Luca Mătăsaru reviews Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards. Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Zone Books, 2025, 280 p.)
The contemporary far-right positions itself as an opponent of the “globalist elites”, who are promoting the neoliberal world order by promising the return to national sovereignty and traditional social values. This is precisely the claim that Quinn Slobodian wishes to deconstruct in his new book, Hayek’s Bastards. Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Published by Zone Books in 2025, the volume is an intellectual genealogy of the neoliberal and libertarian roots of modern alt-right movements. Professor of International History at Boston University, Slobodian has written several books about the rise of neoliberalism and its troubled relationship with democracy. In particular, his last publications and his upcoming book on Elon Musk focus on how late capitalism’s undemocratic tendencies are becoming more severe, thus unlinking the previously unquestioned association building the foundation of the liberal democratic model. Although the author focuses on an intellectual tradition built in the second half of the 20th century, the book also opens towards contemporary manifestations of right-wing extremism as a consequence of the proliferation of (paleo)libertarian ideas in the mainstream political space. As such, Slobodian’s analysis attempts to make sense of today’s increasingly more radicalized ideological landscape by providing a narrative about the rise of the alt-right that is less visible in current debates on the topic, even if it has been used as a framework by Marxist academics, especially when discussing the road that leads from capitalism to fascism.
Most political commentators examining the far-right focus on the resurgence of nationalist and racist talking points and describe it as a reaction against neoliberalism, since it favors authoritarian measures and a populist agenda directing people’s hate towards political and economic elites. However, Slobodian offers a contrary perspective: the far-right may not be, in fact, a revolt against the neoliberal order, but its mutated product. More concretely, the book contends that the recent rebirth of the far-right is not a backlash against neoliberalism, but a “frontlash”, in the sense that right-wing neoliberals find themselves on the same side with traditionalists, paleolibertarians (who combine libertarian philosophy with race science) and nationalists. In Slobodian’s own words,
“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.” (24)
The author’s central claim is that some neoliberals have used the arguments of nature and science in order to fight against the progressive social movements started in the 1960s and 1970s. By resorting to nature when tackling issues such as race, intelligence, national territory and money, they intended to reintroduce hierarchies that were breaking down as a result of feminism, the civil rights movement and affirmative action. Slobodian calls this libertarian school “new fusionism”. As opposed to the fusionists of the 1950s and 1960s, who referenced religion and tradition in order to justify libertarianism, the new fusionists turned to behavioral and evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and to biological anthropology and genetics in order to justify both the abolition of all market restrictions and the existence of insurmountable cultural and racial differences between people, generating a discourse about what Slobodian calls “Volk capital”. As the author argues,
“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.” (24)
In order to justify his claim, Slobodian examines how Friedrich Hayek’s philosophy was misinterpreted by the new fusionists. Even if Hayek himself sometimes used a vocabulary derived from genetics in order to trace the “competitive selection of cultural institutions”, namely the drive of human civilization towards better social and economic infrastructures, his “bastard” disciples took this as more than a limited but useful metaphor. Consequently, the bulk of the book deals with the three scientific “hards”. Slobodian places at the heart of new fusionist thought: hardwired human nature, hard borders and hard money.
Firstly, even though Hayek’s school examined how economy is dependent on cultural norms, thus generating inequality between different human groups, other paleolibertarians, such as Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, thought that race and biology were the true sources of human inequality. They saw themselves as disciples of Ludwig von Mises rather than Hayek, placing more importance on their master’s observations about differences between racial groups than he himself did, since Mises outrightly condemned the idea that distinct populations cannot achieve a peaceful coexistence.
In addition, thinkers such as Peter Brimelow argued that restricting immigration makes sense from an economic perspective. The free circulation of goods makes the movement of people unnecessary and potentially disruptive, since the “metamarket”, the social framework in which the market functions, depends on certain cultural values and institutions. This promotion of cultural homogeneity, built on economic arguments, led to what Slobodian calls the “ethno-economy” as an equivalent to the ethno-state.
Furthermore, this position was strengthened by the new fusionists’ interest in IQ as a measure of economic potential. In The Bell Curve, Richard Hernnstein and Charles Murray argued that even an open, democratic society creates a hierarchy based on cognitive ability. As a result, different populations were separated into “neurocastes”, to use the term employed by Slobodian, in order to support the vision of Volk capital. By joining race science with IQ, new fusionists managed to find a universal standard for measuring human economic value.
Last but not least, the book analyzes another strain of libertarianism, the goldbugs, and their obsession with gold as an eternal monetary standard. They instilled fear after President Nixon’s announcement that dollars would no longer derive their value from gold and claimed that a monetary collapse, accompanied by moral degeneracy and the erosion of traditional values, was inevitable due to irresponsible government spending. Even parties such as the AfD in Germany started as promoters of an alternative currency to the euro, one derived from gold and other precious metals. As such, for the goldbugs,
“[t]he nation is reenvisioned as a platform, adopted insofar as it offers security for capital and a good return on investment.” (163)
Thus, Slobodian manages to highlight how the alt-right uses apparently scientific arguments in order to fight against egalitarianism, claiming that inequality is an unchanging reality of nature and that denying it means being oblivious to how the universe works. He manages to cite a lot of primary sources in which these thinkers express their radical ideas, thus further substantiating his main argument. In addition, he is able to show how these views are often contradictory. For instance, some proponents of a free market economy also provide arguments for state intervention in order to ensure the thriving of this economic model. As such, the connection between nationalism and ethnocentrism on the one hand and anarcho-capitalism on the other becomes less far-fetched than it may initially seem.
Another positive aspect is the book’s clear style. Even if the book is conceived as an academic approach to the subject, the author explains the technical vocabulary he uses in order to prevent any conceptual confusion. Although the general public may find the overwhelming number of names and references difficult to keep track of (especially since Slobodian is prone to name-dropping), readers with some basic knowledge of politics, philosophy and history should be able to follow the central argument quite clearly.
However, the book suffers from a couple of major oversights. First of all, a certain much-needed nuance is lost when discussing so many different thinkers and schools of thought that are all placed at the foundation of the contemporary alt-right. As the book’s title suggests, Slobodian tries to trace many of the new fusionist views he discusses to either Hayek’ or Mises’ ideas about culture and race. However, the genealogy of influence is much more complex in some cases. For example, Phillip Magness has found that Hoppe’s extremely conservative perspectives have less in common with the Austrian School of economics and more with other right-wing strands of political philosophy, as well as the Frankfurt School, since Hoppe was Jürgen Habermas’ disciple. In addition, Slobodian does a similar mistake when bringing together intellectual societies that had quite different outlooks. For instance, he is very critical of the conferences of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) and considers it a promoter of libertarian views that would later be adopted by the alt-right. However, the MPS’s economic philosophy is closer to classical liberalism rather than libertarianism, and Hoppe even founded the paleolibertarian Property and Freedom Society as a reaction against it.
Secondly, the book unfortunately does not usually engage with the arguments of the thinkers it examines. Instead, it seems to draw the genealogy of a “rogues’ gallery”, who are discredited mostly based on their biographies and their association with various think tanks. Although the author occasionally provides succinct facts and counterarguments for the alt-right ideas he obviously disagrees with, his persuasiveness mostly stems from his rhetoric and framing. For instance, according to Magness, Slobodian selects quotes from Mises’ works that apparently indicate his interest in race science, choosing to ignore other relevant passages where Mises clearly shows his dismissal of simple, mechanistic explanations about the relationship between genetics and cognitive ability. Even if this may not have been the book’s main aim, a more factual and logical deconstruction of the alt-right’s supposedly scientific ideas could have been extremely beneficial for strengthening the author’s negative appraisal of the new fusionists and for showing why their apparently rational arguments are so dangerous because they may erode people’s trust in democracy.
Despite these shortcomings, Slobodian’s work of uncovering the hidden filiation between neoliberalism in its libertarian variant and contemporary far-right movements gaining increasingly more traction today is certainly impressive. In the current political context, marked by democratic backsliding and a higher tolerance for authoritarian policies, the author’s narrative sheds some light on how we arrived here and how some ideas circulating in mainstream discourse actually stem from a neoliberal underground that has existed for several decades. Finally, the book’s quite approachable nature turns it into an essential read for anyone interested in the rise of far-right populism and its complex and often contradictory history.
Luca Mătăsaru is an Assistant Editor for the Democracy and Culture section. He is a PhD researcher in Comparative Literature at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. His thesis focuses on the concept of cyclical history, as well as on the idea of biological and civilizational decline in 20th century science fiction literature. He holds a BA in English and Comparative Literature and an MA in History of Ideas, both from Babeș-Bolyai University. His research interests include the relationship between speculative fiction and its cultural and scientific context, the history of philosophical and political thought, as well as the historical inspirations and parallels present in various cultural products.
