Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the chameleon of communism changing colors from red to green. The poison of civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism ran through the veins of the body politic and they needed an antidote.
To defy demands for equality, many neoliberals turned to nature. Race, intelligence, territory, and precious metal would be bulwarks against progressive politics. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they articulated a philosophy of three hards—hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money—and forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists, and goldbugs that would become known as the alt-right.
Following Hayek’s bastards from Murray Rothbard to Charles Murray to Javier Milei, we find that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash. This history of ideas shows us that the reported clash of opposites is more like a family feud.
Quinn Slobodian is Professor of International History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His most recent books are Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South, and Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.
"A creative and engaging intellectual detective story that cuts through the far right’s smoke-and-mirrors claims of rupture and novelty, tracing the movement's deep neoliberal roots and exposing a shared set of supremacist beliefs about which lives have value and which lives do not. Ideas have consequences and very few scholars take the history of ideas as seriously as Slobodian, even when the ideas themselves are absurd, patently false, and deeply dangerous.” – Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger and The Shock Doctrine
“The brilliant Quinn Slobodian has done it again: overturned orthodoxy on the history of neoliberalism by paying attention to its fissures, mutations, and ideological foundations. Neoliberals confessed that tearing down the Berlin Wall did not address the real threat to liberty: welfare, immigrants, and demands for racial, gender, disability, and environmental justice. Anyone who believes neoliberal ideology is dead must read this book. Thanks to the Charles Murrays, Murray Rothbards, Peter Brimelows, and Richard Spencers of the world, it is alive and well in the alt-Right and the self-proclaimed cognitive elite bent on restoring the natural order of things in order to make the West Great Again.” – Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“In this work of historical erudition and sharp political analysis, Quinn Slobodian explains how the myth of neoliberal freedom can be sustained only through a deeply illiberal world view. Through a painstaking reconstruction of how Hayek's offspring appeal to science served to naturalize hierarchy, and resist the calls for social equality, we come to see how rightwing authoritarianism emerged not as an alternative to neoliberalism but as its brainchild. An essential read to understand the times in which we live.” – Lea Ypi, author of Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
