Review of Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right (2025) by Quinn Slobodian. Penguin, 279pp, $20.00

by Michael Kirby Hall

After ten years of right-wing triumph across the globe, but certainly after Trump’s abduction of Nicolás Maduro and the disastrous military campaign in Iran, political commentators across the spectrum have begun to ask: Is the “rules-based” international order dead? And, if so, have the stories it told itself about capitalism—its supposed “openness,” its “democratizing” influence—met a similar fate? Has the so-called neoliberal turn that began in the late ‘70s (and uniformly denounced by leftists) been clearing the way, in the end, for something much more insidious? These are some of the same questions that animate Quinn Slobodian’s recent book, Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right.

As the title suggests, Slobodian partially focuses on the work of F.A. Hayek, an Austrian economist (tangentially) associated with what would come to be known as the Chicago School. Its members provided the theoretical foundations of neoliberalism (the primacy of the price mechanism, monetarism, etc.). Unlike his fellow Chicagoans, however, Hayek underpinned many of his claims about human nature with racist rhetoric; his insistence that free markets can only work in “civilized” nations was a thread that was eventually picked up by right-wing nationalists in the 21^st century. Slobodian, therefore, offers a direct challenge to voices on both center-left and right who continue to insist that neoliberalism favors “free and open” markets and that, if given enough time, tends towards the realization of a post-racial world. Like many leftists before him, he entirely disputes the notion that globalized capitalism has led to uniform (racial, political, material) progress:

The right-wing neoliberals who joined, and in some cases founded, new populist parties did not reject the dynamic of market competition; they deepened it. ‘Closed borders’ libertarians continued to demand free movement for capital and goods; they simply drew a hard line against certain kinds of people.¹

Capitalism’s global expansion has been, for the most part, a win for the Global North’s upper and middle classes but is itself reliant on various neocolonial structures (like the International Monetary Fund, inequitable trade deals, etc.). This is a familiar argument, but Slobodian is unique in his insistence that this racialized dynamic existed within neoliberalism since its inception; “free markets” for us (the Global North) and not them (the Global South) is, for him, a defining feature of the world post-globalization: “…we can see that important factions of the emerging Right were, in fact, mutant strains of neoliberalism. The parties dubbed as right-wing populist, from the United States to Britain and Austria, have rarely been avenging angels, sent to smite economic globalization.”²

These parties have instead met the challenges of globalization—the hollowing out of the industrial core, the collapse of the welfare state—with a lot of talk about fixing the problem via “reinvestment” in the metropole. But, as one can imagine, the right-wing parties in the Global North have put in little effort into addressing the negative effects of capitalist accumulation and, in most cases, have continued to support continued disinvestment along neoliberal lines (Elon Musk’s DOGE being one obvious example). One of the only things they have done, unsurprisingly, is double down on anti-immigrant rhetoric (as if immigrants were themselves the main drivers of globalization) while coextensively calling for a renewal of “national pride” and patriotism. Slobodian has a name for this agglomeration of discourses: “We could call it a language of Volk capital.”³

It is important to emphasize that this Volk capital is not just a return to Nazism or the fascism of wartime Italy. In addition, it is an explicit weaponization of hierarchies that existed prior to or are coextensive with formation of capitalism in its mercantile phase; one might think of it as a retread, in another sense, of extractive colonialism. But where the (neo)colonial underpinnings of neoliberalism were downplayed in its external rhetoric (the face it shared with the world), the rhetoric of Volk capital explicitly embraces the language of domination, of conquest and bloodshed.

This is all happening, of course, in a post-Soviet world, where the threat of “actually existing socialism” is long dead. Volk capital, in other words, does not set itself against socialism as it’s typically understood (as a political movement focused on the “purely economic.”) It is, rather, a form of capitalism that has somehow become even more paranoid in its victory, a capitalism that no longer sees socialism as a legitimate threat but continues to require an external enemy around which to organize itself: “This was a postmaterialist or nonmaterialist ideology… described as a mutant socialism. It traded in chromatic signs and skin tones; a socialism of pigmentation instead of redistributed wealth.”⁴

This turn away from the (supposedly) colorblind tenets of neoliberalism has been the focus of various other books in recent years. In his review of one such study, Arnaud Orain’s Le monde confisqué. Essai sur le capitalism de la finitude [The World Confiscated: An Essay on the Capitalism of Finitude], Nicholas Mulder sums up the defining features of what is called “finite capitalism”:

… first, the closure and monopolization of seas and oceans; second, the militarization of maritime commerce; third, the creation of anti-competitive organizations by capitalists; fourth, the carving up of markets and trade networks into politically exclusive silos; fifth, the usurpation of sovereign powers by mercantile interests; and sixth, the conversion of weaker and poorer parts of the Earth into subjugated resource empires for rich and powerful states.⁵

I bring up this specific example because I believe it works as a useful addendum to Hayek’s Bastards; we, along with Orain, might suggest that capitalism is better understood as the movement between two poles, between finitude and limitlessness, between disguised racism and unabashed racism. What we have called “neoliberalism,” in this reading, is not so much a stage in capitalism’s development but the movement of capital towards one pole in a specific historical moment. Volk capital or finite capitalism is the backwards swing of the pendulum.

Where is the academic library in all of this? We might begin by asking how best to defend library workers in an educational environment that is largely privatized but also increasingly policed by an illiberal government engaged, as Slobodian puts it, in a “zero-sum competition” in which any and all dissent must be crushed.⁶ Librarians, in other words, have the unfortunate task of continuing to fight neoliberalism at the level of the institution while simultaneously confronting Volk capital at the level of national politics. Sometimes, the latter provides convenient cover for the former’s continued drive toward total privatization.

To name just one prominent example, we have the case of Columbia University, which recently agreed to a whole host of Trump-imposed concessions that weaken the academic freedom rights of its faculty.⁷ With this tacit backing from the government, Columbia’s administration has felt emboldened to crackdown on dissent, effectively dismissing, in one instance, a tenured law professor for her support of pro-Palestinian causes.⁸ And while (at least to my knowledge) this has not yet affected Columbia’s librarians, one can easily imagine the various ways in which this playbook could be (and already has been) taken up by other universities—with especially disastrous results in areas of the country where academic freedom protections for librarians are substantially weaker than in New York. This is merely a positional statement (a brief one, at that), but in this historical moment of crisis, it is important to clarify the moments where our enemies—from both the authoritarian right and from the neoliberal center—might converge.

In this sense, Hayek’s Bastards is an invaluable tool; it is a timely reminder that “the aggressive right becomes a functional force both when the ruling class is relatively weak and resorts to extreme measures to defeat a revolutionary threat … and when the ruling class is strong and decides to finish the job.”⁹ This is how Columbia’s (and Texas A&M’s and the University of Oklahoma’s…) recent acquiescence to the Trump administration should be understood: collaboration between neoliberal administrators and authoritarians, both chomping at the bit to finish the job of killing higher education.

Notes

• 1. Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right (Princeton University Press, 2025), 11.
• 2. Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards, 19.
• 3. Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards, 25.
• 4. Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards, 88.
• 5. Nicholas Mulder, “Interludes of Abundance,” New Left Review 155 (September-October 2025): 133, https://doi.org/10.64590/vrx.
• 6. Mulder, “Interludes of Abundance,” 135.
• 7. This includes defining anti-Semitism along the parameters set by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a move that, in effect, forbids any criticism of the State of Israel. See Eyal Press, “The Troubling Lines That Columbia Is Drawing,” The New Yorker, August 18, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-troubling-lines-that-columbia-is-drawing.
• 8. See Ryan Quinn, “Pro-Palestinian Columbia Professor Departs After Investigation,” Inside Higher Ed, January 10, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/academic-freedom/2025/01/10/pro-palestine-columbia-professor-departs-after.
• 9. Martín Mosquera, “The Meaning of Milei.” New Left Review 155 (September-October 2025): 5-23, https://doi.org/10.64590/tfn.

Bibliography

• Mosquera, Martín. “The Meaning of Milei.” New Left Review 155 (September-October 2025): 5-23. https://doi.org/10.64590/tfn.
• Mulder, Nicholas. “Interludes of Abundance.” New Left Review 155 (September-October 2025): 129-140. https://doi.org/10.64590/vrx.
• Press, Eyal. “The Troubling Lines That Columbia Is Drawing.” The New Yorker, August 18, 2025. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-troubling-lines-that-columbia-is-drawing.
• Quinn, Ryan. “Pro-Palestinian Columbia Professor Departs After Investigation.” Inside Higher Ed, January 10, 2025. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/academic-freedom/2025/01/10/pro-palestine-columbia-professor-departs-after.
• Slobodian, Quinn. Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right. Princeton University Press, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5860/rusq.50n4.338.