Hayek's Bastards

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 * The brilliant Quinn Slobodian has done it again. 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 * 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 *