Citation
Type: book
Title: Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
Author: Slobodian, Quinn
Year: 2025
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Highlights
Introduction
From this perspective, neoliberalism can look like a recipe book, a panacea, and a one-size-fits-all nostrum. But the writings of neoliberals themselves offer a different picture—and this is where we must go to make sense of the apparently contradictory political manifestations. When we do, we discover that neoliberal thought is not filled with solutions but with problems. Can judges, dictators, bankers, or businesspeople be reliable guardians of economic order? Can institutions be made, or must they grow? How can markets be accepted by people in the face of their frequent cruelty?40 Radnitzky captured the puzzle well in the epigraph to his paper from the MPS meeting in Munich. It was from Anthony de Jasay: “Democracy’s last dilemma is that the state must, but cannot, roll itself back.”
“Since the political surprises of the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory in 2016, there has been a stubborn story that explains so-called right-wing populism as a grassroots rejection of neoliberalism, often described as market fundamentalism, or the belief that everything on the planet has a price tag, borders are obsolete, the world economy should replace nation-states, and human life is reducible to a cycle of earn, spend, borrow, die. This “New” Right, by contrast, claims to believe in the people, national sovereignty and the importance of culture. As mainstream parties lose support, the elites who promoted neoliberalism out of self-interest seem to be reaping the fruits of the inequality and democratic disempowerment they sowed.
But as this book helps make clear, this story does not capture the whole truth. By looking more closely, we can see that important factions of the emerging Right were, in fact, mutant strains of neoliberalism. The parties dubbed as right-wing populist, from the United States to Britain and Austria, have rarely been avenging angels sent to smite economic globalization. They offer few plans to rein in finance, restore a Golden Age of job security, or end world trade. “By and large, the so-called populists’ calls to privatize, deregulate, and slash taxes come straight from the playbook shared by the world’s leaders for the past thirty years.31
Even more fundamentally, to understand neoliberalism as an apocalyptic hypermarketization of everything is both vague and misleading. As many histories now show, far from conjuring up a vision of capitalism without states, the neoliberals gathered around the Mont Pelerin Society founded by Hayek (who used the term “neoliberalism” as self-description into the 1950s) have reflected for nearly a century about how the state needs to be rethought to restrict democracy without eliminating it and how national and supranational institutions can be used to protect competition and exchange.32 When we see neoliberalism as a project of retooling the state to save capitalism, then its supposed opposition to the populism of the Right begins to dissolve.”
Some saw neoliberalism as a matter of designing the right constitution, others saw a constitution in a democracy as—in a memorably gendered metaphor from de Jasay—“a chastity belt whose key is always within the wearer’s reach.”
This book shows that many contemporary iterations of the Far Right emerged within neoliberalism, not in opposition to it. They did not propose the wholesale rejection of globalism but a variety of it, one that accepts an international division of labor with robust cross-border flows of goods and even multilateral trade agreements while tightening controls on certain kinds of migration. As repellent as their politics may be, these radical thinkers are not barbarians at the gates of neoliberal globalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself. The reported clash of opposites is a family feud.
Chapter One
In a 1976 lecture in Australia that he would reprise two years later in apartheid South Africa, titled, “the atavism of social justice,” Hayek said, “Socialists have the support of inherited instincts, while maintenance of the new wealth which creates the new ambitions requires an acquired discipline which the non-domesticated barbarians in our midst, who call themselves ‘alienated,’ refuse to accept although they still claim all its benefits.”7 The urgency for Hayek was his concern that the pursuit of such a program could ultimately lead to mass death. It was only by adhering to a “game” that “pays so little attention to justice but does so much to increase output” that a growing world population could sustain itself.8 Mass mutual indifference was the secret to sustaining human civilization.
Hayek seemed to demand something elusive: a small group without the group feeling that might move in the direction of sharing, a society absent of demands for social justice, a troop with no impulse toward redistribution: communal cohesion without a sense of community.
For conservatives like Minogue there was also the concern that Hayek was instrumentalizing religion and tradition. Beginning in the early 1980s, Hayek made ever more reference to the need for morality as an anchor for market order. As Wendy Brown and Jessica Whyte have written, it was “markets and morality,” not markets in the place of morality, that became his central theme.22 Yet the way he talked about religion was enough to give a conservative pause. It was hard to shake the impression that Hayek saw morality as having little meaning for its own sake. He conceded this himself when he said that “we have to recognize that we owe our civilization to beliefs which I sometimes have offended some people by calling ‘superstitions’ and which I now prefer to call ‘symbolic truths.’”23 Why were these symbolic truths important and how had they prevailed in long-term processes of cultural “selection”? They facilitated the competitive order. “Our morals,” he wrote, “the morals which have prevailed, the morals of private property and honesty, are simply those that favor the practices that assist the multiplication of mankind.”24
This meant that “the capitalist society, with its cosmopolitanism, its judgement of worth by results, and its acceptance of consumer choice, is in some ways unnatural and therefore always precarious.”27 An alliance with conservatives over religion and tradition made sense, even strategically, as an insurance policy against the atomizing and disrupting effects of untampered market competition.
Chapter Two
Rothbard conscripted the Austrian economist and his mentor Ludwig von Mises for his argument, quoting him as asserting in 1922 that “primitive man lacks all individuality in our sense. Two South Sea Islanders resemble each other far more closely than two twentieth-century Londoners. Personality was not bestowed upon man at the outset. It has been acquired in the course of evolution of society.” Rothbard believed that the egalitarianism of the 1960s New Left was both “antihuman” and “evil.” It sought to strip mankind of the fruits of civilizational advancement, namely, the emergence of individuality and human diversity. The economist Karl Polanyi, too, was criticized for his “worship of the primitive.” Because humans were unequal, some were simply more gifted than others. Elites must be respected: “the only sensible course is to abandon the chimera of equality and accept the universal necessity of leaders and followers.
To Rothbard, the egalitarian challenge to the natural inequality of ability and differences of sexuality and gender would lead to “the destruction of civilization, and even of the human race itself.” “The egalitarian revolt against biological reality” was “only a subset of a deeper revolt: against the ontological structure of reality itself, against the ‘very organization of nature’; against the universe as such.