Bastards!

Readers of a certain age with a taste for intellectual history will recognise the title of Hayek’s Bastards as a tribute to John Ralston Saul’s bestseller from a previous century, Voltaire’s Bastards (1992). Quinn Slobodian freely acknowledges the inspiration. He mentions Saul’s sweeping critique of modern technocratic rationalism in both the introduction and acknowledgments, honouring Voltaire’s Bastards as the book that prompted him, as an inquisitive teenager, to start thinking about history and politics as manifestations of ideas.

Favouring as they must the conceptual over the material, intellectual histories have some inherent limitations, but they can be as informative as they are seductive. The proposition that the modern world is shaped by ideas has been commonplace since Burke blamed Rousseau for the French Revolution. It is a particularly appealing notion for bookish types, who can flatter themselves that by studying the work of influential thinkers they can discern something of the underlying form of history, grasp intangible forces of motivation, perhaps even alter the direction of society with their own critiques and arguments. And these are not entirely fanciful notions. Many a consequential historical figure has been a highly motivated ideologue. My copy of Friedrich Hayek’s turgid neoliberal treatise The Constitution of Liberty (1960) boasts on its back cover that Margaret Thatcher once marched into a meeting with her Conservative Party colleagues, slapped the book on the table, and declared: ‘This is what we believe!’

Thatcher is remembered as one of Hayek’s most notorious bastards, but her name appears infrequently in Slobodian’s book, which is less concerned with the political success of neoliberalism than the murky intellectual currents and philosophical tensions within the neoliberal worldview. Hayek’s Bastards extends the investigations of Slobodian’s earlier books Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018) and Crack-up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023). It focuses primarily on developments in neoliberal thought in the decades after the Cold War, examining debates within a substantial right-wing ecosystem of institutes, foundations and think tanks to give a detailed account of what neoliberals do, in fact, believe. This turns out to be more complicated than the conventional understanding of neoliberalism as a commitment to free-market capitalism, though not in a way that should give anyone comfort. Neoliberals are no less prone to ideological hairsplitting and factionalism than activists of any other political persuasion, but they are united when it comes to the things they do not believe in. And at the top of the list are equality, egalitarianism and democracy. 

A brief note on terminology before we proceed. ‘Neoliberal’, like all politicised terms, tends to be used rather loosely. As Slobodian notes in Globalists, the word has acquired negative connotations. These days, it is most often heard from political opponents, even though it was coined in the 1930s as a neutral descriptor and accepted by many leading figures, including Hayek, as a fair reflection of the movement’s ambition to reinvent classical liberalism. Neoliberalism embraces several economic ‘schools’ (the Austrian school, the Geneva school, the Chicago school, the Virginia school); it blurs into various ideological subcategories (ordoliberalism, libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, paleolibertarianism); and, as Slobodian demonstrates in Crack-up Capitalism and Hayek’s Bastards, its recent exponents have advanced some terrible ideas. But it remains the most appropriate term to characterise a phenomenon that can and should be understood as a distinct political project with an identifiable intellectual lineage and clearly stated objectives.

Those negative connotations are a result of neoliberalism’s recent period of political dominance, during which its policy prescriptions have been elevated to the status of economic orthodoxy among much of the Western world’s political class. It has simply come to be associated with the unpopular consequences of its applied formulas. Over the past four decades or so, nations around the globe have had their economies restructured by aggressive programs of privatisation, deregulation, and substantial tax breaks for the wealthy, combined with deep cuts to public services and social supports. Neoliberalism is now synonymous – and deservedly so – with drastic levels of inequality, crippling austerity, social policies that are punitive to the point of cruelty, heedless environmental destruction, housing and cost-of-living and financial crises, a despised style of corporate managerialism, and all the disempowering effects of globalisation.

Whether or not the neoliberal era is now in retreat is an open question. The rise of right-wing populism, which in certain respects (economic nationalism, nativist resentment) has the appearance of a backlash, suggests a fracturing of the post-Cold War economic consensus. Donald Trump’s attempt to manipulate the international trade system via the imposition of tariffs should be anathema to any self-respecting neoliberal. The Brexit debacle in the United Kingdom has been similarly condemned as a churlish rejection of globalisation and a bizarre exercise in economic self-harm. And yet, as Slobodian observes, in many essential respects ‘populism’ is not a rejection of neoliberalism – quite the opposite. The animus directed against ‘big government’ accords with neoliberalism’s longstanding ambition to cripple the regulatory and redistributive capabilities of the state, and beyond that its administrative and representative functions. The latest politician to ascend into the global ranks of clownish right-wing demagogues, Argentina’s president Javier Milei, names his dogs after neoliberal economists. The omnibus bill recently signed into law in the United States – which tore up environmental regulations, ripped $1.1 trillion from health care, and handed out $4.5 trillion in tax cuts – was textbook neoliberalism.

Hayek’s Bastards is not concerned with the frontline politics or the economic arguments about such measures, but it has some important things to tell us about the origins and the tenor of right-wing populism. One plausible explanation for the apparent backlash – advanced by Naomi Klein, among others – is that decades of neoliberal policies have created societies characterised by obvious inequities, degraded services and chronic insecurity. This has, in turn, generated widespread feelings of frustration and anger among the disadvantaged, which cynical politicians have inflamed and misdirected for electoral gain. Slobodian has a different interpretation. ‘When we see neoliberalism as a project of retooling the state to save capitalism,’ he argues, ‘then its supposed opposition to the populism of the right dissolves.’ His focus on the substance of what prominent neoliberal thinkers have had to say inclines him to see the ugly sentiments that have emerged on the right less as a confused backlash than as ideological mutations born of philosophical contradictions within neoliberalism itself. ‘Neoliberal thought is not filled with solutions,’ he observes near the beginning of Hayek’s Bastards, ‘but with problems.’ 

Neoliberal policies are invariably defended in economic terms; they are always deemed necessary to encourage growth, prosperity, abundance, efficiency and productivity – imperatives we have been conditioned to accept are so important, so intrinsically good, they override any other concerns. These formulaic rationalisations, cast as timeless economic principles, are of course ideological to their core. Part of neoliberalism’s peculiar character, and a quality that marks it as a quintessentially modern ideology, is that it seeks to pass itself off simultaneously as a matter of high moral principle – a crusade marching under the banner of ‘liberty’, no less – and as a bloodless economism. In its institutional manifestations, it operates very much as a form of bastardised rationalism in Saul’s original Voltairean sense – in fact, when the neoliberal counterrevolution came to Australia in the 1980s, it was labelled ‘economic rationalism’, a term that also acquired negative connotations.

Slobodian sees the contradictions and permutations of neoliberalism as arising from its declared mission to protect the rights of capital from the threat of state interference. Its foundational hostility to democracy, the plentiful evidence for which he sets out in Globalists, not only points up the brittle hypocrisy of neoliberalism’s carapace of emancipatory rhetoric; it explains why this supposedly internationalist, individualist, libertarian philosophy should, in practice, be so preoccupied with questions of legality and order, group identity and social hierarchy. ‘One of the fallacies of understanding neoliberalism and libertarianism, especially in its extreme forms, is to say that it is simply as assertion of individualism,’ Slobodian argues. ‘In fact, because these ideologies prioritize individualism, they become immediately concerned with investigating and proposing the conditions under which individualism can exist and be protected.’ They are, as a result, preoccupied not only with ‘laws and rules’, but ‘other parameters such as culture and heredity’.

There is a narrative on the right that grants neoliberalism a heroic role in the Cold War. Its official beginnings are often traced to the foundation of the Mont Pelerin Society at a conference in Switzerland in 1947, convened by Hayek and attended by many of the movement’s most prominent figures, including Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises and the American economist Milton Friedman. The Mont Pelerin Society would become an intellectual rallying point. As an unabashedly pro-capitalist organisation, it positioned itself as a principled defender of one ideological pole in a bipolar world. Its members were not simply concerned to prosecute the economic case against the evils of communism; they held the line against the bleeding-heart appeasements of Keynesianism and New Deal-style social democracy, insisting that deregulated capitalism was the only possible protection against the creeping authoritarianism of the welfare state. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was taken – at least according to the triumphalist rhetoric of the time – as economic and moral vindication of their uncompromising stance: evidence that free societies and free markets went hand in hand.

Recent history has undermined that rickety claim. The prehistory of neoliberalism doesn’t provide much supporting evidence either. In Globalists, Slobodian takes the origin story back to 1920s Vienna, where Mises, in his capacity as a representative of the local Chamber of Commerce, was arguing for company taxes to be slashed and wages to be driven down. The main impediment to the immiseration of the lower orders was organised labour, so naturally Mises was delighted when a mass uprising of Viennese workers in 1927 was brutally crushed. State power was obviously fine when it came to shooting uppity workers, but for the group of free-market economists that had begun to coalesce around Mises there remained a concern that mass enfranchisement could create a situation where elected governments became responsive to the political demands of their constituents and started passing laws contrary to the interests of capital. A clear line needed to be drawn between what Slobodian, borrowing his terminology from the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, calls imperium (the realm of state power) and dominium (the realm of private property). Enforcement of that distinction would, paradoxically, require a global order governed by a legal framework that asserted the transnational rights of capital above the regulatory powers of the nation state – a core neoliberal ambition pursued across the twentieth century that, in Slobodian’s telling, culminates in the establishment of the World Trade Organisation in 1995.

The liberal argument that private property is a necessary protection against unwarranted intrusions of state power goes back to the social contract theory of Locke; the diabolical innovation of neoliberalism was to propose, in effect, that capital should be able to exempt itself from the social contract. A common criticism of neoliberalism as a technocratic doctrine is that it reduces each of us to an atomised version of homo economicus. Social interactions are conceptualised as financial transactions; everything comes to be assessed according to profitability; anything that cannot be monetised is beneath notice. This much is true, and dehumanising enough, but as a political philosophy neoliberalism is even worse. Its transference of the emancipatory language of rights and freedoms to capital makes the rights and freedoms of actual people secondary and conditional. Hayek would mystify the workings of ‘free’ markets as ultimately unknowable, touched with sublimity. Regulations were necessary to ensure their optimal functioning, but should not influence their depersonalised outcomes, which must simply be accepted. Markets were in this sense sacralised, their functioning treated as a natural law beyond negotiation or compromise, a higher principle floating above the needs of the mere human beings who create them.

Behind the casuistry is an escape fantasy. Both regulation and its absence presuppose desired results. In the evasion of responsibility for those results (according to neoliberals, it is not the landlord jacking up your already extortionate rent, it is the ‘market’), there is an attempt to disavow the inherently political motivations of the neoliberal project. In Globalists, Slobodian cites Hayek expressing a desire to ‘dethrone politics’ by placing markets beyond the influence of nation states, and thus the political will of their citizens. Crack-up Capitalism begins with a quote from Peter Thiel, the shadiest member of the treehouse club of maladroit weirdos who dominate the US tech industry, that echoes Hayek and makes the point explicit. ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,’ Thiel wrote in 2009. ‘The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.’

There is much that is revealing in this pompous, ridiculous pronouncement. Of course, like all ‘libertarians’, Thiel means his freedom, not yours. The very notion of an ‘escape’ from politics is an infantile fantasy. Man is a political animal, as Aristotle observed: politics is an inevitable consequence of our social existence, an unavoidable corollary of the fact that people will always have competing interests, ideas and ambitions, which must be negotiated in one way or another. What Thiel is really expressing in his renunciation of democracy and professed impatience with ‘politics’ is an impossible desire to exist in a condition of irresponsibility, free from the inconvenience of having to consider the rights and needs of other people. I also call bullshit on ‘no longer’.

The dream of escaping ‘politics’ – invariably meaning democratic politics – is widely shared among the many neoliberal advocates who appear in Slobodian’s books. Crack-up Capitalism, in particular, examines a range of proposals designed to advance the idea of ‘capitalism without democracy’. Inverting the original neoliberal strategy of undermining state power via the establishment of a global economic order, these schemes seek instead to find strategic ways ‘to pierce holes in the social fabric, to opt out, secede, and defect from the collective’. They range from the creation of ‘special economic zones’, where capitalism can flourish unburdened by taxes and laws, to proposals for virtual societies and utopian gated communities. The emblematic example of the latter is the concept of ‘seasteading’: floating islands outside the jurisdictions of nation states – an idea, promoted by Friedman’s grandson, that has gained some prominent supporters in Silicon Valley.

Now, I am of the view that if you isolated a couple of dozen incels and tech bros in the middle of the ocean it would be Lord of the Flies before the end of the first week, so I am not entirely opposed to the idea. But what is striking about these schemes is their repeated confirmation of the demonic paradox embodied in Dostoevsky’s egoistic radicals: if you start from the principle of absolute freedom, you will end up endorsing the principle of absolute despotism. The moment these libertarian visionaries start explaining how their ‘free’ societies will work, the unimaginative and thoroughly dystopian aspects of their proposals become plain. Convinced that unchecked capitalist exploitation is inherently virtuous, and having abandoned any pretence that there is a connection between capitalism and democracy, they champion coercive monopolies and reinvent colonial forms of wealth extraction. Having grounded their politics in the childish notion that they, personally, should be liberated from regulations and social responsibilities, they end up arguing for absolute monarchies and medieval fiefdoms, confident in the assumption that they will be the feudal overlords. In a twist that should surprise no one, neoliberalism turns out to be the road to serfdom.

Hayek’s Bastards focuses on another of neoliberalism’s many ‘problems’. It turns its attention to the convergence of mainstream neoliberal thought with various fringe movements, mostly on the American right. The subtitle of the US edition characterises them as ‘far right’ rather than ‘populist’, but perhaps the most apposite term is simply ‘racist’.

Strictly speaking, neoliberalism should be indifferent, or at least impartial, when it comes to questions of identity. Its universalising conception of homo economicus makes questions of race, gender, nationality, religion and culture incidental. For the purposes of its free-market economic theories, you are your financial means. This leaves neoliberals ill-equipped to explain the allegiances, beliefs and motivations of real people, but it also raises the awkward ethical question of how to justify a system predicated on the existence of winners and losers – a question that becomes even more awkward when confronted with the undeniable truth that many persistent inequities have their historical origins in systemic prejudice and oppression.

Slobodian proposes that the character of much recent neoliberal thought can be explained by its attempt to resolve this question – or more precisely, its determination not to resolve it. Postwar neoliberals were faced with demands for political and economic self-determination from decolonising nations. They heard the calls for equality issuing from the emerging feminist and civil rights movements. But rather than acknowledge the historical injustices that gave rise to such demands and think seriously about how those injustices might be rectified, many leading neoliberals chose to argue that existing hierarchies were biological in origin and therefore warranted, even inevitable. ‘Confounded by persistent demands for the redress of inequality at the expense of efficiency, stability, and order,’ writes Slobodian, ‘neoliberals turned to nature in matters of race, intelligence, territory, and money.’

Slobodian’s history allows for a good deal of complexity here. His neoliberals do not speak with one voice. He notes a significant split in their ranks along nature-culture lines. There were those, aligned with Hayek, who were open to the idea that human nature was ‘rooted primarily in culture, adaptable over time through social learning and selective evolution’. This faction sought to ‘move beyond methodological individualism and begin to understand collectives and institutions’. But there were others, associated with the American economist Murray Rothbard, who saw ‘difference as rooted in biology and race as a rigid hierarchy of group traits and abilities’.

Hayek’s Bastards is predominantly concerned with the influence of the Rothbard faction, interpreting its racialised appeal to nature as a precursor to alt-right libertarianism and its various mangy offshoots. The encompassing question the book raises is why neoliberalism should take such an overtly racist turn. Slobodian notes in Globalists that, from the 1920s until the 1980s, ‘outright defenses of racial hierarchy play only a marginal role’ in the intellectual history of neoliberalism. His work does, however, register a longstanding ambivalence. Hayek’s Bastards traces this all the way back to Mises, whose economic theories had no racial dimension, but who ‘repeatedly expressed cautious optimism for a potential science of race even as he explicitly condemned the race theory that existed’. Later exponents, Slobodian argues, took this ‘rather parenthetical opening […] and drove the metaphorical truck through it’.

The early rumblings of that metaphorical truck can be heard in a central chapter of Globalists that examines the career of German economist and Mont Pelerin Society member Wilhelm Röpke. In the 1930s, Röpke had taken a principled stand against the antisemitism of the Nazis. In the 1960s, towards the end of his life, he took it upon himself to write a ‘positive appraisal’ of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Apartheid would become something of a litmus test for postwar neoliberals. Hayek said it was ‘both an injustice and an error’. But there were many others, including Friedman, who opposed universal suffrage, viewing the democratic rights of the black majority as too much of a threat to the economic rights of the ruling white minority. Röpke defended the indefensible on economic grounds, but informing his argument were the undisguised racial and cultural chauvinisms of the previous century’s imperial order. He asserted the superiority of Western civilisation and cautioned against the empowerment of ‘nation-states dominated by populations incapable of rational thought’.

The irruption of frankly racist attitudes among neoliberals could be interpreted as a return of the repressed for an ideology that emerged phoenix-like from the smoking ruins of nineteenth-century European imperialism. One could also see it as a logical result of its undemocratic mission. Neoliberal thought is warped by its historical elisions and patently inadequate social and cultural theories, but its moral bankruptcy can be traced to its stance of ‘defiant inegalitarianism’. Though neoliberalism has become a global phenomenon, its intellectual history is largely an exchange between a patrician middle-European intellectualism and the frontier mentality of the hypercapitalist United States. Its ideological raison d’être is to defend the privileged financial interests of the old and new worlds, old and new wealth, against the interests of everyone else. Hayek maintained he was not a conservative, but the obvious appeal of neoliberalism to the forces of reaction, the reason billionaires lavish funds on ‘think tanks’ dedicated to its promotion, is its unabashed rationalisation of material inequality.

Marx famously recognised capitalism as a dynamic and socially transformative force, remorseless in its destruction of old ways, and thus an enemy of traditionalist Burkean conservatism. But monied interests and the most reactionary strains of social conservatism are natural allies in self-justification. They are united in the exculpatory belief that the impoverished and disadvantaged are inferior people who deserve their lot in life. The distance between this core commitment and racism is barely a step. Part of Slobodian’s achievement in Hayek’s Bastards is to show that the symbiosis between recent manifestations of economic libertarianism and the unreconstructed racism of the far right is a function of neoliberalism’s philosophical defence of social hierarchy.

Galvanising the defensiveness was the perceived threat of postwar social liberalisation. A motivating hostility towards the social revolution of the 1960s was clearly in evidence. Rothbard scorned the ‘hundreds of thousands of herd-like, undifferentiated youth’ who ‘wallowed passively in the mud listening to their tribal ritual music’. One of the counterintuitive things Slobodian establishes is that many neoliberals did not experience the end of the Cold War as a moment of triumph. They remained deeply concerned that feminists, environmentalists, and civil rights activists were succeeding in their ambition to create a fairer and more sustainable society where resources and opportunities were equitably shared. Slobodian makes it clear that this was not a matter of neoliberals scratching around for a new enemy to replace the vanquished communist menace. Their commitment to inegalitarianism was every bit as fundamental as their conviction that the demands of capital should always be paramount.

Hayek’s Bastards identifies a visceral loathing of equality as neoliberalism’s ideological keynote: the principle that unites its economic and social agendas, the common ground between the pencilnecks of the Mont Pelerin Society and committed culture warriors. Röpke would find a particularly receptive audience on the American right. He was feted by William F. Buckley, also an apartheid apologist and an opponent of desegregation, who saw himself fighting a rearguard action on behalf of an embattled conservatism. What Slobodian calls the ‘new fusionism’ that emerged in the 1990s was similarly concerned to reconcile economic libertarianism and social conservatism, but sought to overthrow the hated revolutionary principle of equality once and for all, turning to the hard sciences for evidence that human differences were ‘hardwired’. Slobodian describes a conference in the early 1970s at which multiple Mont Pelerin Society members ‘held forth on their own variation of why equality was a destructive fantasy. Many appealed to genetics and race.’ Rothbard, a self-described ‘paleolibertarian’, railed against the egalitarianism of the New Left as ‘antihuman’, ‘evil’, and ‘a revolt against nature’. He argued that there was a ‘genetic basis for inequality of intelligence’ and that biology ‘stands like a rock in the face of egalitarian fantasies’. His fellow paleolibertarian Lew Rockwell would similarly denounce egalitarianism as ‘morally reprehensible’.

The rank bigotry at the heart of the new fusionism’s anti-egalitarianism was not left implicit. Rothbard – more troglodytic than ‘paleo’ in this instance – wondered why feminists, having noted the ubiquitous nature of the patriarchy, did not conclude that men were naturally dominant. Thomas Fleming of the neoliberal Rockford Institute decried the civil rights movement as a ‘revolution against nature’. Sam Francis of the Heritage Foundation said the ‘civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people’. Richard Lynn, a British white supremacist whose career as a ‘race scientist’ was supported by various neoliberal think tanks, maintained that global inequality was the fault of the impoverished. ‘The problem lies in them,’ he said. ‘They have some deficit. Something inside them stops them from earning as much money as we do.’  Shortly after the far-right rallies in Charlottesville in 2017, during which an extremist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one person and injuring thirty-five others, Rothbard’s protégé Hans-Hermann Hoppe urged libertarians to ‘recognize from the outset, as the alt-right does, the inequality not just of individuals but also of different cultures as the ineradicable datum of human existence’.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this kind of obnoxious garbage is The Bell Curve, a book co-authored by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein that was published in 1994. Written with the generous financial support of several right-wing foundations, The Bell Curve shared Lynn’s ambition to link intelligence to race, arguing that average IQ scores were unevenly distributed across racial classifications. Slobodian notes the comprehensiveness with which the critical response dismantled the book’s fallacious arguments and shonky methodology. But he makes a crucial point about its wider political significance. The Bell Curve, he writes, ‘tapped into a constellation of funders who shared a vision of inegalitarianism and an opposition to the redistributive social state’. The book was ‘never merely an academic undertaking. It was a counterattack in what the authors saw as the corrosive doctrine of equality as sameness.’

Murray blamed the prevalence of this doctrine on ‘the legal triumphs of the civil rights and the rise of feminism’. He was also explicit about the political motivation of the counterattack. ‘Do not underestimate the degree to which the Left’s political agenda has been founded on the equality premise,’ he wrote in 2006. ‘Do not underestimate the degree to which losing that premise will throw the Left into disarray.’ 

It should be acknowledged at this point that Slobodian is a model of scholarly integrity. He provides clear and substantiated accounts of the ideas put forward by his subjects and he analyses those ideas without heat. He occasionally permits himself an arch observation. ‘Yet the meritocracy was plagued with a problem,’ he deadpans at one point. ‘By definition, only those deemed elites had the capacity to grasp fully the necessity of their own status.’ But he never stoops to polemicise.

Your correspondent accepts no such constraint. I am thus free to observe that there is something truly pathetic about these creeps, with their snivelling obeisance to hierarchy and wholly unmerited claims to superiority. There is a kind of wilful obtuseness in their reflexive hostility to the principle of equality, which is not a demand for sameness – beyond a rhetorical do-I-not-bleed humanism, no one argues that – but a perfectly reasonable demand for political enfranchisement, fairness and respect. Their ideological rejection of this fundamental democratic principle is the source of their moral corruption: it emboldens the authoritarian impulse that was always latent in neoliberal calls for ‘liberty’ (or maybe not-so-latent: the disgusting Pinochet dictatorship in Chile is usually credited as the world’s first neoliberal government) and beats a path to ideas that anyone with a scrap of decency can see are repugnant. ‘Most intellectuals think that eugenics has somehow or other been discredited or disproved,’ complained Herrnstein. Yes, for some mysterious reason. In Crack-up Capitalism, Slobodian quotes Hoppe, in full demagogue mode, ranting that there can be ‘no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.’ Because nothing says ‘I’m a libertarian’ like calling for the forced removal of people with different opinions.

One cannot encounter the most hateful ideas set forth in Hayek’s Bastards without being conscious of the extent to which the intellectual superstructure of neoliberalism has long been propagated by an array of privately funded organisations with no higher purpose than to provide political rationalisations for advancing the material interests of their wealthy benefactors. This project of propagandising on behalf of billionaire-class exceptionalism explains many hypocrisies. Hayek’s Bastards includes, for example, the interesting detail that in 1984 the Wall Street Journal editorialised in favour of open borders. The preeminent newspaper of the American financial class made the elementary mistake of assuming free-market principles might be applied with some kind of logical consistency. In fact, as Slobodian shows, many on the right have since embraced the oxymoronic notion of ‘closed-borders libertarianism’, devising contorted arguments in classical neoliberal style to explain why freedom of movement should be a right of goods and capital, but not people.

In its later chapters, Hayek’s Bastards turns its attention to the margins, looking beyond the pseudo-respectability of privately funded think tanks to consider political foment in the ‘profane space of the newsletter, the advice manual, and eventually, the website, the feed, and the chatroom’. Its scope expands to include extensive American subcultures of doomers and preppers, online activists and financial grifters – types often embodied in a single person. ‘The alarmism is entrepreneurial,’ observes Slobodian. Hayek’s Bastards comes to focus in particular on those he calls ‘goldbugs’: hardline libertarians who believe Nixon abandoning the gold standard in 1971 created the conditions for an unrestrained fiscal profligacy that is destined to end in a catastrophic economic collapse. They fetishise gold as the one substance that will continue to hold its value when the financial system is in ruins and all other money is useless, because human beings are naturally inclined to think of gold as valuable. In this, they exemplify the third of the three principles that Slobodian contends have come to define ‘paleo ideology’: a commitment to ‘hard money, hard borders and hardwired culture’.

There is a good deal of apocalyptic fantasising in this line of thought, which carries distinct traces of the strange atavisms of American politics. Much of it would seem to be a long way from the internationalism of Mises and Hayek. Slobodian makes a point of stating that many of the ideas he discusses should be viewed as mutations of neoliberalism, rather than direct extensions. But his work also establishes how and why the undemocractic mission of the original neoliberals has become so deeply entangled with the ugly chauvinisms of the far right. Postcolonial theorists have long noted the affinities between capitalism and colonialism, with all of its racist legacies. It is not hard to find direct historical connections between neoliberalism and outright fascism. Thatcher was an ardent supporter of Pinochet, who is well known to have consorted with escaped Nazis. In his discussion of the influence of American neoliberals on the neofascist Alternative für Deutchland, Slobodian records that one of the party’s major donors was a billionaire named August von Finck Jr., whose father made his fortune as a banker under the Third Reich. Hayek’s Bastards, in tracing the connections, allows us to see the affinities.

Slobodian’s detailed intellectual history stops at the frontier of psychology, but it gets us close enough that we might recognise Donald Trump as an embodiment of neoliberalism’s id. Trump strips the ideology of its intellectual pretences, exposes its ugly absurdity and nastiness. He is a grown man with the vocabulary of a toddler who likes to boast about his IQ. He is an instinctive racist and authoritarian, disdainful of democracy and obsessed with status, who understands nothing of neoliberalism’s history or philosophy or economic arguments, but does recognise the principles of money and power. The original neoliberal ambition to place capital beyond state control, notwithstanding simple tax avoidance, was to allow private interests to use the threat of withdrawing their capital to discipline representative governments that might want to levy taxes to fund public services or simply make their societies a little fairer. Trump’s tariffs would seem to make little sense as manifestations of neoliberalism – until you realise he is using the power of the state in the same extortionate way that large corporations use their economic clout. His lizard-brained insight is that the operating principle in our neo-neoliberal world is simply gangsterism: nice economy you got there, shame if anything should happen to it.