Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, 2024

In the 1990s, some libertarians declared that capitalism’s future depended on accepting a few supposed hard truths from the natural sciences: ethno-cultural homogeneity was a condition of market exchange; human intelligence was organized by race; and value was best stored in gold, that noble metal. The appeal to nature was essential to a “new fusionism,” a reactionary mix of libertarianism and ethnocentrism favoured by those white men who called themselves “paleolibertarians.”

So argues Quinn Slobodian, a self-described historian of “bad ideas” who has written a trilogy about neoliberalism. The books make tidy arguments and have attracted a wide readership, even as the scope of each volume is modest. Globalists (2018) explored how Geneva School neoliberals longed to encase the market with institutions and rules, at both international and national levels, that would protect the price system from mid-twentieth-century democracy. Crack-up Capitalism (2023) traced a libertarian riposte at the end of the Cold War: forget globalism – existing institutional arrangements should be exited, with secession creating new geographic zones where private ownership and exchange could thrive without any democracy at all.

Now, Slobodian sticks with the libertarian margins to explore the far right’s capitalism. Hayek’s Bastards focuses on one branch of Ludvig von Mises’s mostly American disciples, the likes of economist Murray Rothbard, editor Lew Rockwell, journalist Peter Brimelow, psychologist Richard Lynn, investment guru Harry Browne, huckster-politician Ron Paul, and political scientist Charles Murray. The research draws on libertarian publications, the Mont Pèlerin Society papers at the Hoover Institution, and the work of fellow scholars. Whereas other neoliberals felt that the law, religion, and a morality of mutual indifference were requirements of a free market, these libertarians were preoccupied with racial hierarchy. What one participant called the “alternative right” in 1987 represented, Slobodian suggests, a pro-capitalist “frontlash” against political demands for equality.

Concepts abound in this work. In Chapters 1 and 2, “Hayek’s bastards” were neoliberals who discounted Friederich Hayek’s cautious interest in cultural evolution and overcame Mises’s ambivalence about race.¹ They instead insisted that group differences were immutable and contemplated forms of decentralization bent on re-establishing property-owning as a means of racial separation. In Chapter 3, the “ethno-economy” was a synthesis of nativism and capitalism. If racist libertarians felt that goods and services should flow freely across borders, they opposed non-white immigration on the grounds that everyday exchanges depended on “bloodworks,” a biological familiarity and cultural endowment needed for a good functioning market.

In Chapter 4, “IQ racism” was a eugenic belief that humanity was organized into quantifiable and hierarchical “neurocastes.” In this view, an intersection of intelligence and race meant that, rather than educated individuals embodying human capital, groups possessed an innate “Volk capital.” In Chapter 5, “goldbugs” condemned “monetary socialism,” thinking that welfare states redistributed wealth by printing paper money and, in doing so, enabling moral degeneration. “Auripatriotism” - an affinity for nations that used the gold standard - was part of a “metal morality,” where possessing gold secured one’s monetary and moral sovereignty.

The narrative is challenging. Slobodian holds that the book is about the 1990s, a decade when neoliberals remained anxious despite the ascent of their political philosophy. However, the story continually doubles back to the 1970s and also projects forward to the present (aiming to link the paleolibertarian genealogy to the “mutant neoliberalisms” of Alternative für Deutschland, Argentina president Javier Milei, or American podcaster Steve Bannon). It is not always clear what using the 1990s as a jumping off point accomplishes. In 1992, Rothbard claimed that the Los Angeles riots radicalized him into championing white property rights against a Black underclass. Yet, in 1971, he had already decided human inequality was “a biological reality.” The original 1950s-1960s “fusionism” mixed capitalism, traditionalism, and segregation; on its heels, libertarians were prepared to elevate property rights above civil rights. Jumping among decades works best, however, from the apocalyptic perspective of the protagonists. Whether 5, 35 or 55 years ago, they believed that social degeneration was underway and market collapse was imminent.

¹ Lionizing their namesake, certain Miseans don’t like what Slobodian has to say. They have antagonized Slobodian as well as accused him of misrepresenting Mises’s views on race.

The book deals with intellectuals who operated between “New Right” conservatism (associated with Thatcher and Reagan) and neo-Nazism. This political space had many divisions, although the analysis prioritizes connections among thinkers and organizations. Slobodian probably does not want to repeat himself: refer to his earlier work if you want to know the difference between anarcho-capitalists and limited-state libertarians or are curious about why white-minority rule in southern African was a key Rorschach test for neoliberals. Brief comments glancingly distinguish libertarianism from monetarism and neoconservatism. Still, more attention to political boundaries would often help locate paleo-libertarians, including in relation to mainstream conservatives.

The narrative refers several times, without explanation, to ethology (the study of animals in the wild) and sociobiology (concerned with the biological basis of social behaviour). Although these academic fields were considered legitimate, their popularizers were right-wing thinkers determined to apply market metaphors to humanity from the 1960s. In their portrait of genetic and social competition, humans were inherently selfish, aggressively territorial, and hierarchical. By drawing on sociobiology, paleo-libertarians repeated reactionary pseudo-science that nonetheless shaped broader neo-Malthusian conversations about population, resources, and development. In an already kaleidoscopic book, it feels like there might be a section missing about Garrett Hardin, “the tragedy off the commons” eugenicist who contributed to free-market environmentalism (and whose influence on Brimelow is underplayed in Chapter 3).

Slobodian’s most unusual choice also relates to political boundaries. The sense of ideas being merged into a new synthesis comes across (e.g. Brimelow arrived at libertarianism through his nativism; Murray added racism to his free-market outlook). Yet “paleo-libertarianism” arose in the early 1990s from cooperation between the Mises Institute and the paleo-conservative John Randolph Club. The alliance included a few dozen or so intellectuals, however Hayek’s Bastards effectively addresses just one faction of the small movement.

Pre-emptively defending this imbalance, Slobodian emphasizes that his interest in capitalism and histories of the far right too often ignore material issues. However, from the 1970s, white supremacists were engaged in debates that overlapped with libertarian themes: about territorial secession, the value of capitalism as opposed to a “third way,” the legitimacy of violence, the boundaries of whiteness, and an approaching apocalyptic crisis. (Indeed, the chapter on gold might seem less like an outlier if allusions to “One Worldism” and “race war” were contextualized in relation to anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.) For the story Slobodian tells, it would be helpful to know how John Randolph Club members distinguished themselves from neo-Nazis and turned towards a “new fusionism” and the “alternative right” (terms both coined by paleo-conservatives). If the book is missing another section, it might concern Jared Taylor, a white nationalist who is knowingly referred to seven times without an explanation of how his ideas were conducive to an alliance with libertarians.

Having stepped into the role of public intellectual, Slobodian offers the lesson that many current examples of the far right emerged within neoliberalism, not in opposition to it - a warning not be duped by demagogues, but also a reminder that ideologies are multifaceted and their elements are changeable over time. Tracing several libertarian threads, Hayek Bastard’s is a history rich in analytical concepts and alive to complexity, full of reference points and no more than a fair share of ambiguities. One suggestive through line is that libertarian intellectualism has been motivated by coexisting impulses: a paranoid desire for security, as well as a crude fantasy of enrichment and domination in a world with deep economic inequality.