Becca Rothfeld reviews Quinn Slobodian’s book, Hayek’s Bastards, for The Washington Post. Click here to read the review. Click here to learn more about the book. An excerpt appears below:

“Friedrich Hayek, the most influential libertarian economist of the 20th century, weighed in on these matters in a 1976 lecture. To his credit, he did not lapse into the more extreme forms of bigotry that some of his apostate followers would later take up with a vengeance. Instead, he did something surprising: He argued that socialism is the state to which humans are most naturally inclined. Because we originated in small groups in which solidarity was an asset, he claimed, neoliberalism was “an acquired discipline” — one that flew in the face of humanity’s most deeply ingrained instincts.

As Slobodian so capably shows, a group of Hayek’s successors disagreed. The dispute between Hayek and the thinkers Slobodian deems his “bastards” revolved in part around human origins: Is capitalism built into our biology, or is it the hard-earned product of civilizing forces? Provocateurs like the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard and the antidemocratic reactionary Hans-Hermann Hoppe maintained, contra Hayek, that humans were capitalists in the cradle, maybe even the womb.”