Today’s Far-Right Crankery Has Libertarian Ancestry
The virulent nationalism and racism of the contemporary far right are typically seen as having little in common with figures like Friedrich Hayek. But the far right’s pseudoscientific defenses of hierarchy have roots in Hayek and his acolytes’ thought.
In Hayek’s Bastards, historian Quinn Slobodian argues that contemporary right-wing obsessions with race, borders, and gold have unlikely antecedents in the thought of the arch-neoliberal Friedrich Hayek. (Laurent Maous / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
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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