The origin was really trying to make sense of that 2016-2017 moment and to ask whether the alt-right was, as we were being told, a return to the 1930s, a kind of awakening of the sleeping beast of white supremacy armed in the streets in the United States. There are many explanations, but I decided to take this kind of curious route in with the distorted readings and reinterpretations of the works of people like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. As a scholar of comparative literature, I wanted to write a revision based on Crack-Up Capitalism.
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Quinn Slobodian about his new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. He takes a deep dive into the genesis of a weird and powerful merging of two seemingly different groups the Far Right and neoliberals. Slobodian writes, “as repellent as their politics may be these radical thinkers are not barbarians the gates of neoliberalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself.” They talk about how this meshing is driven by a primitive desire to ward off egalitarianism, difference, democracy, and government that services the common good. The wide-ranging talk ends with addressing DOGE, Trump's tariffs, and yes, the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right . A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
Thanks so much for being on the show. I thought I'd start by quoting from Robin Kelley's blurb for Hayek’s Bastards, and he writes, “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."
Now, I started reading your work with Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism and then Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, and now this one, and I see the trajectory that Robin is talking about. I would just add that these fissures and mutations all seem to be geared toward maintaining a beachhead against democracy, egalitarianism, and a sense of government that serves the broad public.
So given this pattern of concerns, I wanted to start by asking you, did you envision Hayek’s Bastards already in the earlier books? Did you begin to sense this current book in previous ones?
QUINN SLOBODIAN
The genesis of it was definitely almost at the same time as what became Crack-Up Capitalism. It was really in the run-up to the election in 2016, and then probably even more so the summer of Charlottesville the next year in 2017 when I was, like many other people, just trying to figure out what the hell was going on and how we could make sense of it in the small domain I live in, which is the world of the history of political thought and economic thought. The thing we were dealing with from the alt-right and the eruption of these online subcultures, especially into the streets of the United States with often kind of murderous fury, was treated, I think, often as a kind of asteroid strike or something, right?
Like it was this thing that came out of nowhere. Nobody had really had it on their radar, and so it was this pure rupture that now needed to be reckoned with, perhaps with a whole new set of tools and understandings. There was real talk about, I think, the kind of sobering confrontation with maybe the silos we had been living in as academics and our failure to take seriously the kind of burbling resentments and grievances of the heartland, as it was often put.
This was a kind of another chance for shame, actually, for a failure to be epistemologically useful. Instead, we were spinning our dream worlds. Although there’s some truth to that, and it's always good to do some degree of self-reflection, it occurred to me when I was watching even things like Charlottesville that there were also connections to stories we had been telling and trying to understand inside of things like the history of political thought and the history of neoliberalism for some time.
Take, for example, the fact that this one quite notorious person who was part of the Charlottesville mobilization was selling on his website these bumper stickers that said "I heart physical removal." That would be cryptic to most people, but with a Google stroke away, you could find out it is a reference to this Austrian school philosopher named Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who had been saying that all kinds of people need to be physically removed from society. This kind of thing became a little bit of a paint chip that you could just peel off. As you kept pulling and unraveling it, you start to realize that this far-right phenomenon was not an asteroid from deep space, and that it actually had its own intellectual genealogies, many of which were wound up in the root system of a lot of the things I had been looking at in the history of neoliberalism.
So that investigation really, in a way, preceded what became Crack-Up Capitalism. The idea of a mutant form of Austrian neoliberalism finding its way to alliances with skinheads, neo-Nazis, and neo-Confederates was a story I started to look into at length already in 2017. When it came to trying to tell a bigger story about the supposed backlash against neoliberalism being also a kind of front lash and acceleration and a kind of offspring in its own way intellectually, that ended up manifesting as this Crack-Up Capitalism book, which ended up being more about political geography and the zone as an alternate category to the globe and the nation. The attempt to then graft also onto that a whole new discussion of the return of human nature and race science ended up being a little bit of a bridge too far.
In effect, it became two books, but the origin was really trying to make sense of that 2016-2017 moment and to ask whether the alt-right was, as we were being told, a return to the 1930s, a kind of awakening of the sleeping beast of white supremacy armed in the streets in the United States. There are many explanations, but I decided to take this kind of curious route in with the distorted readings and reinterpretations of the works of people like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. As a scholar of comparative literature, I wanted to write a revision based on Crack-Up Capitalism.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
It's a wonderful way of naming the world as we understand it, rather than harking back to models that no longer work in terms of various aspects. Again, I appreciate the centrality of culture in your current book.
QUINN SLOBODIAN
Yeah, for sure. Should I grab the British one or the American one? How do they differ? I'll bring both. Okay. They look a little different, but oh, which one do you prefer? The American one is the one that can be bought in the United States, since we're both in the U.S. Yeah, it probably makes most sense to talk about that one.
I also quite like the cover art. It's a piece that's in the New Orleans Museum of Art, made by a fellow named Will Ryman. It’s an amazing piece. It’s a true-to-life-size log cabin made out of the kind of ephemeral materials of American industrial capitalism and also racial capitalism. There are shackles, bullet shells, and railroad ties. Oh my God. They all kind of form this mesmerizing kind of mosaic. You can actually enter right into it and be in the shrine. Did you choose this tribal American focus?
Oh, absolutely. I ended up there by good fortune after having a day off after some workshop or another, and was just like, "smack." It is an amazing sculpture and piece, and luckily, the artist was willing to license the rights to us to include just this detail of it. Yes, it seemed to capture quite well this idea of a return to something of a punitive, natural, extra, exactly cultural, and extra-social truth, which is, of course, never quite as extra as they hope.
Actually, most people wouldn’t see this part on the internet because you usually see the back of books, but this is also quite cool. It was designed by a friend of mine, the New Zealand artist Simon Denny, who works in the kind of post-internet medium or genre. He made this with a handheld printer that's usually used for putting labels, like QR codes, onto boxes for shipping, but you can actually put any image you want into it. He put images of Hayek as a kind of way of producing this mediated, slightly degenerated copy of someone in the vein of mutation and inheritance that I read about in the book. That could also have been the cover, but in any case, yes.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
Yeah, no, it's a bit busy, but it's quite beautiful. The reason I asked you to get the book is the other thing I appreciate about you—you're such a beautiful writer. There's such lucidity and clarity, and you get to the gist of things very well with these wonderful ornaments. I wanted to ask you to read the last paragraph of the introduction. To me, it's a wonderful sort of signpost of where you are going to take us.
QUINN SLOBODIAN
Sure. This book shows that many contemporary iterations of the far right emerged within neoliberalism, not in opposition to it. They did not propose the wholesale rejection of globalism, but a variety of it—one that accepts an international division of labor with robust cross-border flows of goods and even multilateral trade agreements while tightening controls on certain kinds of migration. As repellent as their politics may be, these radical thinkers are not barbarians at the gates of neoliberal globalism, but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself. The purported clash of opposites is a family feud.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
Expand on the bastard part of it because that becomes the title of your book. How are they mutant forms?
QUINN SLOBODIAN
I take a pretty narrow, kind of forensic approach to the topic of neoliberalism, which is not always the way people deal with the category, right? Often, it can be used very usefully, more loosely and creatively, to understand things that one might not immediately assume to be neoliberal. Everything from social media usage to makeup tutorials to CV creation and so on. The list of ways that neoliberalism has been deployed as a category of analysis is pretty much endless at this point.
Rather than taking that broad lens, I follow the work of people whom I consider my mentors: Dieter Plehwe, Philip Mirowski, Bernhard Walpen, who write on the people who from the 1930s onward call themselves neoliberal. In 1938, they gathered in Paris, where their term came up as a way to describe their self-understanding of their project. People like Friedrich Hayek and Mises didn’t keep using the term to describe themselves really past the 1950s or so, but for me and the people I work with, it's still helpful to narrow the focus of neoliberalism down to this pretty discrete group of thinkers and a finite number of texts, and to look at the way they’ve worked through problems of doctrine and strategy.
Internally, over the years, their understanding of neoliberalism changes a lot—not just according to shifts in opinion within the group, but often, almost always, in response to what they see as external challenges to the problem of defending the sanctity of capitalism or the principles of private property, freedom of trade, and so on.
They focus on different things at different moments. In the 1960s, as I wrote about in Globalists, there was a big concern about the global south and the decolonizing world as the upsetting forces that needed to be contained and constrained. Into the 1980s, there was more concern about the new social movements that had been spawned by the 1960s and 1970s. Things like the women’s movement, the feminist movement, and the ecological movement became very important. Anti-racism and affirmative action—this sort of afterglow of the civil rights movement—became things that had more or less not been on their radar for decades. These were serious, credible threats to the foundations of capitalist order.
Yet by the 1980s and 1990s, these were very much the things they were worried about. The idea of generations of thinkers and the way their doctrine and strategy changes from generation to generation is something that I think structures most of the writing I’ve been doing for the last decade or so. It makes sense to see the difference between more continuous moments of inheritance of ideas, where the content doesn't seem to be radically transformed, and more discontinuous ones, where you see a jarring kind of right turn in the foundational principles they seem to be honing in on.
That’s where the bastards of the title come in. First of all, a kind of tip of the hat to this book by John Ralston Saul called Voltaire's Bastards, which was an influence on me when I was a teenager looking for books that did history of ideas through readable anecdotes, situations, and moments of conflict. I think they often end up breaking with the core group of neoliberal intellectuals to the point that they are rogue or dissident from the mainline of their movement. This is something that is actually openly acknowledged within the small school of heterodox neoliberal economists.
For example, a few years ago, in 2020, Tyler Cowen, an incredibly influential blogger and podcaster at George Mason University, who is very much part of this neoliberal economic thinking group, published a short post. Most of his posts are quite short. He said the Austrian school movement has split. One part has gone off to join the Ron Paulist Gold Bug Alt-Right fringe and worse. The rest of us are now working on something we call state capacity libertarianism, which is more focused on how we can use the state effectively—kind of licensing reform, permitting reform, and stuff that is now recognizable in this space of things like the abundance concept that someone like Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein are pushing.
That’s a pretty big schism, right? You have some people talking about making the federal government more efficient through permitting reform, and then other people walking the streets with skinheads to expel people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Yet some of those people would have studied at the knee of some of the same thinkers in the 1980s at a place like George Mason University. They would have simply taken very different paths to what they see as the same end, which is how to stabilize the inherently disruptive dynamic of a capitalist society.
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Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.
Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:
“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times. This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”
David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues.
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
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