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...