[Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian (Princeton University Press, 2025; 279pp.]
Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at Boston University, so you might expect that he has at least some ability for clear and logically exact arguments. If you expected that, you would be mistaken.
To be blunt, he has a slapdash approach to ideas. He is an assiduous researcher but displays little interest in the structure of the important issues he writes about. He amasses an extraordinarily large number of quotations but often fails to grasp their meaning. In what follows, I’ll try to give some examples of this. But before doing so, I need to answer a preliminary question. Why should we care about Slobodian’s mistakes? The answer to that is that a great deal of Hayek’s Bastards is devoted to an attack on Murray Rothbard.
A good way to begin to understand Slobodian’s book is to consider its odd title. Slobodian wishes to evoke a book that influenced him, John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards. Saul argued that Enlightenment rationalism had been betrayed by power-seeking intellectuals, who distorted the thought of Voltaire—whom Saul views as the quintessential Enlightened thinker—for ideological reasons. In like fashion, Rothbard has used the thought of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek to justify a policy of white backlash against progressive social reforms aimed at helping oppressed groups. In particular, Rothbard relied on the dubious science of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray to claim that blacks are mentally inferior to whites. Libertarians should, Rothbard maintained, ally with the Far Right and appeal to a genuinely oppressed class—white males.
Rothbard did indeed oppose affirmative action, but in point of fact, he rejected the crude Social Darwinism that Slobodian imputes to him. He supported private charity and benevolence. In a letter to F.A. Harper of November 1948, he says:
I consider one of the glories of economic freedom and individualism (not rugged, but humane) the ever-growing standard of living, the magnificent increase in opportunities for leisure, and the development of life-giving modern medicine. I consider it a tribute to the moral qualities of an individualist society that private charity and philanthropy help the unfortunate people in our midst. Private philanthropy is the direct expression of the great Christian principle of the brotherhood of man and the Golden Rule. Private philanthropy indeed is the only valid expression of these Christian ethical principles; compulsory charity through “social legislation” is the exact contrary: it is the evil imposition of force by one group on another. Christ was a great individualist not because He was rugged, as Dr. [George] Cutten seems to think, but because He recognized that His great ethical principles could only be put into effect through the voluntary action of individuals and not by a self-appointed [group] of politician-priests who claim the right to coerce people into adopting the Golden Rule by “social legislation.’’
Let’s move on to another example of Slobodian’s distorted picture of Rothbard. Slobodian has done me the singular honor of citing two of my reviews critical of the “hermeneutical invasion of economics” by a group of Austrians centered around George Mason University, along with articles by Rothbard to the same effect.
The issue at stake in these criticisms was whether there is a deductive science of praxeology and, more generally, whether there is such a thing as objective truth. The GMU Austrians, Rothbard said, were mired in subjectivism because of undue reliance on the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Slobodian gives no evidence of any knowledge of what is in dispute. In a ludicrous comment, he says, “Rothbard’s summary of hermeneutics sounds remarkably close to Hayek’s own thought that ‘with each person being bound to his subjective views, feelings, history, and so on, there is no method of discovering objective truth.’”
Hayek most definitely did not deny objective truth, and he accepted praxeological deduction, which he called “the pure logic of choice,” though his view of its scope and limits was less expansive than that of Mises. Wading deeper into quicksand, Slobodian confirms his ignorance by telling us that Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an “apostate” for rejecting hermeneutics, in that he had studied at Frankfurt—“the heart of the hermeneutic turn”—under the eminent Juergen Habermas. Evidently Slobodian does not know that Habermas was the leading German critic of Gadamer.
We have not yet plumbed the depths of Slobodian’s ignorance of Rothbard’s thought. Rothbard strongly supported the gold standard, and Slobodian hasn’t the slightest idea why. According to him, the gold standard caused the Great Depression: “The Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression created a liquidity crunch with accompanying spikes in unemployment and plummet in prices.” I suppose it is asking too much of Slobodian that he present a critical analysis of Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression (1963), but if there is any evidence that he is aware of the book at all, it has not been vouchsafed to us.
Rothbard could at least console himself posthumously by noting that he is not alone among eminent Austrians whose views about the gold standard Slobodian botches. Concerning Mises, he says:
Gold bugs claimed to be Ludwig von Mises’s disciples and his heirs. How close were they to the master? In fact, they were guilty of the same misplaced concreteness as the Hayek’s bastards we have met in other chapters…. What he [Mises] rejected about gold was not its metaphysical or irreplaceable qualities but its ability to act as a brake on the tendency of democratic states to “spend beyond their means”… “Gold is natural money” runs a recent post on the Mises Institute website and “Nature’s money is gold.” But this was not the core of Mises’s message. He was more pragmatic and never envisioned a return of mankind to a primal state of barter in precious metals.
Slobodian’s comment is a wordy way of saying, “I have never heard of the money regression theorem.” Slobodian is so lost in space that he thinks a call to return to the gold standard is a demand to return to a primal state in which people “barter in gold.” Perhaps that is the closest he can come to “barter leads to the emergence of gold as money.”
Slobodian also says that “gold bugs” do not understand that central banks and the government guarantee the value of gold; without this aid, it would not be able to function as money. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has taught us that the government can print as much money as it wants, without resulting in inflation. Slobodian offers these startling claims without supporting arguments: evidently—just as the government is free to create money—he thinks himself free to blow unlimited smoke into the air.
