Jennifer Szalai reviews Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Hayek’s Bastards, for The New York Times. Click here to read the full review. Click here to learn more about the book. An excerpt appears below:

“The combination of emollient platitudes, economic shock therapy and strongman authoritarianism is why Milei features prominently in the concluding chapter of Quinn Slobodian’s bracingly original new book, “Hayek’s Bastards.” Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, traces how right-wing figures across the world have positioned themselves as populist critics of “neoliberal policies” even while they pay frequent homage to Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who laid the foundations for the neoliberal tradition, with its gospel of free markets. This so-called New Right has adopted the furious nostalgia of a backlash to what Milei has called a “global hegemony” while embracing radical deregulation. At Davos, Slobodian writes, “Milei spoke less as a defector from the global capitalist order than its latest photogenic cheerleader.”

Slobodian locates a hinge moment in the end of the Cold War. For hardcore believers in the primacy of free markets, the collapse of communism was a surprisingly scary time. Instead of the end-of-history triumphalism emanating from more mainstream quarters, thinkers on the far right warned about the persistence of big states and public spending. Socialism hadn’t been left for dead, they insisted; it had “simply mutated,” as one writer put it. “The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had injected the poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative action and ecological consciousness into the veins of the body politic,” Slobodian writes, paraphrasing the reactionary strain of neoliberal thinking at the time. According to this besieged worldview, egalitarian demands led inexorably to “victimology” and bloated states. “Neoliberals needed an antidote.””