Review: Hayek's Bastards. The Neo-Liberal of the Populist Right, by Quinn Slobodan

One has to admire Quinn Slobodan: in order to write his most recent book—the title is modelled after Voltaire's bastards (1992) by John Ralston Saul—he had to enter the world of madmen who produced movies, fictionalised novels, investment newsletters and comic books detailing the forthcoming economic apocalypse (several apocalypses every year for half a century), implausible conspiracies and a belief in their own racial superiority. All of that was happening because of the piles of money paid by various tycoons to maintain in a comfortable lifestyle and publishing activity Mont Pelerin Society fellows, so that they could continue meeting each other and exchanging the predictions of doom and gloom in the luxury hotels of the Riviera, Alpine resorts and even on the Galapagos islands. The ‘bastards’ are economists such as Murray Rothbard, political scientists such as Charles Murray, racists such as Nathaniel Weyl and Argentina's President Javier Milei.

The reader is unsure if this is really a world of madmen or the world of smart people who pretend to be madmen to extract money from the self-interested oligarchs and credulous readers (so called ‘investors’) who subscribe to their investment newsletters. One has a strong felling of a con business, reminiscent of evangelical scandals where preachers call for humility and love while the real business is one of money.

Did it have to be so? Friedrich Hayek was a serious thinker. Did his writings empower madmen who in many ways distorted his thinking? Probably yes. The reason is that Hayek in his later years began to believe that the usual classical defence of private property and free markets was not sufficient. It had to be reinforced by some moral, or seemingly scientific psychological or ethno-biological norms. That led him to dab into the areas of which he knew next to nothing and to fall prey to a weird predilection of the Austrian school for strange metaphors, borderline racism—‘the Christian west is the only creator of morals in the modern civilisation’—and ethno-economics.

Hayek's moving into psychology, ethno-biology, ‘hard-wired’ moral virtues and similar areas opened the doors to the madmen Slobodian covers in his book. It let them go much further. They were, as Slobodian writes, the believers in the three ‘hards’: hardwired human nature which is ethnically or racially determined, hard money (gold) and hard borders (no migration). At least two of these ‘hard’ beliefs are pure travesties of classical liberalism.

Classical liberalism is cosmopolitan. It prides itself of not making differences between individuals and thus opening the entire world to the application of liberal principles, When the alt-right decided to argue for ethnic, religious or racial differences, it did not simply go against the classical liberal ideology, it showed itself to be a victim of crudest empiricism.

East Asians, according to them, were originally not ‘hard-wired’ for economic success. But as East Asian countries became rich, the East Asians joined the exalted ranks of whites and Ashkenazi Jews as people of superior intellect who, based on their economic success, have the right to rule. If tomorrow African countries became rich, perhaps the Mont Pelerin Society fellows will accept Blacks among those who have the right to rule. That does not mean that they are not racist. It simply means that their ideology of ‘hardwiredness’ is unable to predict, who, on the basis of culture and ethnicity, will do well under capitalism and who will not. Its explanation of economic success is entirely ad hoc, and by rejecting a much more reasonable explanations that put the accent on historical and structural conditions, and not on race, the alt-right displays its epistemological impotence.

How did they succeed in rejecting free movement of people? It is one of key tenets of classical liberalism and even of neoliberalism with which most of the alt-right thinkers discussed in this book are associated. Their argument, by their own admission, is very weak. It is based on IQ-ism: successful parts of the world where smart people by definition live, have the right, in order to remain successful, to fence themselves off from the unsuccessful parts of the world, populated by people of dull intelligence. It is hard to imagine a more drastic departure from classical liberalism: not only is innate inequality of people erected into a dogma and then into a policy, but it requires a forced separation, including in mating, between peoples and impenetrable borders for one factor of production.

Even the third ‘hard’ rule of ‘hard money’ (gold) is, as Slobodian writes, misinterpreted. Not even Ludwig von Mises, whose works, being much more superficial and suffering from being funded by various Chambers of Commerce, were always more attractive to the alt-right than Hayek's, did argue for gold as such. Von Mises saw gold, whose quantity cannot be varied by governments, as a useful tool or anchor to stop governments’ ‘irresponsibility’ in printing fiat currency. Gold had no magical quality that the alt-right, in Slobodian retelling, ascribes to it—going as far as to invite visitors to the gold museum in Berlin to touch, for a brief moment, the gold bars and as it were through epidermal experience, gain the knowledge of correct monetary policy.

On all key issues the alt-right was a bastardised version of Hayekian creed, or as Slobodian calls it ‘a mutant strain’ of neoliberalism. But Hayek himself is, as I mentioned before, guilty of that, by opening, albeit shyly and hesitantly, the door to massive misappropriation and fraud.

The fraud happened because ‘Hayek's bastards’ despite all their protestations to the contrary, were not intellectuals nor interested in ideas. There is no doubt left to the reader of this book that they were—as some of them self-congratulatorily called themselves—‘intellectual entrepreneurs’ whose objective was to make money. It was not to have their ideas, which most of them, I believe, knew to be either unrealisable or false, accepted. A cynical reader might even say that they hoped that their ideas be never implemented because, once brought into the real world, such ideas would show their creators’ intellectual bankruptcy and rob them of permanent sources of money syphoned off from the feeble-minded tycoons and credulous public. The authors reviewed here are discussed as being the clearest examples of a Western intellectual history in decline. Their true claim to fame is not to have forewarned the unsuspecting public to the dangers of the looming apocalypses; it is to have accelerated intellectual decadence and to have converted intellectualism into pure money grubbing.

Hayek's Bastards. The Neo-Liberal of the Populist Right. by Quinn Slobodan. Penguin. 288pp. £25