Aris Roussinos reviews Quinn Slobodian’s recent book with Zone, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, for UnHerd. Read the review here. Purchase the book here. An excerpt appears below:

“Slobodian’s excellent 2018 book Globalists charted the birth of neoliberalism in late-Habsburg Vienna and its progression to intellectual hegemony in the thinktanks and chancelleries of the late 20th-century West. In Hayek’s Bastards, published next week, he aims to show that the populist Right-wing revolt against neoliberal globalisation is less than it seems. He argues that “important factions of the emerging Right were, in fact, mutant strains of neoliberalism” and that “many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it”. The book is, Slobodian claims, “a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing”. If the timing of the book’s release, at the precise moment Trump’s neoliberal acolytes like Milei decry his neo-developmentalist rejection of free trade dogma, appears unfortunate for Slobodian, his argument is that things are not as they seem. “Rather than a rejection of neoliberalism”, Slobodian’s framing sees “the Far Right [in which Slobodian counts the Trump administration and the European populist Right] “as a mutant form of it, shedding certain features — like a commitment to multilateral trade governance or the virtues of outsourcing — while doubling down on Social Darwinist principles of struggle in the market translated through hierarchical categories of race, nationality, and gender”.”