Hayek’s Bastards and the Global Origins of the Far Right: An Interview with Quinn Slobodian.
“A frontlash, not a backlash against capitalism”: Discussing Hayek's Bastards with Quinn Slobodian.
One of the defining questions of our time is the extent to which the new forms of populism are truly committed to dismantling the global order they both denounce and depend on. Nowhere is this conundrum more visible than in the United States today. Trump 2.0 has had a rocky start in the White House, struggling to bring together the seemingly contradictory elements of its agenda: withdrawing from foreign entanglements while stoking new territorial disputes; devaluing the U.S. dollar to boost exports while maintaining its role as the world’s reserve currency; reducing reliance on the global economy while attempting to steer it unilaterally to America’s advantage. The United States is a giant grappling with its own identity as a transfixed world awaits what comes next. Tracing the origins of this moment has never felt more urgent.
It is in this context that Quinn Slobodian, one of the leading intellectual historians of capitalism, re-enters the fray with his new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2025). Arguably the most provocative title in Slobodian’s repertoire, Hayek’s Bastards expands on an argument already central to Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018) and Crack-up Capitalism Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan, 2023). He argues that there is no contradiction in the Far Right simultaneously promoting pro-market liberalism and social hierarchies, facilitating the free movement of capital but not of people. Neoliberalism has always provided the intellectual space for a narrative like that to flourish.
What sets Hayek’s Bastards apart from Slobodian’s earlier works is both its chronological focus and its cast of characters. While he has previously concentrated on the intellectual foundations and origins of neoliberalism, Slobodian now turns decisively to the 1990s, weaving in analysis from other decades to illuminate this pivotal decade. Nor are the protagonists the same. If Globalists examined the crème de la crème of neoliberal intelligentsia at the Mont Pèlerin Society, and Crack-Up Capitalism focused on market radicals in a globalization context, Hayek’s Bastards turns its gaze to paleo-libertarianism, the ideological fusion of libertarianism and paleo-conservatism—the latter representing the old-guard, traditionalist, and isolationist wing of the Republican Party, in contrast to the more recent and hawkish neoconservative branch. One conclusion stands out. The rise of the Far Right is an acceleration, not a rejection of capitalism; a frontlash, not a backlash. And right-wing libertarians of the 1990s—through their convergence with paleoconservatives and their growing interest in biology, IQ, and gold—laid the groundwork for this reality to emerge.
I had the opportunity to interview Slobodian on June 9, 2025. What follows is a summary of our conversation about Hayek’s Bastards, its core arguments, the historical context that led to its conception, its relevance to our present, and the new directions Slobodian’s research might take in the future.
— Asensio Robles, Comillas Pontifical University.
ASENSIO ROBLES (AR): Thank you for joining us again. To start off, I’d like to hear what you see as the main arguments of your new book. Perhaps you could frame it around two concepts that appear quite prominently in your introduction: the notion of “bastards” and what you refer to as “Volk capital.”
QUINN SLOBODIAN (QS): The idea of “bastards” is, I would say, a catchy way to refer to the idea of generations of intellectual influence. The way we can imagine people self-consciously under the sway of their intellectual mentors, being more and less faithful to the spirit and the content of their masters’ work.
In the case of Hayek, it was quite important for me to show that there were people who were following his turn to science and his interest in complexity, but then took turns with their way of thinking that seemed to be very much in contradiction with core principles of Hayek’s thought: those who went far enough to, say, embrace scientific racism as their core principle, or to imagine human nature as an organizing principle for everything. I see those people passing over into the realm of “illegitimate” heirs of Hayek.
As for “Volk capital,” it engages more with how many scholars have studied neoliberalism until this point. Understandings of neoliberalism are often quite general. It’s common for people to believe that it is simply the claim that the whole world should be commodified; that everything is exchangeable; that all humans are reduced to the same basic substance; that they can be monetized and then exchanged in the market.
However, if you take the approach that I use in my books—following the work of Dieter Plehwe, Bernhard Walpen, Philip Mirowski and others—which is to use a narrower definition of liberalism, focusing on the thinking of a fairly discrete group of people over time, then a different vision comes forth. We see how the 1960s and 1970s became an inflection point for neoliberalism's focus on human difference: the idea that humans were not exchangeable and equal, that different human populations had different capacities and endowments to bring into the market. We see how this new neoliberal attention to human difference led to interest in rather old-fashioned categories like culture, race, and even civilization. By the 1980s, we find Hayek—who sometimes people would think of, rightly, as the father of neoliberalism—saying that the Western world has a quality that is different from the rest of the world, and that only the West can produce a certain kind of optimal economic actor.
What all this shows is how the idea of human capital—which is quite deracinated, de-territorialized and quite universal—actually in the minds of neoliberals gets re-grounded in particular genetic populations or cultural groups. Many of the 19th-century ideas of the “Volk”—meaning the essential character of a kinship group—return through the backdoor and get fused onto economic categories. It is in this way that human capital transforms into something we could think of as “Volk capital.”
AR: This view of neoliberalism as increasingly attracted to exclusive forms of community also appears in Crack-up Capitalism. I think you mention in the acknowledgements that these two books were written more or less in parallel.
QS: They were written in an attempt to make one big book that eventually defeated me and were turned into two separate ones. But they came out of the same moment: the 2016-2017 moment of political shock around the election of Trump, the “Leave” vote on Brexit, and then shortly thereafter the rise of the Alternative for Germany Party in the Austrian Freedom Party.
Like many people, I was trying to figure out how to handle this intellectually and politically. I felt discouraged by the way it was being understood by many mainstream pundits and even academics. They were understanding this as a kind of revolt against neoliberal capitalism from the left-behinds of globalization: people who had suffered for forty years under austerity, deindustrialization, wage stagnation and were now having their revenge. It was supposed to be a sobering moment for people who had criticized neoliberalism from the Left until then. The avenging angels against neoliberalism were now from the Right. I think it presented a challenge for identification for a lot of people: How do you interpret a Trump or a Boris Johnson? Are they now the unlikely heroes? Or are they still somehow insufficient critics of the neoliberal consensus?
I decided to try to question that dominant narrative in two main ways. First, by pointing out political geographies that were often somewhat more invisible. I argued that we were misleading ourselves to think that there were only two options for the world economy: either hyper-globalization or nationalism. I questioned that through attention to a third category, the “zone,” which becomes the protagonist of Crack-Up Capitalism. There, I point to the fact that much of the so-called economic nationalism happening around 2017-2018 was actually about creating more fluid spaces for the movement of investor capital inside nations: the freeport model in the United Kingdom, or the proliferation of Special Economic Zones in places like China and India.
My original goal was then to further graft on the fact that many of the people who were part of the alt-right in the 2016 moment were often coming from the so-called “paleo-libertarian” camp: libertarians who didn’t believe in global economic governance, who were also skeptical of national governments, and who were seeking in this moment a backlash to produce a larger fracturing of the state system as such.
There is an analogy--or an elective affinity between—Special Economic Zones being used for knitting together underwear or putting together trucks; and, on the other hand, this vision of contractual communities that drew together people on the Right, from scientific racists to anarcho-capitalists. I had this grandiose vision of bundling all that together into one grand narrative, but I realized in the end that it was quixotic. Crack-up Capitalism thus sat by itself, and the story of the paleo-alliance that brought together dissident members of the Right and the neoliberal movement is what became the heart of Hayek’s Bastards.
AR: I also have the impression that both books address the same issues, but from two different angles. Crack-Up Capitalism explores recent trends in neoliberalism with an emphasis on space (and spaces). In Hayek’s Bastards, there seems to be a stronger focus on chronology and the pivotal role of certain decades.
QS: I think that's true. In the event, the chronologies were pretty well aligned in the sense that in Hayek’s Bastards I described this period after the Cold War as a moment of reckoning, where people were asking themselves whether or not they had actually won the Cold War, or if there was still a persistence of state spending and socialism by another name in the form of environmentalism or feminism.
In the case of the zones, the 1990s were also a breakthrough period where, if you look at charts of numbers of countries with Special Economic Zones or the numbers at large, it was a way to practice globalization—not through integration in the sense of making a larger and larger, uniform regulatory space, but through creating different diversities across territory.
The use of difference, politically or economically, is what unites the two narratives. And in both cases my revision was to say that this period we think of as a time of greater uniformity, or the smoothing over of differences in the 1990s and 2000s, was also a time of focusing on irreconcilable differences that needed to be salvaged and made the basis of new politics.
AR: One of the critiques that you raise in this book is, I think, the widespread assumption that neoliberalism is simply a celebration of individualism. Hayek’s Bastards, in this sense, shows how neoliberals were deeply invested in fostering alternative forms of community. Some even feared the dissolution of the state, worried that there would be nothing left to build upon.
QS: It's a bit of a subtle point. It's not that I disagree that their focus is individualism—I actually agree that it is. But because their focus is individualism, they are very conscious of what the conditions are under which individualism can be realized. And the traditional modern solution to that is the idea of the “Republic,” the idea of a liberal polity governed by a relatively impartial state that allows for individual space of self-expression or self-actualization, either for commitment to the notion of civil society, or the idea that the market works best when people have a space of choice as consumers and as workers.
If you discard that republican tradition, then you have to create something new. That is, I think, the real task of neoliberals at a basic level, especially the ones who want to do away with the state. This book is concerned with that subgenre of neoliberal thought, more so than anything else I’ve written.
Then you need to ask yourself: How can we constitute communities that will be functioning and allow for individual expression in the absence of uniform regulations from a representative state? You have to start paying attention to things like the role of ethnic homogeneity in decreasing transaction costs and producing climates of trust, which can allow for communities to self-perpetuate. You pay attention to things like the importance of the “social contract,” understood literally as a set of terms and conditions that people agree to be part of a smaller community. You start paying attention to things like social reproduction: what kind of gender orders are necessary to make sure that enough children are produced if you’re going to move towards a more closed-border model of political organization?
This is the terrain where anarcho-capitalists end up having productive conversations with conservatives. Because the conservatives are coming at it from the other direction: They want to preserve a certain gender order, a certain moral and cultural order, and are interested in the terms under which they can hold on to that. The anarcho-capitalists, meanwhile, want abstract, individual freedom, but recognize the need for some conditions and parameters for that. So, they actually have decades-worth of engagement on that question.
What you're also pointing to, which was striking for me reading it in the sources, was this neoliberal fear that the Cold War might have been lost, in the sense that state spending remained very high after the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War raised the possibility that they might win the social policy struggle and destroy the social state altogether. That then raises a set of new questions about how the new order could be anchored in the absence of a redistributive state at any level.
That’s one place where that discussion becomes very relevant to our present moment in the United States, because this recent campaign to cut one third of the federal budget requires that you begin to remove what exists of a social state in the United States. You get closer to this predicament that Charles Murray describes in the introduction to my book, where he asks, to paraphrase: “What happens the day after the welfare state is truly gone? Do we descend into a state of anarchy? Is there some form of organic self-organization that reemerges? Does part of the population perish while another part of it defends itself against the remnants?”
The very moment of vexed triumphalism after the Cold War is what sets the stage for these more apocalyptic forms of politics that are now becoming all too familiar to us.
AR: The end of the Cold War triggered an intellectual schism inside neoliberalism that had somewhat remained dormant or irrelevant until then. It is remarkable, you say in your book, the absence of serious sectarian splits within neoliberalism between the 1940s and the 1980s. Not an easy thing to achieve for any ideology.
QS: That's right. In a general way, I think that the political battle lines were pretty clearly drawn from 1948 to 1991: the “free, liberal, capitalist” world on one side of the spectrum, and the planned command economies of the communist world on the other. When that divide was abruptly erased in the 1990s, there were only two directions to go. You could argue that there were no more meaningful political divisions, that global convergence was inevitable. Or you could go the other direction, which was to say that the divisions still existed, that they had simply migrated to other domains that had been previously under the radar. This second reading is the one the global Right decided for.
On the part of the Right (and every nation in the world), the 1990s were a time of a restless search for a new enemy now that the Soviet Union was gone. Sometimes, that meant going back to previous images: the vision of George Soros as the revival of anti-Semitic trope of Jewish conspiratorial control is, for example, very important for Viktor Orbán and the world around CPAC. Neoliberals were also a part of this story of figuring out who the new enemy was. And they found it in the Left that was doing this march through the institutions, claiming the universities, claiming the newspapers and introducing a language of so-called “political correctness.” That enlightens this current moment we're in. Neoliberals’ attention to affirmative action, the attempt to redress gender and racial inequality through state means, is framed very early. We're talking about 35 years ago!
When you take the historical view (of any kind), then you always take for granted that no rupture appears out of thin air. But I do think that we were, for different reasons, not attentive to the cleavages that ended up producing the disruptive politics of the last decade. In that sense, I guess that all three of my last books are attempts to reframe that moment in ways to help us understand better where these supposedly spontaneous outbursts of anger against the global status quo have come from.
AR: I guess another element these three books share is how you develop your argument. If we think that neoliberalism strives for the dissolution of the state, Globalists highlights how neoliberals have actually relied on state intervention and institutions to sustain their order. If we think of neoliberalism as promoting a wide-open, borderless global society, Crack-up Capitalism zooms in on micro-spaces and neoliberals’ growing attention to human separation. If we imagine the alt-right as a backlash against neoliberalism, Hayek’s Bastardspictures it as a frontlash, an acceleration of this ideology. It’s as if you’re drawn to what initially might seem a counterintuitive position, in order to explore what that contradiction can reveal.
QS: Thanks for noticing that. I think that is also relevant to what we do as history professors. That's the way I try to teach my students. I tell them that the template for writing an interesting paper is to begin by saying: “We think it's like this, but it's actually like that, and I'm going to show you why. I'm going to show you evidence that has been, for different reasons, ignored, neglected, or misunderstood. And I'm not just going to do this through the force of logic, but through the force of evidence.”
The demonstration of traces of material, the idea made flesh in the past that will give strength and power to the revision I’m trying to make. That’s what keeps me interested in this field and motivates me. I think that the need to do that kind of revision and think through the contradictions, rather than just settle for them, is something that in some ways history is in a uniquely gifted position to do these days.
AR: You also seem to establish a strong correlation between two periods: the 1990s and the 1960s. We can’t understand paleo-libertarians’ interest in hard borders, IQ, and gold without looking at earlier debates on, for example, the 1965 Immigration Act, 1960s evolutionary psychology, or monetary reform after Bretton Woods.
QS: That’s a good observation. One of the ways that I think that I'm trying to set up this alternative intellectual history of neoliberalism is by proving it is something that happens in dynamic response to political challenges.
In Globalists, the argument was that neoliberalism is not something that just comes out of meetings and books, but also of people’s fear about the rise of certain forms of collective politics. Politics that they see as especially threatening to the stability of the capitalist order and whose nature mutates from decade to decade: from traditional working-class parties to decolonizing countries, to attempts at a New International Economic Order, and so on.
Now, in Hayek’s Bastards, the 1960s and the 1990s offer two moments where there is an attempt to reconfigure the settlement, especially in the United States. That both decades were, all in all, two moments of prosperity is particularly interesting as well. By the end of the 1990s, there is the attempt to do what Nancy Fraser has pejoratively called “progressive neoliberalism:” to search for a version of the market that also attends to problems of gender, race and environmentalism but often does not go beyond tokenism.
I think that one of the reasons why the Left was caught off guard by 2016 is because they were quite focused on criticizing a version of neoliberalism embraced by someone like Bill Clinton, or even Barack Obama. A version of neoliberalism which seemed to be hypocritical, to give lip service to certain aspects of the 1960s social movements while also defanging and blunting their critical edge. So, in many ways, I think people on the Left didn’t have their eye on the right “villain,” so to speak. They were too focused on internal critique.
If you think about ideas and movements in this dynamic and dialogic relationship to each other, then we should always pay attention to what the neoliberals are worried about at a given decade. It might be a good sign of vulnerability in the economic system, a kind of soft underbelly: for example, when they were worried in the 1970s and in the 1990s about the way environmental demands could upset the growth model or put the brakes on forms of profit accumulation. That should be something that we pay close attention to and ask if maybe they were right. Maybe they had found that there was a soft spot that we could push harder on. I continue to believe that reading neoliberalism against the grain is a productive way of also fertilizing counter movements.
AR: Final question now: I couldn’t help but notice that two topics don’t come up in the book. One is cryptocurrencies, which in some ways mirror the paleo-libertarian obsession with gold that you discuss. The other is AI, which perhaps could relate to your reflections on IQ. Are these elephants in the room? Or are you saving them for your next book?
QS: I am actually finishing a short book that I'm writing with a friend, Ben Tarnoff, who is a tech writer. It’s about Elon Musk and is called Muskism. It will be out already this time next year, and it will be translated into Spanish and other languages. So yes, there we do get more into AI, effective altruism, superintelligence, and so on.
Crypto is an interesting case. It’s certainly been around long enough that I’ve had many opportunities to think about it. I still don’t find the core argument persuasive. I see it as always parasitical on a functioning traditional monetary system, in which it can play the role of a hedge-speculative asset, a plaything for a small number of libertarians and more recently large investors. For years, I've resisted taking it too seriously, and I feel like now it's proven to be a wise bet because the number of real true believers in, say, the blockchain as a template for rethinking politics, is very, very small. The vast majority of people with crypto investments are just using it the same way they would make bets on solar panels or electric vehicles. It's just another growth sector which has its own internal dynamics, and which will have the backstop from the state when necessary. So crypto seems to me like a bit of a dead end intellectually.
Now, the theme of IQ is different. Funnily enough, the other direction my research is going is not necessarily forward to AI, but backwards to the changes in the human sciences in the postwar decades: the world that Richard Herrnstein came out of as a student of B. F. Skinner at Harvard in the 1970s, the world of E. O. Wilson and Robert Trivers… All the ways that humans were being analogized to animals in the 1960s and 70s. I find that topic quite compelling.
A medium-term project, and what I'll be doing after Muskism, is basically to be writing the history of this: “How humans became animals at Harvard.”
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Quinn Slobodian is Professor of International History at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. A historian of capitalism, he specializes in the intellectual evolution of neoliberalism, from its origins to the present day. His earlier research has explored global grassroot activism during the Cold War, with a focus on West Germany. He is co-director of the History and Political Economy Project, and a regular contributor to The Guardian, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. For 2025-26, he is a Guggenheim Fellow.