Slobodian’s Bastard Caricatures: Smearing Austrian Economists

[Slobodian, Quinn. Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 2025. 279pp. $29.95.]

There is a civil war raging on the American right. On the surface, it appears to be a struggle between two factions. The first faction—which might be called the “neoconservatives”—represents the old guard of the American GOP and the remnant of the Cold War and War on Terror consensus. These conservatives further believe in an aggressive American foreign policy. Although often professing adherence to free market principles, they are so-called “compassionate conservatives” who hold to many elements of the welfare state. They believe that shedding a strong cultural and ethnic identity is a mark of enlightenment and identify membership in a nation state as being based upon legal citizenship and allegiance to credal principles as opposed to ethnicity. They also, generally speaking, hold to natural law principles and embrace a broadly Christian understanding of sexual ethics.

The second group—which could be called the New Right—tends to be skeptical of American involvement in foreign wars. They tend toward right-wing socialism or at least favor strong restrictions on the market. They believe that ethnicity is mostly but not exclusively one’s primary political identity. They further tend toward supporting Christian ethics but also are enamored with critics of Christianity such as Friedrich Nietzsche.

Of course, this divide is far too superficial. One group that seems not to fit into this two-fold divide is the libertarians. Having gained national popularity and recognition during the Ron Paul presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2012, libertarians have largely been eclipsed by Trumpian populism and the New Right. However, they remain an important intellectual force, although it is difficult to label them as necessarily being right wing or conservative. Libertarians can be pro-choice or pro-life. They can be ethnocentric and tribalist or highly individualist. They can be pro- or anti-war. In his recent book, Hayek’s Bastard’s: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Boston University historian Quinn Slobodian attempts to craft a history of the New Right by emphasizing its alleged pedigree in libertarian figures like Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

Slobodian cautions that he is not trying to argue that von Hayek and von Mises’s ideas are identical to those of the most extreme members of the New Right—he explains that the idea for the title for his book is derived from John Ralston Saul’s 1992 book, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, which argues that the hyper-rationalist bureaucracy of the West, at least, in part, took Voltaire’s rationalism in ways that the French Enlightenment thinker would not have anticipated.

In a similar fashion, Slobodian states that contemporary right-wing thinkers take Hayek and von Mises’s thought in directions that the two thinkers would not have anticipated. Several times in the book Slobodian attempts to make clear differences between thinkers. Pat Buchanan, Ludwig von Mises and David Duke believe (often radically) different things, but they are often lumped together as being “right wing.” However, the very premise and model of the book seems, at times—whether intentionally or not—to lump conservatives together with those on the far right. 

Perhaps the principal villain in the book is Charles Murray. Murray is both a libertarian and a believer in IQ science—the main target of Slobodian’s critique in the book. Slobodian argues that Murray and others in his milieu are wrong to interpret genetic and other scientific discoveries that at least appear to suggest innate differences among human people groups as being correct. Slobodian seems to hold something akin to the belief that all humans are equal, and any intelligence or behavior differences that can be mapped among ethnicities has cultural and economic sources, not biological or genetic ones.

Since Murray is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, as well as an advocate for free market economics, Slobodian attempts to attach Murray’s ideas of inequality to libertarian politics and free market economics. While other leftists have distinguished the New Right as well as the more aggressive Alt Right or what is now called “Dissident Right” as being anti-capitalist, or at least critical of capitalism, Slobodian views the New Right as being as pro-capitalist as it is racialist. Alleged libertarian goals of economic inequality, according to Slobodian, are stepping stones to advocating racial inequality.

In developing his historical chronology, Slobodian states that the libertarians—having been part of the coalition that won the Cold War—began, in the 1990s, to view the enemy as being socialism and civil rights. While many libertarians argue that the welfare state is an encroachment on freedom, Slobodian sees many right-wing libertarians as being opposed to the welfare state because their goal is not freedom, but inequality. Drawing from paleoconservative Paul Gottfried, Slobodian states that a new fusionism emerged in the 1990s that relied upon biologism and genetics to advocate for inequality in all facets of human life. Slobodian quotes from Murray and others who argued that the liberal order, contrary to Francis Fukuyama’s vision of the end of history, was not suited for all humans.

In making his case, Slobodian argues that some right leaning libertarians like Gerard Radnitzky argued that there is a notion of human nature at the bedrock of Austrian economics. Slobodian even sees Pat Buchanan’s campaigns of the 1990s, advised by libertarian Murray Rothbard, as being a means to bringing libertarian dreams into reality—a point with which some Buchanan supporters would take issue.

Slobodian also argues that ethnonationalist works such as Thilo Sarrazin’s Germany Abolishes Itself and Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints are part of the libertarian tradition as much as they are protests against mass immigration. Slobodian also sees Steve Bannon as a figure who more recently helped inject the logic of libertarianism into “collective identity.” Slobodian alleges that this movement can be traced to Hayek’s turn toward embracing the morals and values of the Christian West in the 1980s, but he does ignore that Hayek’s thought is not identical to that of the New Right.

Hayek’s Bastards, however, ignores the dominance of evangelicals who often reject Darwinism and advocate for human equality. It also ignores the dominance of the neoconservatives in the 1990s and 2000s, who likewise argued for the liberal self as opposed to biology and ethnicity. The contemporary embrace of neoconservatives like George W. Bush by the Left is not surprising because both believed in the fundamental equality of all humans. Moreover, there is not a great deal of discussion of left-wing libertarianism in the book or the strong presence of anti-capitalist thought in the New Right. Nonetheless, Slobodian does make an effective case that some of those who advocate for racial inequality take from (and bastardize) some elements of the libertarian tradition.