The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right
Allen Lane, 2025
Amazon.co.uk (Amazon.com, with different subtitle)
Publisher’s Description:
‘Bracingly original…Hayek’s Bastards demonstrates how a history of ideas can be riveting. Slobodian grounds intellectual abstractions in the lives of the people who espoused them…His book offers an illuminating history to our current bewildering moment, as right-wing populists join forces with billionaire oligarchs to take a chain saw to the foundations of public life, until there’s nothing left to stand on’ Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
A revelatory exploration of how today’s rightwing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within it
After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated – and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek’s disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote.
In this illuminating new book, historian Quinn Slobodian reveals how, from the 1990s onwards, neoliberal thinkers turned to nature, in an attempt to roll back social changes and to return to a hierarchy of gender, race and cultural difference. He explores how these thinkers drew on the language of science, from cognitive psychology to genetics, in order to embed the idea of ‘competition’ ever deeper into social life, and to advocate cultural homogeneity as essential for markets to truly work. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists that would become known as the alt-right.
Hayek’s Bastards shows that many contemporary iterations of the Far Right, from Javier Milei to Donald Trump, emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but within it. As repellent as their politics may be, these supposed disruptors are not defectors from the neoliberal order, but its latest cheerleaders.
Reviews:
“Indispensable…Entertaining. Slobodian’s wry commentary offers welcome respite from both the difficulty and the moral odiousness of his subject.” Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post
“As Quinn Slobodian makes clear in his bracing history of the intellectual origins of the alt-right, the conventional story misses out big part of the picture.” David Runciman, London Review of Books
“With real empirical depth and analytical subtlety, Hayek’s Bastards traces the origins of today’s far-right to a split within neoliberalism, and a ‘new fusionism’ of liberal economy and hard-hereditarian ‘race science’ – and all is made clear. One of the sharpest guides to the new reaction, it also casts light on the seemingly contradictory formation of libertarian-authoritarianism, of free trade and closed borders, and of an extreme monetary populism that is also extremely deferential to the wealthy.” Richard Seymour
“Quinn Slobodian has established himself as one of the sharpest intellectual historians of neoliberalism.” Bartolomeo Sala, Jacobin
“A bravura performance of intellectual inquiry.” Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Fascinating…Slobodian’s book draws our attention to what might appear an astonishing fact…that it has proven very easy to support capitalism while being hostile to other fundamental liberal liberties.” Matt McManus, Illiberalism
“Slobodian’s thesis is novel: he suggests that what is unfolding in Washington is the culmination of a strategic shift by neoliberal planners to achieve more populist support for their particular cause…One of Slobodian’s key achievements…is in showing that the entire weight of the extraordinarily successful neoliberal project rests on a foundation of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo.” Dave Vetter, The Climate Laundry
“Slobodian marshals impressive archival research…dazzling.” Aris Roussinos, Unherd
“A rousing relitigation of the 1990s’ ideological scorecard.” Jon Skolnik, Vanity Fair
“Slobodian charts clearly how today’s far right is simply a further degeneration from neoliberalism’s celebration of economic inequality and the primacy of economics as the measure of man. We are all living in a world being plundered by Hayek’s bastards now.” Ian Hughes, Irish Times
“Hayek’s Bastards is an important book…As with Slobodian’s previous books, Hayek’s Bastards shows remarkable thoroughness in terms of research and in pursuing the connections among the thicket of figures populating the netherworld of the new fusionist right. Slobodian has provided his readers with nothing less than a counter-history of the nexus of politics, economics, and ideology in our world. The results are breathtaking but also terrifying.” John Foster, The Battleground
“A creative and engaging intellectual detective story that cuts through the far right’s smoke-and-mirrors claims of rupture and novelty, tracing the movement’s deep neoliberal roots and exposing a shared set of supremacist beliefs about which lives have value and which lives do not. Ideas have consequences and very few scholars take the history of ideas as seriously as Slobodian, even when the ideas themselves are absurd, patently false, and deeply dangerous.” Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger and The Shock Doctrine
“The brilliant Quinn Slobodian has done it again: overturned orthodoxy on the history of neoliberalism by paying attention to its fissures, mutations, and ideological foundations. Neoliberals confessed that tearing down the Berlin Wall did not address the real threat to liberty: welfare, immigrants, and demands for racial, gender, disability, and environmental justice. Anyone who believes neoliberal ideology is dead must read this book. Thanks to the Charles Murrays, Murray Rothbards, Peter Brimelows, and Richard Spencers of the world, it is alive and well in the alt-Right and the self-proclaimed cognitive elite bent on restoring the natural order of things in order to make the West Great Again.” Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“In this work of historical erudition and sharp political analysis, Quinn Slobodian explains how the myth of neoliberal freedom can be sustained only through a deeply illiberal world view. Through a painstaking reconstruction of how Hayek’s offspring appeal to science served to naturalize hierarchy, and resist the calls for social equality, we come to see how rightwing authoritarianism emerged not as an alternative to neoliberalism but as its brainchild. An essential read to understand the times in which we live.” Lea Ypi, author of Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
About the Author:
Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University and the author or editor of seven books translated into ten languages. He contributes regularly to the New York Times, Guardian, and New York Review of Books. In 2024, Prospect UK named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers.
Jan Olof Bengtsson 