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Quinn Slobodian

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like any good capitalist thinker, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek had a Book of Genesis–esque prehistoric parable for his followers. In Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, historian Quinn Slobodian terms this fable “the savanna story.” It went like this: in the beginning, human beings lived in small, tight-knit collectivist groups that necessarily had to prioritize cooperation and shared interest. As society grew, trade expanded, and new social orders developed, human beings came to care less and less about each other. “Mass mutual indifference,” Slobodian sums up, “was the secret to sustaining human civilization.”

This is as good a summary as any of the heart of neoliberal political and economic thought: its well-known hostility to the welfare state and government regulation flow from a deeper opposition to inclusive compassion and collective deliberation. Hayek’s Bastards argues that the current right descends, rather than departs, from neoliberalism. On this, the book is entirely convincing. But are the new right figures and institutions Slobodian examines — the libertarian Murray Rothbard, the Nazi-admiring Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany, the eugenicist Charles Murray — actually spreading a “mutant strain” of neoliberalism? Are they Hayek’s bastards — or his legitimate sons?

Hayek’s Heirs

Against the backdrop of the Soviet Union’s recent death, Slobodian stages the 1994 death of Hayek in his first chapter a bit like early scenes in Ellen Raskin’s beloved childhood classic The Westing Game, or Netflix and Gerard Way’s Umbrella Academy: a questionable patriarch has died, and his squabbling potential heirs must fight over his material and political legacies. Philosopher of science Gerard Radnitzky, for instance, argued that private property had foundations in primate genes. Conservative political scientist Kenneth Minogue found himself alarmed by such appeals to nature — why was something natural automatically preferable, and where would this leave religious morality?...

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[### Quinn Slobodian Bastardizes Hayek and Mises: News Article

Independent Institute

https://www.independent.org › News Article](https://www.independent.org/article/2025/04/17/quinn-slobodian-bastardizes-hayek-and-mises/)

Apr 16, 2025 — Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, has convinced himself that Trumpism traces its intellectual origins to the Austrian ...

AI Overview

This combination of names refers to the historical and ideological thesis presented in the book Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by historian Quinn Slobodian.

Independent Institute +1

The connection between these figures can be broken down as follows:

Independent Institute +4

Independent Institute +3

The New York Times +3

The book has sparked significant debate among economic scholars. Critics argue that Slobodian heavily misrepresents Mises and Hayek, viewing his attempt to link Austrian economic philosophy to the racialist right as historically flawed. You can explore these varying perspectives further through reviews on the Independent Institute or in Liberal Currents.

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The Far Right’s Love-Hate Relationship With Globalization

A new book by the historian Quinn Slobodian examines right-wing figures who have positioned themselves as populist critics of neoliberalism while weaponizing some of its founders’ ideas.

:{:{Elon Musk brandishes a chain saw given to him by President Javier Milei of Argentina, to his right, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland in February.}:

By Jennifer Szalai

Published April 9, 2025

Updated May 12, 2025

HAYEK’S BASTARDS: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian

Argentina’s mutton-chopped president, Javier Milei, doesn’t exactly come across as a placid figure. A self-described “anarcho-capitalist,” he rails against “sick wokeism” and gleefully brandishes a chain saw to mimic his evisceration of government spending. (At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, he gave a shiny red one to Elon Musk.) But standing before the world’s elite at Davos last year, Milei offered some soothing reassurance to the businesspeople in his audience. “You are social benefactors, you’re heroes,” he said. “Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being.”

:{:{The combination of emollient platitudes, economic shock therapy and strongman authoritarianism is why Milei features prominently in the concluding chapter of Quinn Slobodian’s bracingly original new book, “Hayek’s Bastards.” Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, traces how right-wing figures across the world have positioned themselves as populist critics of “neoliberal policies” even while they pay frequent homage to Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who laid the foundations for the neoliberal tradition, with its gospel of free markets.}:

This so-called New Right has adopted the furious nostalgia of a backlash to what Milei has called a “global hegemony” while embracing radical deregulation. At Davos, Slobodian writes, “Milei spoke less as a defector from the global capitalist order than its latest photogenic cheerleader.”}:

:{:{Slobodian locates a hinge moment in the end of the Cold War. For hardcore believers in the primacy of free markets, the collapse of communism was a surprisingly scary time. Instead of the end-of-history triumphalism emanating from more mainstream quarters, thinkers on the far right warned about the persistence of big states and public spending. Socialism hadn’t been left for dead, they insisted; it had “simply mutated,” as one writer put it.}:

“The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had injected the poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative action and ecological consciousness into the veins of the body politic,” Slobodian writes, paraphrasing the reactionary strain of neoliberal thinking at the time. According to this besieged worldview, egalitarian demands led inexorably to “victimology” and bloated states. “Neoliberals needed an antidote.”}:

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The cover of “Hayek’s Bastards,” by Quinn Slobodian

:{:{Against centrists’ soft-focus visions of incremental reforms and an expanding pie, a number of thinkers on the right turned to severe, zero-sum assertions of what Slobodian calls the three “hards”: hard borders, hard-wired human difference and hard money. (President Trump’s antagonistic trade war is the reductio ad absurdum of this brutal worldview.)}:

They argued by making appeals to nature (though not the idea that nature that imposes limits on economic growth). Slobodian vividly shows how far-right intellectuals took to promoting racial homogeneity, an obsession with I.Q. and gold as the ultimate currency. They presented themselves as faithful followers of Hayek and Mises, who traded their early calls for the free movement of labor for an acceptance of closed borders, especially to keep out nonwhite migrants.}:

The title of Slobodian’s book is an explicit echo of “Voltaire’s Bastards” (1992), John Ralston Saul’s bravura work of intellectual history. Saul posited that technocratic elites had fetishized the Enlightenment ideal of rationality to the point of extremism. Slobodian sees a similar dynamic at play with the ideas of Hayek and Mises, and the “intellectual free-for-all” among their epigones on the far right. Hayek, for instance, claimed that in his critiques of immigration he was assuming not innate differences in people’s genes but, rather, cultural differences — a notion that his “bastards” would stretch, warp and deform. “The point is not to salvage the honor of the Austrian school sages,” Slobodian writes, “but to show how ideas are instrumentalized, adapted and weaponized.”

“Hayek’s Bastards” demonstrates how a history of ideas can be riveting. Slobodian grounds intellectual abstractions in the lives of the people who espoused them. The cast of hard-right thinkers in this book include the economist Murray Rothbard; the financial writer Peter Brimelow, who founded the anti-immigration website VDARE; the political scientist Charles Murray and the psychologist Richard Herrnstein, who together wrote “The Bell Curve” (1994), the notorious treatise on race and I.Q. that described affirmative action as “leaking a poison into the American soul.”

Rothbard was adamant that “biology stands like a rock in the face of egalitarian fantasies.” Like the other figures in this book, he presumed that hierarchy and inequality were entirely natural. As Herrnstein put it in a letter to another like-minded psychologist, “It continually amazes me that even biologists deny having eugenic sentiments, as if they were shameful.”

The economic ideas that are predicated on such a worldview are inevitably ruthless and cutthroat. In a universe based on hierarchy and inequality, cruelty can never be eliminated, only ameliorated. The same year that “The Bell Curve” was published, Rothbard pointed to the wars in the former Yugoslavia as proof that “national heterogeneity simply does not work.” The year after that, he lauded Patrick J. Buchanan’s presidential campaign as “a revolution of white Euro-males.” According to Rothbard, segregation was good. He said that South Africa needed not less apartheid but more.

But for the hard right, even such preferred forms of government could never be trusted. Slobodian lays out how, for right-wingers fearful of a spendthrift government “debauching” the currency, gold became the objective standard of value. Some “goldbugs” actually welcomed the prospect of a currency collapse, anticipating the “twin pleasures” of vindication and financial enrichment. Before the internet, they stoked fear and excitement in what Slobodian calls the “profane space” of the newsletter and advice manual. The key was to portray a collapse as imminent and inevitable: “An essential part of the goldbug formula was instilling a basic mistrust in the utterances of public authorities.”

It’s a formula that has been turbocharged in the digital age. A similar mix of gullibility and paranoia fuels today’s rush for the “new gold” of cryptocurrency, in which suspicions of central banks meet credulous frenzies for memecoins. Slobodian’s book offers an illuminating history to our current bewildering moment, as right-wing populists join forces with billionaire oligarchs to take a chain saw to the foundations of public life, until there’s nothing left to stand on.

HAYEK’S BASTARDS: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right | By Quinn Slobodian | Zone Books | 279 pp. | $29.95

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2025, Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Entangled in a Love-Hate Relationship With Globalization.

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The Bastards of Mont Pèlerin

Hayek's Bastards should serve as a reminder to the defenders of Hayek and neoliberalism generally to be vigilant in differentiating themselves from the far right figures and groups that have attempted to graft onto what they defend.

Gary T. Gunnels

The Bastards of Mont Pèlerin

July 16 2025

Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (2025) is an exploration of the ideological intersections between neoliberalism, far-right politics, and pseudoscientific racism. Slobodian argues that a distorted offshoot of Friedrich Hayek’s economic philosophy has been hijacked by far-right thinkers to create an ideological matrix that fuses free-market absolutism with ethnonationalism and racial hierarchies based upon IQ. He then attempts to connect these to the politics of figures like Donald Trump today. I aim to evaluate Slobodian’s arguments, focusing on the major figures and institutions he identifies as central to this ideological synthesis.

Slobodian’s central thesis is that Hayek’s intellectual edifice, rooted in his arguments for spontaneous order and market mechanisms, has been warped by a group of unwanted “bastards” into a justification for a racially hierarchical social order. A “new fusionism” as he calls it—a play on the “old fusionism” associated with Bill Buckley Jr. Slobodian contends that while Hayek’s ideas weren’t inherently racist, they've been co-opted by figures who have twisted his emphasis on competition and its alleged advantages to legitimize ethnonationalism, restrictive immigration policies, and pseudoscientific claims about racial superiority. The three thematic pillars of the book are race, IQ, and gold. All three are used as defenses against any sort of ameliorative politics. And they form the basis for what he calls the “three hards” meant to keep progressive politics at bay: hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.

Behind the scenes of much of Slobodian’s analysis is Hayek’s so-called “savanna story” (a phrase which Hayek admittedly never used), a just-so story about our species’ ancestors that attempts to use culture in a Lamarckian sense to explain modern human differences. To Hayek certain cultures were simply better at overcoming our small band communitarianism as our species formed larger polities. For Hayek this explains the modern differences between cultures and states. This story, Slobodian argues, is used to naturalize modern inequalities in ways that we can do little about as a matter of policy. In turn certain far-right thinkers invoked the savanna story to argue that humans are biologically predisposed towards inequality, thereby justifying policies like closed borders or racially homogeneous communities as natural extensions of market-driven choices.

The book’s cast of characters and institutions forms the backbone of Slobodian’s case. Murray Rothbard, a pioneer of anarcho-capitalism, and someone who aligned with Hayek’s concept of spontaneous order, is a primary example. In particular Slobodian focuses on Rothbard’s “paleolibertarian” turn in the 1990s, when he forged alliances with various cultural conservatives and ethno-nationalists. Through writings in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report Rothbard defended cultural homogeneity, a shift that Slobodian argues helped lay the groundwork for a synthesis of free-market absolutism and ethnonationalism. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a disciple of Rothbard, is a similar figure. Hoppe’s concept of private, contract-based societies that could exclude individuals based on cultural or racial criteria (“covenant communities”) is of particular importance to Slobodian’s analysis. It’s a sort of Hayekian spontaneous order towards xenophobic ends that justifies exclusionary communities that prioritizes homogeneity over more universal values.

:{:{The Ludwig von Mises Institute, founded by Lew Rockwell (a paleoconservative with a long history of using racial resentment as a political strategy) and closely associated with Rothbard, is a key institution that also disseminated these ideas. Slobodian points to the institute’s conferences and publications, such as The Mises Review, as having provided a platform for thinkers like Hoppe and Rockwell to advance their ideas. It’s also not the only hub for libertarian thought that has overlapped into far-right discourse.}:

Similar critiques are made of the Mont Pèlerin Society (a highly influential invitation-only free market organization that has shaped much of global economic policy since its inception by Hayek and likeminded classical liberals in 1947 through its network of Nobel prize winning economists, government advisors, and scholars) and the Institute for Humane Studies, both of which have hosted or flirted with a number of ethno-nationalists, “race realists,” and the like. As an ex-libertarian I was a bit shocked by the number of hard-right figures the Mont Pèlerin Society in particular found comfortable inviting to its meetings, especially given its outsized role in legitimizing neoliberal thought and the prominent positions of its members. }:

:{:{This gets to one of the book's greatest strengths: Slobodian's careful mapping of the intellectual networks that form far right politics of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. For example, Slobodian shows how figures like Charles Murray (a Mont Pèlerin Society member) and Peter Brimelow became central nodes in a broader ecosystem of societies and think tanks that fused market fundamentalism with biological determinism.}:

:{:{Murray, whose work The Bell Curve provided pseudoscientific justification for racial hierarchies through IQ testing, proved particularly attractive to neoliberals seeking to counter civil rights advances because it offered a seemingly objective, data-driven rationale for opposing state efforts to promote equality in an almost Malthusian sense. Murray and his allies could advocate for pure market solutions while claiming to be above racial politics, envisaging a sort of meritocratic “neurocaste,” (Slobodian's word) based upon IQ.}:

Peter Brimelow, a founder of the white nationalist website VDare and author of Alien Nation, explicitly connected immigration restriction to preserving American economic and cultural superiority and free market economics. Slobodian demonstrates that both had significant influence on the formation of the alt-right.}:}:

:{:{What all of this suggests is that Hayek's "savanna story" provided an intellectual framework (a “blank check” as Slobodian calls it) that far-right thinkers subsequently appropriated and distorted for their exclusionary agendas, despite Hayek's own intentions. Hayek’s philosophy, whatever else one might think of it, was explicitly universalist and cosmopolitan in its defense of individual liberty and open markets. The far-right thinkers that Slobodian examines, by contrast, prioritized group identity and exclusion from the start. In this sense their engagement with Hayek’s work appears as much opportunistic as foundational.}:

They were seizing upon elements of Hayek’s work that they could twist towards their own ends as much as they were deriving their worldview from Hayek’s principles. This doesn’t mean that Slobodian didn’t find some cringe-inducing racist-adjacent comments by Hayek over the years. Hayek’s remarks about “un-domesticated barbarians” and their unwillingness to accept the “discipline” required of a free market society at a 1976 lecture is highly reminiscent of nineteenth century attitudes towards colonized or enslaved people that merely reinforced unequal social relationships rooted in nothing more than coercion. }:

Slobodian adeptly shows how the far right, much like previous generations of pseudoscientific racists, misused evolutionary biology to lend scientific legitimacy to their ideologies. Indeed, when figures within the Mises Institute or Mont Pèlerin Society circles draw on discredited race science to justify social inequalities that surely has something to say about the nature of what neoliberalism will tolerate in its defense of free market economics. This broader historical outlook underscores the dangers of pseudoscience in legitimizing discriminatory and bigoted ideologies. Still, this approach has its limitations. While it effectively captures the far right’s tendency to invoke evolutionary metaphors, it, as Slobodian admits at the start, is only one part of the story of how we got here.

Slobodian’s effort to squeeze gold in the narrative is to this reviewer a bit clunky. But it does serve the purpose of demonstrating just how committed far right thinkers were to a certain set of ideas about the state (especially a democratic one) and its role in society. The advocacy for "hard money" became a vehicle for opposing democratic governance and social programs (that were pointless because of natural hierarchies in the first place) that required the flexibility of a fiat currency. That goldbugs and other hard money advocates became part of an alt-right coalition is understandable from this perspective. Hard money meant a so-called natural economic restraint on the government in its efforts to pursue redistributive policies.

What can be said of all of this? First, Slobodian focuses a great deal on a number of minor figures. Individuals like Hoppe (and there are quite a few of them in the book) are frankly marginal compared to more mainstream libertarian or conservative thinkers. This risks giving readers an incomplete understanding of how libertarian and neoliberal thought actually developed and gained prominence over time. As a reader I want to understand just how close a connection existed between these minor figures and some of the larger personalities in the movement. That connection could have been drawn a bit more tightly. Still, given the frequent involvement of these minor characters in the cornerstone institutions of the movement, there is merit to Slobodian’s approach.

Not that all were minor characters. Slobodian doesn't ignore individuals like Milton Friedman, whom he quotes as viewing the Americans with Disabilities Act as a sort of coercive “paternalism” that merely expanded statism at the expense of a laissez-faire social order. This frankly callous and tone-deaf dismissal of disability rights surprised me and it makes me wonder what other views by Friedman I may have missed.

:{:{Also, notwithstanding the excellent research that is the heart of the book, Slobodian’s portrayal of Hayek as an accidental progenitor of far-right ideologies is difficult to prove. There is something of a speculative bridge one has to make to go from Hayek’s abstract principles about spontaneous order to the concrete policies of ethno-nationalists. A deeper set of connections needs to be made in order to make this bridge more concrete. That Slobodian focuses so much on intellectual history comes at a cost. Surely there is more going on here in the formation of the alt-right than this.}:

If we think of the alt-right in its broadest scope as a largely online phenomenon based upon white identity politics, and as a loose connection of groups and people opposed to concepts like multiculturalism and feminism, then a larger discussion of how forerunners of the alt-right that Slobodian identifies (like the paleoconservatives or the European New Right) meshed with this new movement seems in order. Slobodian does make a nod to this from time to time, but he could have been more explicit. }:

:{:{Hayek’s Bastards resonates with historical examples of pseudoscience-supported racism, such as the American eugenics movement’s advocacy for forced sterilizations. Slobodian thus underscores the enduring danger of pseudoscience in legitimizing racism and inequality. Of course Slobodian’s work has faced significant criticism from a number of libertarian and neoliberal reviewers of the book (I won't wade into these here), however, I would argue that these largely miss the point.}:

The book should serve as a reminder to Hayek's defenders—and libertarians and neoliberals more generally—to be vigilant in differentiating themselves from the far right figures and groups that have attempted to graft onto what they defend. That a lot of the mainstream organizations in the neoliberal movement chose to invite racist crackpots to their conferences and soirées is exactly the opposite of that, and is merely summoning the sort of confluences that Slobodian discusses in his book. Libertarians could use this opportunity to more forcefully articulate how genuine free market principles are incompatible with racial determinism.}:

In conclusion, Slobodian effectively highlights the far right’s misuse of evolutionary theory (and IQ), and his analysis of figures like Rothbard, Hoppe, Murray, and Brimelow, as well as institutions like the Mises Institute and the Mont Pèlerin Society, provides a compelling portrait of an ideological undercurrent that has gained visibility in recent years. But his attempt to tie these figures directly to Hayek’s legacy is less convincing, as it relies on a set of speculative connections that need more heft. This isn't to suggest that Slobodian is wrong, just that he needs to demonstrate his claims more concretely. Ultimately, I believe that Slobodian is attempting to provide us with a cautionary tale about how theories of human development, when stripped of ethical moorings, can support exclusionary and oppressive ends.

Author

Gary T. Gunnels

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You Don't Need Democracy If You Don't Have People: Quinn Slobodian's Warning - YouTube

You Don't Need Democracy If You Don't Have People: Quinn Slobodian's Warning

The Nerd Reich with Gil Duran

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6,741 views Feb 8, 2026 The Nerd Reich with Gil Duran

Will tech billionaires get rid of democracy by getting rid of people? In this episode of The Nerd Reich, Gil Duran sits down with renowned historian Quinn Slobodian (Globalists, Crack-Up Capitalism) to dissect the "ideology of exit." While the media focuses on failed "Freedom City" experiments like Prospera, Slobodian reveals a darker endgame: a shift toward automated, "post-human" infrastructure where voters are no longer part of the equation. In this episode, we explore:

The Hong Kong Blueprint: How a colonial relic became the template for 21st-century capitalism. Authoritarian Capitalism: Why Silicon Valley elites are obsessed with models of control. The Post-Human Zone: Why the future of "sovereignty" belongs to Manhattan-sized data centers, not citizens. The Octavia Butler Reality: What if future isn't about escaping the "company town," but fighting to get inside one? Connect with Quinn Slobodian: https://bsky.app/profile/quinnslobodi...New Book: Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Releasing April 21, 2026): https://www.harpercollins.com/product...Must Read: Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy: https://us.macmillan.com/books/978125...#CrackUpCapitalism #NetworkState #SiliconValley #tech #digitalfeudalism #FutureOfDemocracy

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Phillip W. Magness is a Senior Fellow and David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute

Historian Quinn Slobodian Misrepresents Ludwig von Mises

Eye on the News / Arts and Culture, Education, Politics and Law

Jun 23 2026

Academic works on “neoliberalism” almost invariably share three characteristics. First, they portray neoliberalism as the dominant paradigm of the global economy since the mid-twentieth century. Second, they treat that development as harmful, attributing a long list of social ills to its rise. Third, they rarely explain what “neoliberalism” actually means. Nevertheless, the term has become one of academia’s favorite buzzwords, generating tens of thousands of books and journal articles purporting to document its corrosive effects on society.

Boston University Professor of International History Quinn Slobodian ranks among the most visible figures in this burgeoning genre of “neoliberalism studies.” His 2025 book Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He holds various elite academic honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, visiting stints at Harvard and Brown, and six-figure grants from a Hewlett Foundation program, which funds research opposing neoliberalism. All evince a strong adversarial stance toward the subject of his research.

Hayek’s Bastards has gained high cachet on the political Left, as it purports to uncover a “neoliberal” origin of MAGA populism, especially its far-right underbelly of race theorist and conspiracist types. As his title suggests, Slobodian portrays these elements as intellectual offspring born out-of-wedlock from the free-market-oriented Austrian School of Economics, particularly its two great twentieth-century expositors: Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

The central claim of Slobodian’s thesis is that, while Mises and Hayek were not racists themselves, they left a “parenthetical opening” to racial pseudoscience in their writings, which later bigots and cranks exploited. These ideological descendants, he argues, include figures associated with the “Alt-Right,” such as Curtis Yarvin and Richard Spencer, who have shaped political discourse through white identity politics and movements like the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. According to Slobodian, their worldview is fundamentally an outgrowth of neoliberalism, albeit a distorted one. As Hayek’s Bastards puts it, they are “less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it.” Slobodian casts himself as the physician providing the genealogical “X-rays” needed to expose the neoliberal project’s deeper intentions.

There’s a problem with Slobodian’s argument, though. He constructs his case for the “parenthetical opening” through chronic misrepresentations of the Austrian economists that he places at the top of his neoliberal family tree.

Slobodian’s research overlaps with my own historical interest in Mises, and to its credit, his earlier works such as his 2018 book Globalistsexplored a neglected chapter of the economist’s life: the period he spent in Switzerland after fleeing the Nazi regime in his native Austria. Yet, like much of the “neoliberalism studies” genre, Slobodian approached the subject from a position of pronounced hostility. Even mundane episodes in the history of the Austrian School were recounted with not only disdain for its ideas but also a heavy dose of innuendo about the motives of its leading figures. Despite his precarious position as an exiled Jew and refugee from near-certain imprisonment, Mises’s voluminous writings against the Nazi regime weighed little on Slobodian’s interpretation of his works in this period. Indeed, Slobodian made the sneering suggestion that the Austrian economists only turned against fascism after it imperiled free markets and free trade.

Slobodian began to lay the groundwork for Hayek’s Bastardsshortly after Globalistsin a series of working papers and shorter articles. By 2019, he had fully formed his thesis about a posited “parenthetical opening” to the scientific racism of the Alt-Right in an academic article for Cultural Politics.In a second article, published in Contemporary European History, he supplied the supposed evidence of Mises’s parentage by mining the economist’s writings.

Whereas prior scholarly treatments interpreted Mises as a pro-immigration, anti-colonialist classical liberal living in an era and region plagued by a race-based authoritarian nationalism, in Slobodian’s Contemporary European History essay, he assembled quotations that appeared to defend the utility of European imperialism as a mechanism for extracting wealth from the Southern Hemisphere. He further suggested that Mises’s critiques of Nazi race theory reflected a bounded form of liberalism—one that affirmed the equality of non-Germanic white Europeans, including Jews such as himself, while excluding other racial groups from its moral and political framework.

Slobodian’s provocative argument purported to explain a long-observed tension on parts of the political Right, where professed followers of Mises’s economic libertarianism nonetheless rejected his support for more open immigration and the cosmopolitan dimensions of his geopolitical outlook. In Slobodian’s telling, Mises himself was a less consistent adherent of those positions than commonly assumed. Though he never explicitly embraced the opposing view, Slobodian argues that he left enough room for his ideological “bastard” offspring to cultivate explicitly racial doctrines within a broadly “neoliberal” economic framework.

Intrigued, and taken aback, by these unfamiliar arguments, I decided to examine Slobodian’s evidence more closely. My worst suspicions were quickly confirmed. Slobodian had not, in fact, uncovered the much-touted “parenthetical openings” to racism and colonialism in Mises’s writings. Instead, I found a pattern of contextomy: selectively edited quotations in which phrases were clipped from sentences and adjoining passages omitted, all to shoehorn Mises’s interwar-era words into Slobodian’s own twenty-first-century political interpretations.

A revealing example appears below. Slobodian quotes a passage from Mises that seems to rationalize the violent history of European colonialism by appealing to its net economic benefits. In reality, he simply omits the second half of the sentence, where Mises explicitly disavows the very position that Slobodian uses the first half to attribute to him.

In his Contemporary European Historyessay, titled “Perfect Capitalism, Imperfect Humans: Race, Migration and the Limits of Ludwig von Mises’s Globalism,” Slobodian wrote (underlining added):

When necessary, the opening of world markets had to be achieved through violence. Though ‘one can think only with shudders and anger of the fearful mass murders that prepared the basis for many of the colonial settlements flourishing today’, [Mises] wrote in a book published the year after the First World War, the net gain made it worthwhile; in the end, ‘all other pages of world history were also written in blood.’ Violence in the project of expanding the space of foreign investment, wage labour and commercial exchange was not only acceptable, it was necessary.

In Nation, State, and Economy, Mises wrote (underlining added):

It is true that those colonies were not taken with smooth talk, and one can think only with shudders and anger of the fearful mass murders that prepared the basis for many of the colonial settlements flourishing today. But all other pages of world history were also written in blood, and nothing is more stupid than efforts to justify today’s imperialism, with all of its brutalities, by reference to atrocities of generations long since gone.

huh?

In another example, Slobodian accuses Mises of drawing a distinction between persecuted white European minorities and nonwhite racial groups. Yet a review of the full paragraph reveals that he simply misrepresented its argument. Mises was describing Nazi efforts to identify purportedly “Jewish” ancestry among other white Europeans through facial features and bodily characteristics. Slobodian then spliced this discussion into an unrelated passage about differences in black and white skin color. Contrary to his claim, the second quotation appears nowhere near the argument to which he attributes it.

In “Perfect Capitalism, Imperfect Humans,” Slobodian wrote (underlining added):

Yet Mises proved incapable of extending a similar cosmopolitan attitude to populations of colour. Even as he argued emphatically that ‘there are today no pure stocks within the class or race of white-skinned people’, he did so by pointing out the difference with black populations. ‘Negroes and whites differ in racial – i.e., bodily – features’, he wrote, ‘but it is impossible to tell a Jewish German from a non-Jewish one by any racial characteristic’. Mises’s rejection of anti-Semitism was premised on an affirmation of white–black race difference.

In Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, Mises wrote (underlining added):

For more than a hundred years anthropologists have studied the bodily features of various races. The undisputed outcome of these scientific investigations is that the peoples of white skin, Europeans and non-European descendants of emigrated European ancestors, represent a mixture of various bodily characteristics. Men have tried to explain this fact as the result of intermarriage between the members of pure primitive stocks. Whatever the truth of this, it is certain that there are today no pure stocks within the class or race of white-skinned people.

Further efforts have been made to coördinate certain bodily features—racial characteristics—with certain mental and moral characteristics. All these endeavors have also failed.

Finally people have tried, especially in Germany, to discover the physical characteristics of an alleged Jewish or Semitic race as distinguished from the characteristics of European non-Jews. These quests, too, have failed completely.

Struck by these and other similar examples, I began checking quotations in Slobodian’s related works. I soon found another instance in a 2015 precursor to the Hayek’s Bastards thesis. Once again, Slobodian excised Mises’s unequivocal condemnation of colonialism from the surrounding passage and instead portrayed him as a qualified defender of the institution who favored an alleged “muscular super-state” to uphold free trade under European economic domination.

In a 2015 lecture, Slobodian stated (underlining added):

For Mises, the demands of the world economy trumped all other political claims. In discussing colonialism, for example, he remarked that “no chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism” but still insisted that keeping the colonies was the first priority once Europe became dependent on the empire for raw materials. Self-determination might be thinkable but only under the control of a muscular super-state that could ensure the continuation of free trade.

In Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, Mises wrote (underlining added):

No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified. The dominion of Europeans in Africa and in important parts of Asia is absolute. It stands in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism and democracy, and there can be no doubt that we must strive for its abolition. The only question is how the elimination of this intolerable condition can be accomplished in the least harmful way possible.

Even this textual comparison understates the gap between Mises’s original argument in Liberalism (1927) and Slobodian’s portrayal of it. The supposedly ominous “muscular super-state” was simply the League of Nations. And far from treating the retention of colonies as a “first priority,” Mises left little doubt about his position a few paragraphs later: “the final goal must continue to be the complete liberation of the colonies from the despotic rule under which they live today.”

I found multiple other examples of similar contextomy in Slobodian’s works. In one instance, he parsed, spliced, and rearranged passages from Mises’s 1940 German-language treatise Nationalökonomie to make them appear as a qualified concession to scientific racism, provided it was not “misused” by the Nazis. In reality, Mises offered a sweeping repudiation of eugenic theory, concluding that repeated attempts to establish it on scientific grounds had failed. Slobodian’s editing practices also extended to other free-market economists. In Globalists, for example, he transformed a passage from William H. Hutt condemning South Africa’s apartheid government into what appeared to be a defense of white-minority rule.

Taken together, these and similar misrepresented quotations supplied much of the textual “evidence” for Slobodian’s thesis about the Alt-Right—the same thesis he would later expand into his award-winning book, Hayek’s Bastards.

Given the severity of the misrepresentations, I began drafting a scholarly response. I completed a manuscript in late 2019. The paper not only showed how Slobodian built his central argument on distorted quotations; it also challenged that argument with evidence he had overlooked and archival sources he never examined. Whereas Slobodian maintained that these groups drew inspiration from the passages he highlighted, I could find no evidence that any prominent Alt-Right figure had ever cited, quoted, or referenced them. Instead, they typically grounded their arguments in distinctly non-Misesian sources, including the eugenic theories of J. Philippe Rushton, the racial dystopian fiction of Jean Raspail, and right-wing adaptations of concepts borrowed from the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory tradition. In short, Slobodian’s intellectual genealogy identified the wrong parentage for the Alt-Right’s racial theories, and then attempted to obscure the DNA evidence.

I presented my paper at an economics conference and circulated a draft to other Mises scholars for feedback—both routine parts of the scholarly process. At the time, my goal was to challenge Slobodian’s argument in a professional academic setting where he would have an opportunity to respond. In early 2020, I formally submitted the paper to Contemporary European History, the journal that had published his principal arguments only months earlier.

Any hope of a productive scholarly exchange was quickly dashed. The journal’s editors issued a rapid desk rejection. There would be no debate in their pages, nor would Slobodian be required to address the evidence I had assembled concerning his misuse of sources.

I was not deterred and wrote to the editors seeking an explanation for their decision. It was not an unreasonable request. After all, I had identified multiple examples of misrepresented quotations in the pages of their journal. The ensuing exchange produced little more than stonewalling. One reply insinuated—incorrectly—that my article had already been published elsewhere because I had posted an earlier draft online for circulation at the economics conference where I presented it. Another suggested that my response lacked an original archival contribution, even though it drew on archival sources far more extensively than Slobodian’s original article.

It soon became clear that the editors had little interest in engaging the substance of the issues I had documented. Shortly thereafter, I learned that Slobodian had been appointed a co-editor of Contemporary European History.

Still undeterred, I changed tack and sent the journal another inquiry. If it would not publish a response to Slobodian’s thesis, would it at least issue a corrigendum or similar correction addressing the most egregious examples of his misquotations? The grounds for doing so seemed clear. After all, Slobodian had transformed Mises’s statement that “all other pages of world history were also written in blood, and nothing is more stupid than efforts to justify today’s imperialism” into an apparent endorsement of imperialism simply by deleting the second half of the sentence.

In response, I received the following unsigned email:

Dear Dr Magness,

Our publication process involves a rigorous peer-review system of multiple reviewers for each piece, a process which ensures the high-quality of our research articles. Scholarship, of course, evolves, and interpretations differ. This is why we host roundtables to discuss different viewpoints on broad topics (the Spanish Civil War, most recently).

However, in this specific case, we are confident about the academic rigour of Slobodian’s piece.

We hope you and yours are keeping well in these difficult times.

All Best,

*Contemporary European History

I would soon learn that the journal had been less than forthright about the “academic rigour” of its “peer-review system.” After reaching a dead end through its official correction procedures, I went public with my findings and with the editors’ dismissive responses. In the process, I discovered that the same misquotation issues had been flagged during peer review by one of Contemporary European History’s referees in 2018, who had recommended that the article be rejected.

The referee contacted me after seeing my findings on social media and shared a copy of the original peer-review report to the journal on Slobodian’s thesis. It described the paper as “based on dubious historical scholarship: quoting out of context, partial reading of the relevant material, and ascribing views to other’s [sic] that they did not hold.” The referee flagged an “out-of-context quote” in which Slobodian misrepresented Mises’s position, seeking to depict it as an opening for scientific racism. In doing so, the report continued, Slobodian had ignored an adjacent “four-page refutation of race theories, arguing very clearly that all people’s [sic] are mixed and that social circumstances are for [sic] more important than genetics.”

The report concluded with a recommendation to the editors of Contemporary European History: “I strongly suggest that the article is not published in its revised form.” The journal nevertheless overruled its own reviewer and published the piece, despite having been warned about the same problems that I later identified after it appeared in print.

Armed with this revelation, I submitted another complaint to the journal, requesting a review of its editorial processes. Several months passed before I received notice of the outcome of its “internal investigation.” The publisher was standing by both Slobodian and its review procedures. It would not address any of the issues raised by either me or its own referee. The long string of misquotations, I was told, amounted to permissible differences of “interpretation.”

Four years later, Hayek’s Bastards appeared in print, repeating and expanding the same thesis that Slobodian had first developed in his Contemporary European History article. The book continued to portray Mises’s writings as a “parenthetical opening” to Alt-Right racism and supplemented that argument with a similar stream of insinuations directed at Hayek.

While the academic Left lavished Slobodian’s book with accolades for having supposedly demonstrated the “neoliberal” family tree of scientific racism, I undertook yet another review of his then-latest work.

In a key passage, Slobodian again quoted from Mises’s untranslated 1940 book Nationalökonomie, purporting to find an additional “parenthetical opening” to scientific racism. I compared it with the original text and found yet another example of his now-familiar interpretive practice.

In Hayek’s Bastards, Slobodian wrote (underlining added):

[Mises wrote] that “we may take as given that the racial element plays a role among the factors that form the personality and, with it, our values and understanding.” What he objected to was not the possible truth content of race theory but its misuse. “In the doctrine of National Socialism and its derivative teachings in Italian fascism,” he wrote, “there is an unbridgeable gap between the statements of the founders of racial biology and their application to propaganda and use for practical policies.” The fascist politicization of race theory should not discredit it permanently. “Because the keywords of race theory are used to justify measures with which it has nothing to do,” he wrote, “does not free scientific thought from the responsibility to think through to the end the problem of human races (Menschenrassen) in its praxeological significance.”

In Nationalökonomie, Mises wrote (underlining added):

We may take as given that the racial element plays a role among the factors that form the personality and, with it, our values and understanding, i.e., everything with which a man is born, his physical endowment, the hereditary qualities derived from his ancestors. But in the present state of our knowledge, we know nothing about the connection between the physical and the mind, and therefore cannot make any statement as to whether and in what way the physical is capable of influencing Verstehen. Some have attempted to assign certain value judgments (types of Verstehen, Verstehen types) to specific peoples; these attempts failed because it is easy to prove that every attempt to group people according to types of Verstehen thwarts the classification according to ethnicity.

In the passage at issue, Mises was once again arguing against the scientific validity of efforts to link intellectual capacity to race or ethnicity. And once again, Slobodian was “bastardizing” the text—rearranging quotations, splicing together unrelated excerpts, and constructing a false version of Mises’s position that conveniently reinforced the political narrative of Hayek’s Bastards.

:{*:{Phillip W. Magness is a Senior Fellow and David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute.}:

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