For a recent interview in The Point, Quinn Slobodian discusses his book Hayek’s Bastards with James Duesterberg. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full interview. An excerpt appears below:

“If you use the category of neoliberalism as originally coined in 1938 in Paris by a group of economists, politicians, journalists and authors, including Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, then you look for schisms and breaks within the intellectual community and work from inside out. This is different than thinking from the outside in about neoliberalism as a set of political and economic tendencies that can be summed up in one decade or another, according to dominant modes of accumulation, patterns of behavior, political idioms and so on. Neither is necessarily superior, but this is the approach I use.

The puzzle in my most recent book was a specific one. Around 2016 or 2017, we heard a lot about the “libertarian to alt-right pipeline.” Yet nobody explained why people mostly interested in economic freedom were drawn to people mostly interested in ethnic and racial purity. Why would they make common cause? My goal was not to try to unmask neoliberalism as a whole as having a dark, concealed essence of ethno-chauvinism or ethno-nationalism, but rather to show how the doctrine itself transforms as it faces different challenges in different moments. For reasons I lay out in the book, the 1990s were a time that an alliance with the far right looked promising for some within the neoliberal community.”