Quinn Slobodian's Hayek’s Bastards: A Review
Ashok Kumar reviews Quinn Slobodian's newest deep dive into the neoliberal order.
Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards performs an autopsy on neoliberalism’s corpse while its heart still beats - peeling back the skin of free market ideology to expose the necrotic tissue of eugenics beneath. This isn’t merely intellectual history; it’s a forensic examination of how neoliberalism’s immune system turned against itself, producing the autoimmune disorder we call the populist right. But as I read the book, I found myself returning to a fundamental question: What exactly are we talking about when we talk about neoliberalism today?
The book forces us to confront neoliberalism’s eugenicist DNA, yet we must ask whether this focus on intellectual genealogy risks becoming an academic séance - summoning Hayek’s ghost while the vampire of capital slips out the back door. Because here’s the truth: neoliberalism was never just a set of ideas. It was capital’s fever dream during the crisis of the 1970s, when the postwar body economic developed antibodies against working class power - financialization as chemotherapy, globalization as radical surgery.
Let me frame this through 4 provocations:
Provocation 1: The Metastasizing Definition
Slobodian’s genealogy shows neoliberalism’s nervous system - the Mont Pèlerin synapses firing between Hayek’s neurons - but we must ask: When a term can simultaneously describe Thatcher’s union-busting and Trump’s protectionism, when it can mean both Davos cosmopolitanism and Orban’s “illiberal democracy,” hasn’t the diagnosis become useless?
Because if we mislabel the disease, we misprecribe the cure.
Neoliberalism cannot mean open borders for capital but ICE raids for workers, colourblind meritocracy for corporate boards but explicit racism for border walls. It cannot mean hyper-globalization of the 1990s and the protectionism of the 2020s. Either neoliberalism has developed multiple personality disorder, or we’re watching capital’s body reject its own transplanted organs.
Provocation 2: Capitalism’s Racial Fix
Slobodian exposes neoliberalism’s eugenicist roots, but we must push further: Is today’s nativism neoliberalism’s bastard child--or is it just capitalism’s oldest trick?
Every crisis within capitalism has produced it’s own ‘racial fix’. This is achieved by manufacturing new differences in populations and new norms embedded in such differences. Just as economic fixes keep profits up, racial fixes keep labour down. These help to police the crisis, absorb or resolve its contradictions, develop new terrains of profitability, and recuperate from forms of resistance.
At its core neoliberalism was market fundamentalism, free movement of capital/goods, formal equality under the law, and a preference for technocratic governance. Its ‘postmodern’ cultural logic (as per A. Sivanandan via Jameson) often obscured racial hierarchies under the veneer of meritocracy. In the 1980s and ’90s, neoliberalism required formal colour blindness to lubricate globalization.
Cities across the advanced capitalist world, for example, tell the opposition story. A rejection of scientific racism in favour of assimilation for the purposes of dispossession for capital. Ghettos tell this story in metastasized form - the industrial body’s housing projects first quarantined the reserve army, then became tumours to be excised through gentrification. What was once dark and dangerous became dark, dangerous and desirable - a perverse immunotherapy where racism didn’t disappear but went into remission, hiding in the fatty tissue of credit scores and algorithmic policing.
Now the cancer’s returned. As capital’s spatial fixes fail, the body politic develops new growths: Brexit’s necrotic nationalism, Trump’s melanoma of white grievance. This isn’t mutation - it’s the same disease entering its cachexic phase.
Provocation 3: The Brain is Failing to Control the Body
Slobodian calls the far-right neoliberalism’s “mutant strain”, but this implies too much coherence. A better metaphor: the prefrontal cortex (capital) is losing control of the limbic system (politics).
- 93% of British CEOs opposed Brexit’s self-harm.
- Corporate America’s $2bn fight against Trump’s tariffs.
- Italy’s industrialists scream that Meloni’s policies will strangle growth.
- Brexit has reduced UK goods trade by 15%.
- Trump’s tariffs cost US firms $46 billion annually.
This isn’t adaptation - it’s ataxia, the loss of muscular coordination. When capital’s preferred policies become electoral poison, when the GOPs Tucker Carlson screams at “woke corporations!” when Farage supports nationalizations while Starmer’s Labour administers austerity - we’re witnessing not mutation but dissolution of the mind-body connection.
Provocation 4: The Paralysis of Intellectual History
Here’s the sedative in Slobodian’s autopsy: focusing on ideas alone is like studying a cadaver’s wardrobe instead of its rigor mortis. The Mont Pèlerin Society mattered, but only as capital’s speech therapist after its 1970s stroke. The real question is: Did Hayek’s ideas create neoliberalism or did neoliberalism elevate Hayek’s ideas because they served capital’s needs?
Change doesn’t happen in the realm of ideas any more than digestion happens in a cookbook. The 2008 crisis didn’t occur because some bankers read too much Hayek - it happened because capital’s digestive system could only process subprime mortgages as financial excrement. Likewise, today’s nativist turn isn’t about think tanks - it’s capital’s peristalsis reversing direction after decades of globalization-induced vomiting.
This intellectual focus isn’t just incomplete - it’s demobilizing. If we believe change happens through better syllabi, we’ll keep lecturing while the house burns. The 1970s crisis would have birthed some form of regressive capitalism even if every copy of The Road to Serfdom had been pulped.
Conclusion: Time to Stop Performing Autopsies and Start Building Life Support
Slobodian’s book is essential - not for what it says about neoliberalism’s bastard children, but for what it reveals about capital’s failing organs. What we’re witnessing is something darker: a system in crisis, lashing out in increasingly irrational ways.
When the next crisis hits--whether climate collapse or AI-driven unemployment--what racial fixes will emerge then? And will we still be calling them neoliberal?
The task ahead isn’t just to critique Hayek’s heirs. It’s to confront the dying system that keeps producing them.
Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right by Quinn Slobodian is out now.
