Mont Pelerin Society and the new synthesis. They truly are Friedrich von Hayek’s bastards- not his legitimate heirs, but sharing plenty of his DNA. It’s true that Hayek turned towards “cultural explanations” for inequality towards the end of his life, and agreed that efforts to protect/advance the cultures that supposedly allowed for liberal capitalism were necessary to undertake. True to form though, he refused to quantify these cultural differences or assign them firmly to any given demographics. You could more or less tell what they meant- it was pretty consistently white people they were “defending” from “forced integration” and/or “aggression,” from the Jim Crow US South to apartheid South Africa. This, more than any other issue, is what kickstarted political libertarianism in the US. That said, Hayek, Friedman, and political epigones like Goldwater and Reagan all claimed that the free market was for everyone, foreswore bigotry as irrational, etc. That they had to deflect to “freedom of association” to fight civil rights is the hypocrisy-tax they paid to the virtue they understood broad human freedom to be. But from Rothbard on down, other libertarians who rubbed elbows at Mont Pelerin conferences were more than happy to spell the implications out, aloud, along predictable lines.
The new fusion didn’t just provide an alliance between cultural conservatism and neoliberalism, one that could outlast the disastrous neoconservative coalition when it shat the bed in the Middle East and everywhere else. It also reestablished the right in an intellectual foundation of supposedly hard realities. For all the emphasis the likes of Milton Friedman put on the “free flow” of money, goods, ideas, and sometimes people, their ideological neighbors in the new fusion preferred more solid metaphors. IQ, supposedly, is “hard-wired,” in the genes. These genes in turn supposedly run along hard lines of descent bound to racial, ethnic, and national groups. They then reinscribe these supposedly immutable differences (based on made up and arbitrary racial and national groups) to insist on the need for need hard borders, in order to keep undesirables, those not programmed by the aforementioned genes to succeed in capitalism, out. Hard money, too, in the form of gold or, eventually, the hard logic of the blockchain, would separate the strong, thoughtful, and provident from the weak suckers who think that society, in the form of government and its papers, could, would, or should care about them (they’d be the ones who could fight off the low-IQ foreign hordes, too, in their own imagining). Slobodian combs through a wonderful array of sources, from the performatively (pseudo)-intellectual world of post-war eugenics, to goldbug survivalist fora which dovetailed with the once-lively world of investment advice newsletters to a few different flavors of science fiction to show us how this new fusion formed and spread. Among other things, Hayek’s Bastards shines as an example of a growing historical literature of just how fucking weird the nineties and aughts really were.
That all of this is based in junk science ala Charles Murray, junk economics, fetishism of various kinds (commodity, race, gender, violence, take your pick), doesn’t really deter anyone invested in this new fusionism or its constituent parts. These supposedly hard facts that ground them in reality are more like feelings, and the right is going to oblige all of us to care about them. Slobodian was also co-author of the paper that introduced the concept of “diagonalism” to explain the appeal of authoritarian movements – MAGA, AfD in Germany, anti-vax and transphobia everywhere – hooked in crunchy, notionally-libertarian or apolitical types in a sort of united front of “alternative facts” believers against the oppressive regime of… well, reality, and its harsh vibes. Diagonalism and the new fusionism are, at the very least, sitting at the same lunch table, if not cousins (or weird scifi clones).
The neoliberal project, from its beginnings in interwar Vienna, has always been about encasing the market as an institution from democratic pressure. More than the chaos that free marketeers supposedly thrive off of, the most important neoliberal thinkers emphasized institutions (constitutions, nations, banking authorities, courts, etc) that could act as bulwarks against the supposedly corrosive action of the masses. I would say it wasn’t just fringe kooks taking the neoliberal oriflamme from the “respectable” hands of the Hayeks of the world. Post-Cold War (and post 9/11, post-GWOT, post-2008, post-Tea Party, on and on), it was those kooks who helped give the right, as a broader project of the defense of privilege, and neoliberalism with it, new life. And Slobodian produces an uncanny effect in his writing (at least for this child of the end of history period) by displaying just how porous the line between kook and respectable always was, not just intellectually but institutionally and even socially- the connections have always been there. And he does this without the kind of reductionism you so often see in “the discourse” - “of course, they were always nazis from the word go,” etc etc, which might be handy in a social media dustup but less so for a thoroughgoing understanding of what’s going on.
All this, in a slim (under 200 pages), readable, and often highly entertaining book. Go read it!
September 9, 2025
I struggle to see who this book is really for. The big conclusion consisting of ideas such as "the far right is a warped investment strategy" and "rich people sometimes lie to protect their interests" doesn't seem particularly enlightening to those dialed in, yet the text is written in such an impenetrable fashion that I can't imagine anyone starting here would have a worthwhile experience.
November 14, 2025
I read this book because I've noticed an increase in people expressing ideas from the right – and some even supporting Trump. So I wanted to get a better understanding of where this leaning was coming from. Reading this book in Ireland, I was surprised to hear that a British alt-right propagandist called Richard Lynn lived on this island until recently. His poisonous writing is probably more prevalent on the other side of the Atlantic, but the ideas of him and his cohorts are being repackaged and leaking onto our streets and into online discourse. Here in Ireland, there aren't any elected politicians with those ideas, but as in the UK our elected politicians can be pushed more to the right.
Slobodian argues that what many people often describe as the rise of the populist right as a backlash against neoliberalism is actually more accurately a frontlash — i.e., the far-right today is not entirely opposed to the neoliberal order but in many cases a direct offspring of it.
He traces how neoliberal thinkers (drawing on Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and others) shifted from focusing purely on markets and deregulation to embracing arguments about human nature, race, IQ, hard money (gold), and boundaries — which then merged into far-right ideologies.
He has chapters on:
Hardwired human nature – i.e., there is no blank slate, no point in egalitarianism since we are hardwired for inequality already.
Hard borders keep non-white people out.
Hard money – buy gold now because the apocalypse is coming. And in Germany, you can get your gold from Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD).
He talks about nature vs culture in neoliberalism – he shows a divergence between neoliberals like Hayek, who allowed for cultural and social learning, and more extreme libertarian/racial-hierarchy thinkers (e.g., Murray Rothbard, Hans‑Hermann Hoppe) who rejected much of the cultural/social learning idea and instead leaned into biological determinism.
The final chapter is the best because it shines a light on the politicians who are in power today e.g. Milei in Argentina. The last paragraph in the book describes Milei's speech at Davos:
"He listed all the varieties of collectivism he opposed, including communists, fascists, social democrats, nationalists, national socialists, Nazis, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists, and globalists. He reserved his praise for the wealthy gathered in the room. ‘You are the true protagonists of this story,’ he said. ‘You are heroes.’ Like Jair Bolsonaro, Sebastian Kurz, and Donald Trump, who had spoken from the same stage before him, Milei spoke less as a defector from the global capitalist order than as its latest photogenic cheerleader. He posed for selfies with the managing director of the IMF after the show, just as he would pose later with Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk and take the stage at the Hoover Institution, introduced by its director, Condoleezza Rice. This book is a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing. Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it. Our genealogies of their ideas are X-rays that leave little doubt.”
In short: Slobodian suggests that the far-right is not entirely outside the neoliberal canon but is in large part its bastard offspring. The intellectual roots of modern libertarian-authoritarian hybrids lie in a neoliberal tradition that increasingly turned from mere economic freedom toward arguments about race, biology, culture, money and borders — thereby laying ideological foundations for what became the alt-right, populist right, and similar movements. It's very important to actively go out and get to know these people because they won't come up in your newsfeeds online if you're left-leaning.
Slobodian argues that what many people often describe as the rise of the populist right as a backlash against neoliberalism is actually more accurately a frontlash — i.e., the far-right today is not entirely opposed to the neoliberal order but in many cases a direct offspring of it.
He traces how neoliberal thinkers (drawing on Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and others) shifted from focusing purely on markets and deregulation to embracing arguments about human nature, race, IQ, hard money (gold), and boundaries — which then merged into far-right ideologies.
He has chapters on:
Hardwired human nature – i.e., there is no blank slate, no point in egalitarianism since we are hardwired for inequality already.
Hard borders keep non-white people out.
Hard money – buy gold now because the apocalypse is coming. And in Germany, you can get your gold from Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD).
He talks about nature vs culture in neoliberalism – he shows a divergence between neoliberals like Hayek, who allowed for cultural and social learning, and more extreme libertarian/racial-hierarchy thinkers (e.g., Murray Rothbard, Hans‑Hermann Hoppe) who rejected much of the cultural/social learning idea and instead leaned into biological determinism.
The final chapter is the best because it shines a light on the politicians who are in power today e.g. Milei in Argentina. The last paragraph in the book describes Milei's speech at Davos:
"He listed all the varieties of collectivism he opposed, including communists, fascists, social democrats, nationalists, national socialists, Nazis, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists, and globalists. He reserved his praise for the wealthy gathered in the room. ‘You are the true protagonists of this story,’ he said. ‘You are heroes.’ Like Jair Bolsonaro, Sebastian Kurz, and Donald Trump, who had spoken from the same stage before him, Milei spoke less as a defector from the global capitalist order than as its latest photogenic cheerleader. He posed for selfies with the managing director of the IMF after the show, just as he would pose later with Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk and take the stage at the Hoover Institution, introduced by its director, Condoleezza Rice. This book is a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing. Many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it. Our genealogies of their ideas are X-rays that leave little doubt.”
In short: Slobodian suggests that the far-right is not entirely outside the neoliberal canon but is in large part its bastard offspring. The intellectual roots of modern libertarian-authoritarian hybrids lie in a neoliberal tradition that increasingly turned from mere economic freedom toward arguments about race, biology, culture, money and borders — thereby laying ideological foundations for what became the alt-right, populist right, and similar movements. It's very important to actively go out and get to know these people because they won't come up in your newsfeeds online if you're left-leaning.
December 1, 2025
Na de val van de Berlijnse muur was het communisme wel verslagen, maar het was nog niet tijd voor de neoliberalen om op hun lauweren te gaan rusten: de verzorgingsstaat woekerde nog voort, al deden Thatcher en Reagan wel de nodige pogingen om die te slopen.
Gelijktijdig greep het gelijkheidsdenken van de jaren zeventig steeds verder om zich heen, wat leidde tot de burgerrechtenbeweging, feminisme, en de acceptatie van andere gendervarianten, kortom het ‘woke’ gedachtegoed. Dit lokte bij extreem-rechts een groeiende weerstand op tegen links. Ook werden vanuit die hoek schrikbeelden gedeeld over de illegale "massa"-immigratie en de ondergang van de witte beschaving. Het leidde tot de ‘alt-right’ beweging met een duidelijke ‘white-suprematistische’ insteek.
Zonder het neoliberalisme en het rechts populisme aan elkaar gelijk te stellen, is er al die jaren toch wel sympathie over en weer geweest. Ook de gedeelde weerstand tegen een te grote overheid bracht neoliberalen en rechts-populisten regelmatig samen op bijeenkomsten georganiseerd door de neoliberale Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), en het rechtse Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), gefinancierd door Charles Koch.
Quinn Slobodian, hoogleraar Internationale Geschiedenis aan de Universiteit van Boston, schreef eerder het boek Globalists, The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, waarin de beginjaren van de neoliberale beweging worden beschreven. In dit boek bespreekt hij het denken van de “volgelingen” van Friedrich Hayek, die het oorspronkelijke gedachtegoed van Hayek naar eigen inzichten aanpasten, zoals Charles Murray, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Peter Brimelow en Nathaniel Weyl. Feitelijk zijn dit vooral extreem-rechtse anarcho-kapitalisten, en geen echte neoliberalen, al steunen ze de neoliberale economische agenda. Omgekeerd zijn er ook genoeg neoliberalen met sympathie voor het libertaire gedachtegoed, zonder zich echt thuis te voelen in het extreem-rechtse kamp.
Heeft het neoliberalisme inderdaad, zoals Quinn Slobodian stelt, aan de wortel van het huidige rechts populisme gestaan? Heeft de terugtredende overheid, de marktwerking en de globalisering, de arbeider vervreemd van de sociaaldemocratie? Of heeft de arbeider met weinig materiële vooruitgang in de afgelopen decennia gekozen voor het eigen belang en tegen de collectieve voorzieningen en internationale solidariteit?
Het boek is op zich een aardige inventarisatie van de opkomst van de alt-right beweging, die een belangrijke bijdrage heeft geleverd aan de (her)verkiezing van Trump. Het neoliberalisme zelf komt in het boek maar zijdelings ter sprake en Quinn Slobodian doet niet echt veel moeite om de tegenstellingen tussen alt-right en het neoliberalisme nader toe te lichten (bv. nationalisme versus globalisme). Wel blijkt andermaal hoe mal al die anarcho- en tech-kapitalistische ideeën wel niet zijn.
Op zich dus een waardevol boek, al is het net als zijn vorige boek Globalists, weer een lange opsomming van namen, bijeenkomsten, seminars, en denktanks, al of niet gesponsord door rijke Amerikanen. Het boek is met zijn 60 pagina’s aan noten een mooie documentatie van het extreem-rechtse (alt-right) gedachtegoed, al is de lijn van het verhaal door de vele details vaak wat lastig te volgen.
Helaas adresseert hij niet de “woede” bij populistisch rechts. Veel linkse commentatoren verklaren die woede juist uit het heersende neoliberale beleid van overheden. Dan is het toch wel de vraag of gesproken kan worden van een fusie van neoliberalisme en populistisch rechts. Quinn Slobodian lost die puzzel helaas niet voor ons op.
Zie voor de volledige bespreking De neoliberalen en populistisch rechts
Gelijktijdig greep het gelijkheidsdenken van de jaren zeventig steeds verder om zich heen, wat leidde tot de burgerrechtenbeweging, feminisme, en de acceptatie van andere gendervarianten, kortom het ‘woke’ gedachtegoed. Dit lokte bij extreem-rechts een groeiende weerstand op tegen links. Ook werden vanuit die hoek schrikbeelden gedeeld over de illegale "massa"-immigratie en de ondergang van de witte beschaving. Het leidde tot de ‘alt-right’ beweging met een duidelijke ‘white-suprematistische’ insteek.
Zonder het neoliberalisme en het rechts populisme aan elkaar gelijk te stellen, is er al die jaren toch wel sympathie over en weer geweest. Ook de gedeelde weerstand tegen een te grote overheid bracht neoliberalen en rechts-populisten regelmatig samen op bijeenkomsten georganiseerd door de neoliberale Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), en het rechtse Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), gefinancierd door Charles Koch.
Quinn Slobodian, hoogleraar Internationale Geschiedenis aan de Universiteit van Boston, schreef eerder het boek Globalists, The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, waarin de beginjaren van de neoliberale beweging worden beschreven. In dit boek bespreekt hij het denken van de “volgelingen” van Friedrich Hayek, die het oorspronkelijke gedachtegoed van Hayek naar eigen inzichten aanpasten, zoals Charles Murray, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Peter Brimelow en Nathaniel Weyl. Feitelijk zijn dit vooral extreem-rechtse anarcho-kapitalisten, en geen echte neoliberalen, al steunen ze de neoliberale economische agenda. Omgekeerd zijn er ook genoeg neoliberalen met sympathie voor het libertaire gedachtegoed, zonder zich echt thuis te voelen in het extreem-rechtse kamp.
Heeft het neoliberalisme inderdaad, zoals Quinn Slobodian stelt, aan de wortel van het huidige rechts populisme gestaan? Heeft de terugtredende overheid, de marktwerking en de globalisering, de arbeider vervreemd van de sociaaldemocratie? Of heeft de arbeider met weinig materiële vooruitgang in de afgelopen decennia gekozen voor het eigen belang en tegen de collectieve voorzieningen en internationale solidariteit?
Het boek is op zich een aardige inventarisatie van de opkomst van de alt-right beweging, die een belangrijke bijdrage heeft geleverd aan de (her)verkiezing van Trump. Het neoliberalisme zelf komt in het boek maar zijdelings ter sprake en Quinn Slobodian doet niet echt veel moeite om de tegenstellingen tussen alt-right en het neoliberalisme nader toe te lichten (bv. nationalisme versus globalisme). Wel blijkt andermaal hoe mal al die anarcho- en tech-kapitalistische ideeën wel niet zijn.
Op zich dus een waardevol boek, al is het net als zijn vorige boek Globalists, weer een lange opsomming van namen, bijeenkomsten, seminars, en denktanks, al of niet gesponsord door rijke Amerikanen. Het boek is met zijn 60 pagina’s aan noten een mooie documentatie van het extreem-rechtse (alt-right) gedachtegoed, al is de lijn van het verhaal door de vele details vaak wat lastig te volgen.
Helaas adresseert hij niet de “woede” bij populistisch rechts. Veel linkse commentatoren verklaren die woede juist uit het heersende neoliberale beleid van overheden. Dan is het toch wel de vraag of gesproken kan worden van een fusie van neoliberalisme en populistisch rechts. Quinn Slobodian lost die puzzel helaas niet voor ons op.
Zie voor de volledige bespreking De neoliberalen en populistisch rechts
August 2, 2025
An intellectual history of certain strands of modern libertarian thought, post-1960s, emphasizing how a movement focused on free market ideas became a haven for a set of cultural views centered on racism, up to today's alt-right and fellow-travelers. I found the descriptions of various writers and organizers in the movement informative, particularly in areas less familiar to contemporary American observers, like the international spread of the movement in Europe and Latin America and the shared funding sources and interconnections between organizations, though laying out the commitments of the movement in an organized fashion does paint a clear picture of more familiar aspects.
On the other hand, the book has a fair bit less on why this collection of views came together, either historically or intellectually. It felt a bit like a notes dump on a collection of prominent racists, rather than a story of intellectual lineages. Having read Slobodian's previous book, Globalists, focused on the early members of the Mont Pelerin Society who influenced these thinkers, it may very well have been a somewhat hopeless attempt to make sense of the subsequent generations from the 1960s on. That doesn't mar the extensive description, but it does make one wonder why it took the shape it did; is it an inherent possibility (mostly) dormant in the earlier ideas? A natural affinity born of common psychological commitments or incentives? A response to changing circumstances? All are mentioned, but little effort is made to provide a full evaluation of causes, which I think is relevant because it is not clear, despite the prominence of the thinkers in the global right, that the intellectual history really matters for that development. Surely racism and economic conservatism were often paired well before the 1960s, and in modern times often without specific reference to the small group of intellectuals who were putting those ideas into print, making the specific focus on the pairing among Hayekians feel like a sideshow. Maybe just the fact that these were the main group of people writing down such arguments during the period in American life post Civil Rights act in which open racism became taboo is noteworthy, and it certainly is the case that contemporary movements have adopted many of their idiosyncrasies, like a focus on survivalism, IQ, and gold coins, but it's not clear that this group was really necessary for the modern racist revival.Instead, it seems possible, as hinted by the scattered references to wealthy funders in quotidian industries, like paper and plastics, and the investment newsletters that both disseminated and funded many of the goldbug race scientist doomsday preppers, that racism was simply already widespread and that these were just the people who got paid to write it down and provide a semi-respectable intellectual veneer. I'm not certain which way it goes, but if it is the latter then the history of that writing becomes at best a small part of a much larger picture.
On the other hand, the book has a fair bit less on why this collection of views came together, either historically or intellectually. It felt a bit like a notes dump on a collection of prominent racists, rather than a story of intellectual lineages. Having read Slobodian's previous book, Globalists, focused on the early members of the Mont Pelerin Society who influenced these thinkers, it may very well have been a somewhat hopeless attempt to make sense of the subsequent generations from the 1960s on. That doesn't mar the extensive description, but it does make one wonder why it took the shape it did; is it an inherent possibility (mostly) dormant in the earlier ideas? A natural affinity born of common psychological commitments or incentives? A response to changing circumstances? All are mentioned, but little effort is made to provide a full evaluation of causes, which I think is relevant because it is not clear, despite the prominence of the thinkers in the global right, that the intellectual history really matters for that development. Surely racism and economic conservatism were often paired well before the 1960s, and in modern times often without specific reference to the small group of intellectuals who were putting those ideas into print, making the specific focus on the pairing among Hayekians feel like a sideshow. Maybe just the fact that these were the main group of people writing down such arguments during the period in American life post Civil Rights act in which open racism became taboo is noteworthy, and it certainly is the case that contemporary movements have adopted many of their idiosyncrasies, like a focus on survivalism, IQ, and gold coins, but it's not clear that this group was really necessary for the modern racist revival.Instead, it seems possible, as hinted by the scattered references to wealthy funders in quotidian industries, like paper and plastics, and the investment newsletters that both disseminated and funded many of the goldbug race scientist doomsday preppers, that racism was simply already widespread and that these were just the people who got paid to write it down and provide a semi-respectable intellectual veneer. I'm not certain which way it goes, but if it is the latter then the history of that writing becomes at best a small part of a much larger picture.
October 26, 2025
A friend of mine said I should read this and so I tracked it down. I didn’t really notice who had written it – which is, unfortunately, almost standard for me. If I had, I might have noticed I’ve read two other books by the same author before. Both on neoliberalism. The thing is, even if you have read those books, you should probably get hold of this one too. Each of his books so far tackle the question from slightly different angles and few of the things discussed in one are discussed again in the next. Yep, neoliberalism has many sides – and not one of them appealing.
Much of this one is on the connection between the neoliberals and the new right – particularly in relation to questions of racial superiority and the impact of this supposed superiority on economics and economic policy. Essentially, their argument runs like this. Very soon science – cognitive and psychological, as well as biological and genetic – will prove the superiority of the white races and of men over women. This is inevitable and so all of the hippy nonsense from the 1960s will be overturned and ways of organising society so that everyone can take their proper place in the natural economic hierarchy.
While markets are wonderful things – it could well be that they only properly work for nice, white people. Also, while we are at it – democracy has clearly failed and so the genetically superior need to take over the running of society, even in nice white nations. We have to avoid the ‘great replacement’ of white people in white nations too.
There is also a lot on going back to gold. Ayn Rand has a lot to answer for.
If all of this sounds frighteningly familiar – well, it is. I knew I despised these people - but the depth of my disgust (they prefer to call it envy, I believe) now knows no limits.
Much of this one is on the connection between the neoliberals and the new right – particularly in relation to questions of racial superiority and the impact of this supposed superiority on economics and economic policy. Essentially, their argument runs like this. Very soon science – cognitive and psychological, as well as biological and genetic – will prove the superiority of the white races and of men over women. This is inevitable and so all of the hippy nonsense from the 1960s will be overturned and ways of organising society so that everyone can take their proper place in the natural economic hierarchy.
While markets are wonderful things – it could well be that they only properly work for nice, white people. Also, while we are at it – democracy has clearly failed and so the genetically superior need to take over the running of society, even in nice white nations. We have to avoid the ‘great replacement’ of white people in white nations too.
There is also a lot on going back to gold. Ayn Rand has a lot to answer for.
If all of this sounds frighteningly familiar – well, it is. I knew I despised these people - but the depth of my disgust (they prefer to call it envy, I believe) now knows no limits.
June 3, 2025
I should have reviewed this some time ago. I enjoyed it. History of ideas, but within living memory if, like me, you're well past middle age. Friedrich Hayek is the fellow that inspired Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, a mania for giving tax cuts to the rich, and the fire-sale of state assets which we know today as neo-liberalism. It turns out that his disciples were rum lot, some of them very interested in eugenics; also, it turns out that capitalism works best if it's managed by clever people, and certain races are cleverer than others (we've all been kept in the dark about this - socialists and their ilk are dragging us all down to their level). Slobodian traces many twists and turns among conferences, think-tanks, billionaires' foundations, private communications, and academic journals - there is quite a cast of academically distinguished people involved with this - to tell a compelling story of what informs much of today's bonkers right-wing extremism. It's very impressive research, and the book is a real page-turner, but at the end, with all the acronyms, unfamiliar names (foundations, think-tanks, etc., but also personal names), the takeaway is rather insubstantial - an impression of dark forces at work, but not much tangible to hold on to. I don't hold Slobodian responsible for this. It's the nature of his subject matter. Maybe in time, when others have taken up and expanded on the same material, it will become more familiar and seem less abstruse. I hope so.
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