Report on Business

In Hayek’s Bastards, Quinn Slobodian, a Canadian professor of international history at Boston University, examines strange bedfellows of the alt‑right: extreme free marketers, libertarians, paleolibertarians, and anarcho-capitalists. This is his third book tracing the intellectual legacies — both faithful and unfaithful — of the great economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who have become the patron saints of neo-liberals and adherents of what’s known as the Austrian School. Inevitably, many now subscribe to ideas that their patron saints would not recognize or embrace, which is why Slobodian coins the term “Hayek’s Bastards” (with a nod to John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, from 1992).

The protagonists in Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, which won the George Louis Beer Prize in 2019, were pretty classic neo-liberals, fairly close to Mises and especially to Hayek. As ardent free marketers, they opposed economic nationalism and, in the 1940s, managed to defeat a United Nations proposal, the International Trade Organization, which they considered too permissive of national protectionism. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, with stricter controls on national policies, was created instead. Subsequently these actors supported the European Common Market and called for top‑down networks of international rules to protect markets from democratic majorities.

In Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and a Dream of a World without Democracy, his 2023 book, Slobodian again depicted neo-liberals seeking to safeguard markets from democracy and the state, but with a more bottom‑up approach, including special economic zones, where trade is largely free and protected from misguided majorities. Such a zone might take the form of a large city (Hong Kong), a principality (Liechtenstein), or a special real estate development (Canary Wharf in London). The Protect Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act, which Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives passed earlier this year, could create new examples in Canada. Slobodian’s “crack‑up” capitalists also included libertarians who really want to escape — all the way to ungoverned free market communities in outer space or on floating “seasteads.”

Now Slobodian has shifted his focus to factions on the alt‑right. He argues that we “cannot understand the peculiar hybrids of extreme market ideology, Far Right authoritarianism, and social conservatism without familiarizing ourselves with the often-tangled genealogies traced in this book.”

Starting in the 1990s, Slobodian explains, some neo-liberals drew elements of cognitive and evolutionary psychology, genetics, and biological anthropology, along with economic neo-liberalism, into a “new fusionism”: a scientized view of how societies and economies function. It involves a “turn to nature” for a broader view of the cultural and often racial prerequisites for a functioning market society, which Slobodian considers a mutant strain of neo-liberalism, not a rejection of it — though the advocates of the new fusionism often distort the thinking of the masters. Hayek saw the “competitive selection of cultural institutions” across societies as important for establishing free markets (with an advantage to the Christian West), but he eschewed genetic explanations. Mises, for his part, flirted explicitly with racial theories, so he is more often invoked by these new fusionists.

Slobodian understands “the most radical strain of the new fusionism” as based on what he calls “the rock of biology,” and he gives the impression that the new populist right has embraced “three hards”: hard-wired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.

Extreme-right racism is long established, but it acquired a “scientific” hue starting in the 1970s. Charles Koch, the American libertarian billionaire and funder of many right-wing causes (including Canada’s Fraser Institute), supported a new Institute for Humane Studies, which promoted work on “human differentiation,” including genetic differences between racial groups that it suggested may have evolved over centuries. This thinking contested the more prevalent liberal view that race and gender differences are shaped more by social forces than by biology. The American paleoconservative and presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan, who combined libertarianism with prejudice, became an early champion of such views. At the beginning of his second campaign for the White House, in February 1995, Buchanan’s adviser Murray Rothbard emphasized a “revolution of white Euro‑males” and pushed messaging about “immigration by hordes of foreigners.”

A prominent actor in the Mises camp has been the white nationalist Peter Brimelow, a British journalist who in the 1970s lived in Canada, where he fiercely criticized multiculturalism. After moving to the United States, he advocated theories of genetic hierarchies and a racialized free market liberalism — free for goods and capital, not for labour. He even proposed, in his book Alien Nation, a ban on immigrants who were not white Anglo-Saxons, because the U.S. was becoming “a freak among the world’s nations” due to “the unprecedented demographic mutation it is inflicting on itself.” Racial differences, his reasoning went, require hard borders to protect the gene pool.

Such thinking got a huge boost in 1994 from Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, which Slobodian considers “the most controversial book of the decade.” Herrnstein and Murray emphasized IQ differences among groups and argued that, according to one critique, “the more open the society becomes, the more it becomes a closed caste system,” because populations are inevitably sorted based on cognitive abilities. They worried that well-educated people with high IQs were having few children, while welfare recipients with low IQs, encouraged by social assistance, were having many. Although Herrnstein and Murray did not focus primarily on race, they did posit that average IQs varied accordingly, with Black intelligence being generally lower than white intelligence. Moreover, they argued that Black and white individuals with the same IQs had similar earnings. Herrnstein and Murray concluded, therefore, that state action to end inequality was futile. The Bell Curve was roundly criticized on statistical and other grounds, but it shifted the debate and certainly influenced thinking on the right. Murray, a long-time scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, continued attacking the welfare state in Human Diversity, from 2020.

Many of Silicon Valley’s libertarians have bought into neo-geneticism. Elon Musk, for example, has made reproducing his genius a personal project, with at least fourteen children by four different women. Such libertarians are hostile not only to the welfare state but also to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. “DEI will never d‑i‑e from words alone,” the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a mentor to J. D. Vance, has written. “We need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.” Thiel, who is at the centre of many alt‑right activities, also admires Curtis Yarvin — or Mencius Moldbug — an influential neo-reactionary theorist of the so‑called Dark Enlightenment.

In his discussion of “hard money,” Slobodian describes right-wing neo-liberals, such as the former U.S. congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, as “goldbugs,” who claim to be the heirs of Mises. They reject even Milton Friedman’s prescriptions for monetary management and advocate a return to gold and other precious metals. Many of them foresee a coming economic apocalypse and a world state led by “Trilateralists” and globalists. In the predicted chaos, racial hatred will grow as Black welfare recipients are cut off. Here, however, Slobodian exaggerates. While there are certainly advocates of hard money who are new fusionists, it is possible to favour hard money but not hard borders. It’s even possible to believe in hard-wired human nature while rejecting hard borders.

Slobodian also fails to draw out the full significance of the new fusionists for contemporary politics. He suggests that the Alternative for Germany party has intellectual links to the anarcho-capitalists Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe (author of Democracy: The God That Failed) and to Mises, but he doesn’t develop a complete portrait of them as new fusionists. Slobodian offers passing reference to such politicians as Argentina’s Javier Milei and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who seem to be closer to his anarcho-capitalist subset, but he says little about France’s Marine Le Pen and nothing about Italy’s Giorgia Meloni or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, all right-wing authoritarians who don’t seem to fit the new-fusionist category.

Many of Slobodian’s protagonists, whom he calls false prophets, are fringe characters, even in conservative circles, and not all are actually new fusionists. While he says understanding their intellectual trajectories is essential for understanding far-right authoritarians and extreme free marketers, he seems focused on a subset of a subset — just one part of the larger, mixed group.

Indeed, many far-right and free market figures are quite smart. Often they write books and scholarly articles, reside in academia (George Mason University and the Claremont Colleges are hot spots), and associate with foundations, institutions, and societies (including the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society). And, of course, Silicon Valley has spawned countless staunch libertarians, who have little in common with right-wing Catholic thinkers. In other words, the far right has many factions and disagreements. While the larger motley group generally supports Donald Trump and the Republican Party, the commingling of deeply anti-intellectual populists in the MAGA movement with contending schools of far-right ideologues can be uncomfortable.

Trump’s current entourage includes a wide variety of hard right wingers. Few qualify as new fusionists — usually because they’re not goldbugs — though most believe in hard-wired human nature and hard borders. They’re deeply divided on classic economic liberalism — and especially on Trump’s love of tariffs. Perhaps the president’s most interesting and dangerous courtier is Vance, his savvy vice-president, whose influences range from Thiel to conservative Catholic legal theory, as propounded by Harvard’s Adrian Vermuele, and the anti-constitutionalism of the German political theorist Carl Schmitt.

Slobodian makes several references to the European alt-right but none to a parallel entity in Canada, perhaps because it scarcely exists, at least in intellectual circles comparable to those elsewhere. Prominent alt-right thinkers in Canada are virtually non-existent. There are no notable new fusionists, and extreme libertarians are rare. The Conservative Party has populist tendencies and rails against big government, but it’s not racist, anti-immigration, or enamoured of gold. Canada has nasty right-wing populists, some of whom were in the Freedom Convoy and at the standoff near Coutts, Alberta, as well as skinhead or neo-fascist outfits such as the Hammerskin Nation. But they seem few and decidedly on the outside. We can be thankful for that.