For the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Suzanne Schneider reviews Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“‘Arguments about politics always rest on claims about human nature,’ Quinn Slobodian reminds us in his new intellectual history of the American far right. Hayek’s Bastards focuses on a coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, and paleoconservatives who, a century after Pearson, returned to theories of immutable genetic and racial differences to make the case for market supremacy and a minimalist state, a current of thinking Slobodian calls “new fusionism.” While a previous generation of conservatives had welded religious traditionalism to free market principles—the original fusionism associated with Frank Meyer and the National Review—their ideological successors found evolutionary psychology, genetics, and biological anthropology more useful.”