A revelatory exploration of how today's right-wing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition
to neoliberalism but from within it 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 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 neo-confederates
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.
