Hayek's Bastards

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

The brilliant Quinn Slobodian has done it again. 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

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

Quinn Slobodian is the sharpest and most resourceful historian yet of the far-right movements rapidly taking over the Western world. Anyone hoping for illumination in these rapidly darkening times cannot afford to miss Hayek’s Bastards

Pankaj Mishra

Far more useful and original than the standard populist interpretation is Slobodian’s effort to reframe Trumpism as a perverse outgrowth of orthodox libertarianism... Slobodian’s wry commentary offers welcome respite from both the difficulty and the moral odiousness of his subject

Becca Rothfield, The Washington Post

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

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 highly topical and brilliantly argued demolition of a misplaced orthodoxy about the surging populist right

Matthew d’Ancona, The New European

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, The Irish Times

As Quinn Slobodian makes clear in his bracing history of the intellectual origins of the alt-right, the conventional story misses out a big part of the picture

David Runciman, London Review of Books