Today’s far right manages to combine the call for economic freedom with pseudoscience about natural hierarchies of race and IQ. Historian Quinn Slobodian explains how these ideas can be fitted together.
Quinn Slobodian has established himself as one of the sharpest intellectual historians of neoliberalism. In books such as Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, he casts neoliberalism as an ideology whose essential feature consists in shielding capital from the adverse consequences of democracy.
In his latest book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, he writes that the rise of the contemporary right — both in its techno-libertarian and more authoritarian strains — cannot be understood without considering neoliberal thinkers’ turn to nature and science as a buttress against demands for social justice and affirmative action in the 1990s. He explains how such “social Darwinism,” sometimes tipping into outright “apocalypticism,” lies behind different members of the reactionary international, from Murray Rothbard’s disciple Javier Milei to Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
In an interview for Jacobin, Bartolomeo Sala asked Slobodian about this ideological formation, which he identifies as the strange product of the end of the Cold War, as well as what effect it has in animating the Trump administration and far-right parties internationally.
Bartolomeo Sala
I wanted to start by asking you to describe the concept of the book in a nutshell. At different…
Auteur: Quinn Slobodian
