A revelatory exploration of how today's rightwing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within itAfter the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated - and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek's disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote.
In this illuminating new book, historian Quinn Slobodian reveals how, from the 1990s onwards, neoliberal thinkers turned to nature, in an attempt to roll back social changes and to return to a hierarchy of gender, race and cultural difference. He explores how these thinkers drew on the language of science, from cognitive psychology to genetics, in order to justify the extension of competitive dynamics ever deeper into social life, and to advocate cultural homogeneity as a requirement for a functioning market-based order. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists that would become known as the alt-right.
Hayek's Bastards shows that many contemporary iterations of the Far Right, from Javier Milei to Donald Trump, emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but within it. As repellent as their politics may be, these supposed disruptors are not defectors from the neoliberal order, but its latest cheerleaders.
About the AuthorQuinn Slobodian is Professor of International History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His most recent book is
Crack-Up Capitalism- Market Radicals and the
Dream of a World Without Democracy.
Industry Reviews
Bracingly original... Hayek’s Bastards demonstrates how a history of ideas can be riveting. Slobodian grounds intellectual abstractions in the lives of the people who espoused them... His book offers an illuminating history to our current bewildering moment, as right-wing populists join forces with billionaire oligarchs to take a chain saw to the foundations of public life, until there’s nothing left to stand on -- Jennifer Szalai The New York Times
Far more useful and original than the standard populist interpretation is Slobodian’s effort to reframe Trumpism as a perverse outgrowth of orthodox libertarianism... Slobodian’s wry commentary offers welcome respite from both the difficulty and the moral odiousness of his subject -- Becca Rothfield The Washington Post
A highly topical and brilliantly argued demolition of a misplaced orthodoxy about the surging populist right -- Matthew d’Ancona The New European
Slobodian charts clearly how today’s far right is simply a further degeneration from neoliberalism’s celebration of economic inequality and the primacy of economics as the measure of man. We are all living in a world being plundered by Hayek’s bastards now -- Ian Hughes The Irish Times
A creative and engaging intellectual detective story that cuts through the far right’s smoke-and-mirrors claims of rupture and novelty, tracing the movement's deep neoliberal roots and exposing a shared set of supremacist beliefs about which lives have value and which lives do not. Ideas have consequences and very few scholars take the history of ideas as seriously as Slobodian, even when the ideas themselves are absurd, patently false, and deeply dangerous Naomi Klein
In this work of historical erudition and sharp political analysis, Quinn Slobodian explains how the myth of neoliberal freedom can be sustained only through a deeply illiberal world view. Through a painstaking reconstruction of how Hayek's offspring appeal to science served to naturalize hierarchy, and resist the calls for social equality, we come to see how rightwing authoritarianism emerged not as an alternative to neoliberalism but as its brainchild. An essential read to understand the times in which we live Lea Ypi
Quinn Slobodian is the sharpest and most resourceful historian yet of the far-right movements rapidly taking over the Western world. Anyone hoping for illumination in these rapidly darkening times cannot afford to miss Hayek’s Bastards Pankaj Mishra
