“Together, we are promoting a new fusionism that argues that there are—as Mises knew—iron links between culture, economics, and politics.”
Lew Rockwell, cited in Hayek’s Bastards
A Market Mutates
Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right is a flare in a sealed vault. The contents. The Mont Pelerin Society, the gold-bug economists, the IQ absolutists, that have been festering for decades. The light lets us see the shape of things. This isn’t intellectual history for its own sake. It’s an autopsy report on the present. The bastard children of neoliberalism are running wild, clutching crypto wallets, ancestry reports, and a dog-eared copy of The Bell Curve.
Slobodian is a fine writer, precise without being bloodless, and no one working today is better at picking apart the machinery of neoliberalism. Its metaphors, its fixations, its cold, quiet violence.
The argument is simple and brutal. The far right didn’t break from neoliberalism. It mutated out of it. What Slobodian uncovers is not an intellectual decline but a strategic retooling. When capital’s legitimacy falters, the market doesn’t retreat. It reroutes. Through race. Through blood. Through border.
From God to Genome
He calls it “new fusionism”. The original, forged in the Cold War by figures like Frank Meyer, married markets to morality and liberty to God. The new version swaps pulpits for gene sequences. It speaks not in sermons, but in studies. Graphs. Brain scans. The moral order becomes biological order.
The Mont Pelerin Society is at the centre of the story. Founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek and a handful of Cold War ideologues, it claimed to defend liberty. But liberty here meant markets. And markets needed protection. When they met in Cannes in 1994, after Hayek’s death, the subject wasn’t monetary policy. It was evolution. Chimpanzees. Savannas. One speaker said, “even bacteria exhibit entrepreneurial spirit.” This is what philosophy becomes when capital does the talking.
IQ and Infrastructure
Slobodian maps how the new right fused libertarian economics with race science. Charles Murray. Richard Herrnstein. Murray Rothbard. Their work reads like a caste manual for the digital age. IQ is the measure. The rest is sorting. Slobodian calls it “neurocastes”. It’s class war by psychometrics. The poor aren’t poor because of policy. They’re poor because of biology. Redistribution becomes not just a mistake, but a sin. The cruelty proves the system works.
The Braverman doctrine still lingers, even with the Tories gone. Immigration as entropy. Multiculturalism as threat. Labour nods along and rebrands the language. In the US, the Heritage Foundation is scripting Trump’s second term. Net Zero is treated like tyranny. AI gets its own department. The algorithm and the border patrol march in step. The state defends capital’s sovereignty. On the border. In the family. In the lab.
Cloned Dogs, Real Power
Then there’s Javier Milei. President of Argentina. Dog-cloner. Rothbardian to the bone. He names his pets after Austrian economists. He governs like Ayn Rand on amphetamines. He’s not a glitch. He’s the programme running smoothly. Slobodian shows that what looks like far-right insurgency is often little more than neoliberalism without shame. The goldbugs, the secessionists, the eugenicists. They never went away. They stopped hiding in the shadows.
Slobodian’s strength is not just who he reads, but how he reads them. He follows the paper trails and conference rosters. The back channels of bourgeois science. He shows how these ideas don’t emerge in chaos. They’re cultivated. Curated. Shipped out through think tanks and white papers. Incubated in journals and rich men’s retreats. This isn’t fringe. It’s infrastructure.
Leviathan’s Green Mask
Mont Pelerin’s legacy is everywhere. In the obsession with tradition. In the cult of moral order. These are just new names for race, patriarchy, and private property. In 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the Society didn’t celebrate. They panicked. Environmentalism, they said, was the new communism. “Leviathan still lives, but now it marches under a green flag.” Net Zero wasn’t climate policy. It was socialism by another route.
What enrages the right about Net Zero isn’t the science. It’s the planning. It suggests society might have to choose. That the market can’t price the future. That capital must wait. It threatens redistribution. From fossil capital to public infrastructure. From the Global North to the South. It reopens the question of equality. Of history. Of who gets to decide what comes next.
The End of Common Sense
The new right doesn’t oppose globalisation. It wants to control it. Free movement for capital, not for people. Tariffs for rivals. Tax havens for allies. Trade without solidarity. Corporations without migrants. Volk capitalism. Gold in the vault. A flag on the fence. A passport that means something again.
Slobodian refuses to sentimentalise. Hayek warned that planning leads to tyranny. Slobodian shows that neoliberalism leads to its own kind of cage. A world of IQ charts. Police drones. Fortified compounds. The old order is dying. These are the midwives of what comes after. They chant about freedom. They draw maps of who counts and who doesn’t.
If this is capitalism’s final mask, the Left’s task isn’t to peel it off. It’s to build something unrecognisable to these men. A world where freedom means more than the freedom to dominate.
My only criticism? Not everyone will get to see the Allen Lane cover, illustrated by Ben Jones. It’s a visual thesis in its own right. Cool, brutal, and strangely elegant. The corporate patriarch looms. Hayek? The globe tilts. The lone figure stands boxed in, dwarfed by power and abstraction. What better image for a world governed by spreadsheets and skull measurements?
Globalisation may be blamed by Trump and his imitators, but neoliberalism will find no defenders in the future. It will be remembered for what it was: the scaffolding for inequality, public to private, extraction and slow collapse. A doctrine for the rich, posing as common sense.
“Let the libertarians have their mastiffs. They’re going to need them.”
Hayek’s Bastards
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