Review of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian (Princeton University Press, 2025).
Like any good capitalist thinker, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek had a Book of Genesis–esque prehistoric parable for his followers. In Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, historian Quinn Slobodian terms this fable “the savanna story.” It went like this: in the beginning, human beings lived in small, tight-knit collectivist groups that necessarily had to prioritize cooperation and shared interest. As society grew, trade expanded, and new social orders developed, human beings came to care less and less about each other. “Mass mutual indifference,” Slobodian sums up, “was the secret to sustaining human civilization.”
This is as good a summary as any of the heart of neoliberal political and economic thought: its well-known hostility to the welfare state and government regulation flow from a deeper opposition to inclusive compassion and collective deliberation. Hayek’s Bastards argues that the current right descends, rather than departs, from neoliberalism. On this, the book is entirely convincing. But are the new right figures and institutions Slobodian examines — the libertarian Murray Rothbard, the Nazi-admiring Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany, the eugenicist Charles Murray — actually spreading a “mutant strain” of neoliberalism? Are they Hayek’s bastards — or his legitimate sons?
Against the…
Auteur: Henry Snow
