Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at Boston University whose research documents the intellectual history of neoliberalism. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, published by Harvard University Press in 2018, he argued that far from shrinking the state as usually understood, postwar neoliberalism used the emerging framework of supranational regulatory institutions to enshrine market principles and insulate them from democratic challenge, and in Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan, 2023) he tracked the growth of Special Economic Zones and other deregulated spaces as attempts by capitalists to exit from the bonds of national sovereignty altogether. In his most recent book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Slobodian argues that the rise of the New Right marks not so much a radical break with neoliberal orthodoxy as the ascension of certain tendencies within it. In late July, I spoke with Slobodian about his new book and the ideas that have shaped today’s ascendant right-wing movements.

—James Duesterberg

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James Duesterberg: I wanted to start by asking about the relation between the New Right and neoliberalism. One of the main thrusts of your argument is that despite, and even somewhat by way of, its claims to break from neoliberalism, the New Right actually arose out of an internal schism within neoliberal thought.

Does this mean that at its core there is there is a kind of ethnocentrism, or racism, in neoliberalism? There is obviously a centrist neoliberalism that understands itself to be quasi-progressive at the minimum, if not anti-racist then at least “non-racist.” So one way of posing this question is, does the rise of the New Right call the bluff of neoliberalism understood as a whole?

Quinn Slobodian: I first need to clarify that my method is quite doctrinal. I take an intellectual-history approach that narrows the category of neoliberalism to a group of individuals who have been gathering since the 1930s to talk about ways to safeguard capitalism from collectivist threats on the left and the right. If you use the category of neoliberalism as originally coined in 1938 in Paris by a group of economists, politicians, journalists and authors, including Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, then you look for schisms and breaks within the intellectual community and work from inside out. This is different than thinking from the outside in about neoliberalism as a set of political and economic tendencies that can be summed up in one decade or another, according to dominant modes of accumulation, patterns of behavior, political idioms and so on. Neither is necessarily superior, but this is the approach I use.

The puzzle in my most recent book was a specific one. Around 2016 or 2017, we heard a lot about the “libertarian to alt-right pipeline.” Yet nobody explained why people mostly interested in economic freedom were drawn to people mostly interested in ethnic and racial purity. Why would they make common cause? My goal was not to try to unmask neoliberalism as a whole as having a dark, concealed essence of ethno-chauvinism or ethno-nationalism, but rather to show how the doctrine itself transforms as it faces different challenges in different moments. For reasons I lay out in the book, the 1990s were a time that an alliance with the far right looked promising for some within the neoliberal community.

JD: In the book you highlight the importance of this moment in the Nineties, at the end of the Cold War, and the fear the neoliberals had that maybe actually we’ve lost the Cold War—that communism has in fact entrenched itself under the cover of Keynesian social democracy. This ends up becoming an impetus for a lot of these transformations—for the rise of paleoconservatism, and for some of the shift in thinking about the role of culture in the economy—that you track in your book. What was the impetus here—is it the loss of the external enemy in the form of the Soviet Union and the need to find an internal enemy? Or is there something more structural, having to do with economic history?

QS: It begins with an accurate insight: the percentage of GDP accounted for by state spending didn’t really fall after communism had been defeated as a geopolitical enemy. Thatcher and Reagan talked about dismantling the welfare state. Yet the NHS persisted, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security persisted, and entitlements programs remained pretty steady, even if in restructured form. This was a distressing data point for neoliberals, and they asked themselves: If it wasn’t the infiltration of communist ideology that was keeping this welfare state alive, then what was it? And how could they now win the internal battle that had eluded them for so long?

The other thing that concerned them was the move toward international organizations and multilateral trade treaties, which neoliberals had previously championed in the 1980s as a way to defend free trade and protect private property. Things like NAFTA and the WTO and the European Union had been welcomed by many neoliberal thinkers. But in the 1990s, a fear took hold that those very institutions were becoming Trojan horses for a revived socialist ideology—that there were continued strongholds for these ideas in the intellectual elite, in universities, the press and some parts of the civil service. If you took seriously the critique of the managerial elite from James Burnham to the professional-managerial class—as the neoliberals did—then you would worry that the obstacles to true economic freedom were now not in Moscow but in the federal agencies and in the international legal institutions.

Also, the very things that were supposedly the components of “progressive neoliberalism” as understood by Nancy Fraser—namely feminism, antiracism and environmentalism, which most people on the left would see as having been easily integrated into the smooth functioning of capitalism—these were understood very differently by neoliberals. They saw the resurgence of interest in things like affirmative action and mainstream feminism, gay rights, political correctness, as zombie forms of communism, which would need to be defeated now as well.

JD: In Globalists, your book from 2018 on the origins of neoliberalism, you mention how these multilateral postwar NGOs and other institutions, along with the EU, were largely set up or oriented by people involved with the Mont Pelerin Society, people who were card-carrying neoliberals and reflected a lot of their priorities. But what you’re documenting in this book is how at least some neoliberals ultimately turn against those institutions and come to see them as the main threat to market society. There’s a way in which neoliberalism seems to kind of set up obstacles for itself that it then has to overcome. Does this logic illuminate something about the essence of neoliberalism, or is it just a contingent historical fact that the EU and these other institutions that initially were seen as vehicles for marketization in the end become obstacles to it?

QS: I would frame it a little differently. I think those institutions—whether the European Union or international economic law—were less whole-cloth inventions of the neoliberals and more terrains of struggle and compromise. There were moments when international institutions could have enframed economic relationships differently. Much of Globalists is about the decolonizing world making a play for control of institutions in the name of a very different kind of political economy and the neoliberal counterrevolution against Global South activism. The neoliberals are sensitive to the fact that no institutions are ever safe.

On the other hand, the dynamic of escalation you’re describing is a familiar story in many radical movements, where no victory is adequate to the imagination of some members of that formation. This plays out across the history of the left within the communist movement or in the clashes between anarchists and communists in Spain and elsewhere in the early twentieth century. What I document in Hayek’s Bastards is something similar within the free-market libertarian movement—apparent victories are perceived as unsatisfying by more radical parts of the movement, and then are framed as obstacles to be overcome to achieve something more like the true market utopia on the far side of the horizon. That’s the big story of the end of the Cold War from the perspective of the neoliberal intellectuals: the exhilarating and slightly vertiginous sense that the world-framing battle had been won, and now you were left with the question of whether you were satisfied with the victory.

JD: What you’re saying here goes against a lot of the received, or at least the received left interpretation, of the history of neoliberalism, which is often that there’s something deeply, not only depoliticizing, but anti-political about neoliberalism. In other words, that it’s guided by this fantasy of removing things from the sphere of political contestation. Behind that critique is the claim that in fact neoliberals need to set up all these institutions to cleanse the public sphere of politics, but they don’t know that they’re doing it or they try to hide it. But the way you’re describing their attitude is quite different—never feeling any victory is final, remaining ever vigilant. I wonder if this a way of accounting for the success of the neoliberal project in various guises in the postwar period: that in fact they are quite sensitive to political dynamics, political strategy, and what it means to think politically on the largest scale.

QS: Absolutely. There’s a persuasive narrative about neoliberalism as depoliticization. The unmasking critical move is then to point out that “in fact, no, it is political after all.” But few neoliberals would deny that. Neoliberalism isn’t ultimately a claim to apolitical technocracy or a purely self-organizing market. It’s always understood as a political project that faces different challenges at different moments depending on often marginalized groups being dissatisfied with the settlement that they’re being given.

If you just look at someone like Milton Friedman, then it’s clear that he didn’t see this as a purely managerial undertaking, right? He was very attentive to forms of rhetoric, forms of strategy. Watch a couple episodes of Free to Choose, and you see all kinds of ways he’s valorizing the little guy against the smothering effects of the big bureaucracy. Policies he helped to promote—like the volunteer draft—were also a way to appeal to people’s sense of individual choice and to redistribute risk within the society, which he knew would be politically attractive. So that idea of winning consent, and finding the new opponent, is front and center for neoliberals in their own discussions. The question of strategy is never far from their lips or from the texts that they’re working on.

I do think that one of the key misunderstandings about neoliberalism is that it’s purely a doctrine of economization, an attempt to purify social life of conflict. That doesn’t ring true for me. Not only because market dynamics are premised on competition and the uneven distribution of rewards but because neoliberals are also keenly aware their policy battles need to be won within a shifting field of alliances and interests.

JD: To return to the genealogical approach we talked about earlier, I think one thing that has been difficult for people to wrap their head around about the shifts on the right since 2016 is this combination of a seemingly libertarian approach to economics with an authoritarian approach to culture. But, in a sense, this is what modern conservative fusionism is, right? The combination of what Europeans would call liberal economics with an authoritarian approach to culture and society. And a central argument of your book is that what differentiates what you call “new fusionism” from the old fusionism of the William F. Buckley era is a shift to hard sciences rather than religious or other forms of authority as moral arbiter, which gets fused, as it were, with the economic doctrine. One example that immediately comes to mind is Elon Musk talking about how, you know, women and betas shouldn’t vote, only alpha men get to vote, but routing that argument through evolutionary psychology. Without enough testosterone you are neurologically incapable of independent thought. So there’s a scientific disqualification for the franchise rather than saying that it’s in the Bible, or that there’s a tradition under which men are supposed to be in charge of their families, and then the family scales up to the polis, etc.

So is that just a matter of shifting ideology to justify the same underlying political reality? In your book you write, “New fusionism uses the language of science to justify the extension of competitive dynamics ever deeper into social life.” But you also say the common understanding of neoliberalism as an “apocalyptic hypermarketization of everything” is mistaken. What’s the role of the authoritarian cultural component, and how does a shift from a religious or traditional justification to a scientific justification change the structure of fusionism?

QS: The prestige of neuroscience, evolutionary biology and genomics rises in the 1990s and the 2000s. This broadens the base for a certain kind of thinker who could be attracted to the movement, offering openings toward the ever more important fields of tech and computer engineering and all the things we associate with Silicon Valley. The ordinal attitude toward human hierarchies is captured well in something like IQ and is amenable to people who like to create spreadsheets of humanity that they understand to be telling them some deeper truth.

This is an appeal now to a kind of scrutable human nature that cannot only be seen and understood, but also potentially manipulated, especially with the rise of gene editing, embryo selection and prenatal screening—the sorts of things that are so interesting to people like Nick Bostrom and many people in Silicon Valley. (Stephen Hsu is another figure who’s a bridge between the world of DNA manipulation and libertarian right-wing thinking.) I think that allows for an update to libertarian and neoliberal thought to make it not seem so stodgy and backward-looking, and more like an economic philosophy that is willing to look at the hard truths of scientific discovery and breach the hidden archives of so-called forbidden knowledge—the kind that egalitarian progressives supposedly don’t want you to think about.

The pendulum swing away from the post-1960s Great Society demands for redistributive justice and a modicum of welfare in the United States has been given new force from the efforts to ground inegalitarianism in the supposedly hard and immutable realities of human difference. As with The Bell Curve, which I discuss at length in the book, this allows for new arguments about the inevitability of inequality and the quixotic quality of efforts at redistribution or the uplift of naturally less endowed populations.

JD: And that shift coincides, as you’re pointing out, with a new or enhanced technological capacity to manipulate precisely those things. To manipulate biology with DNA editing; on the gold question, which is hard money, Bitcoin comes into play. With borders, they’re doing seasteading and Special Economic Zones.

This is a longstanding philosophical temptation, where the only thing that’s real is the thing that we don’t control—whether it’s God or Nature. But it’s interesting that this turn toward finding a new source, or renewed sources, of external veridiction comes when those objects are actually now becoming manipulable, and therefore within the sphere of human decision, within the arena of political contestation.

QS: In some ways, the book tees up but doesn’t deliver a hard statement about how the Silicon Valley right finds its shape in this new fusionism too. Because what you’re saying is correct—faith in manipulability should undermine a philosophy based on immutable hard realities. But I think it’s the opposite. It puts all the more power in the hands of a Promethean minority that purports to change what was supposedly unchangeable. If you can simultaneously ground human nature in something like DNA, which is inert, and then say you have a new technology to change it, you can almost double the payload of your technology. The two things work together, both hard and manipulable, as long as the technology is not democratized.

JD: Something that has always fascinated me in Hayek is that his argument for the supremacy of the market is premised on what he calls “tacit knowledge.” For him, the market is not ultimately about rationality or organizing explicit knowledge, because if it were, then a computer could do the work, or a particularly good team of government bureaucrats could do the work—we wouldn’t need the market. The market works, and is necessary, precisely because we can never know this infinite density of context, which is the actual determinant of value or price.

You make a fascinating point about how this actually aligns the Hayekians, at least, if not neoliberalism as a whole, with the New Left in some ways, or with its intellectual sources—with phenomenology, with cultural studies, all of which have ranged their ideas against what they call “economism” or, more broadly, scientism. You can see a resonance between Hayek talking about tacit knowledge and ideas like “the body keeps the score”—that there’s some kind of truth in trauma that can never be made explicit in discourse. Could you talk about how this critique of economism shapes neoliberalism, how it feeds into the origins of the New Right? I’m also thinking about Foucault’s claim, in his lectures on neoliberalism from ’78 or ’79, that the left lacked what he called a governmentality, and that it needed to learn from neoliberalism how to identify success or failure—needed a metric by which to evaluate political action.

QS: This was an important flashpoint for the schism amongst neoliberals in the 1980s and especially the 1990s over the question of how hard one’s claims can be about anything, really. If you follow Hayek faithfully, you get a paradoxical outcome—you are committed to the practice of science but remain skeptical about overly concrete claims to have arrived at an endpoint for scientific inquiry. Hayek is committed to the idea that what is taken as fact is always provisional and open to the next insight or discovery, and that to adopt our scientific claims as the basis for any social system or political system is to commit the sin of what he calls scientism. The spirit brings them close at times to what is called the constructivist wing of social sciences, especially when combined with the influences that he was operating under in interwar Vienna, which were very open to the idea that meaning was subjective.

JD: Well, he was Wittgenstein’s cousin.

QS: Yeah, exactly. In general, the vibe, even without family relations, around there was to treat not just meaning but facts and knowledge as things that were tied closely to our sensory perception. And this becomes the basis of Hayek’s understanding of how the market works, as you were laying out: the reason you need the price system in the market is not because it’s telling the truth, but because it’s the best-available mediator between the totally inaccessible interior life of humans who are interacting with one another. You can never know how much that cup of coffee means to a person, except through the makeshift of what amount of money they will be willing to pay for it. And the great fallacy as he would see it would be that that would then mean, in some concrete way, that in your heart, an Americano is worth $3.50. Whereas actually you are just engaged in a shifting social game, where you were willing to shell that out at that moment. So taking that to its logical conclusion, you actually do become a critic of economism because you remain attuned to the limits of how much you can expect to learn from things like prices. And then, of course, the limits of how those things can be manipulated and rationally engineered in the form of planning.

Some of his students and people inspired by him who were working at George Mason University in the 1980s and ’90s got excited about how Hayek’s insights were resonating with trends in literary theory and deconstructive thought coming from continental Europe. They were interested in Gadamer’s hermeneutics and to a lesser extent Derrida, but especially Paul Ricoeur. They were interested in the idea that meaning in the reading of a text was not produced by the text itself, but by the reader, and that art and philosophy were as subjective as the economy was in some basic way. This was taken as an arch heresy by other intellectual descendants of Hayek.

Indeed, the turn to hard facts and hard science was part of the backlash to what I call the “cultural Austrians,” and an embrace very explicitly in the 1990s of race and IQ science. People like Murry Rothbard, who helped establish the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe [author of Democracy: The God That Failed], were livid about what they saw as the hijacking of the Austrian tradition by these culturalists, and were all the more set on finding other people who rejected Ivory Tower navel-gazing and instead took the fight to the leftists directly, culminating in collaborations with neo-confederates, white nationalists and open scientific racists. That story shows how, in part, this libertarian alt-right faction emerges out of a schism within the Austrian school of economics itself.

JD: Picking up on this last thread about what you’re calling cultural Austrians: the existence of Hayek’s bastards implies that Hayek has rightful heirs. Your title makes reference to a book by John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, which critiques how the original Enlightenment vision of reason as a bulwark against tyranny was corrupted and distorted, resulting in the modern rationalized bureaucracy that, for example, Adorno and Horkheimer also take as their target. Is there a hidden good in Hayek, or—maybe a slightly reduced claim—is there something to be learned from him?

QS: There is a case to be made for more legitimate heirs of Hayek than the ones I described. One criticism I’ve gotten from within the neoliberal community itself is that my villains in the story, so to speak, tend to be more like Ludwig von Mises’s children than Hayek’s. There are people—for example, Peter Boettke, who is the head of the Hayek Program of the Mercatus Center at George Mason, and was also president of the Mont Pelerin Society—who I have found to be quite open and interested in debate. There is still something bracing in the notion that the market is an information processor larger than any computer could ever be. In some ways, the left is still fighting what was called the socialist calculation debate in the 1920s. Having good-faith neoliberal opponents to debate latter-day proposals for market socialism could be constructive.

JD: The New Right is very fond of saying that twentieth-century conservatism only knows how to lose. This is the narrative about the deep state, cultural Marxism, the neoreactionary version of it is that “Cthulhu always swims left.” For them, mainstream conservatism is summed up in William F. Buckley’s famous aphorism that conservatism is “standing athwart history yelling, ‘Stop.’” But one consequence of your argument, as I understand it, is that neoliberalism, now in the form of new fusionism or the New Right, continues to enjoy a kind of ideological hegemony.

QS: Look at the way someone like Oskar Lange responded to the Hayekian challenge in the 1930s. This is long before what anyone could describe as neoliberal hegemony, and yet he took very seriously the Hayekian insight and felt obliged to respond to it in its own terms. And his idea, which remains one of the most prominent leftist proposals, is that we just need bigger computers. In other words, that you could simply substitute the market with another information processor given a certain computing capacity. The idea that cybernetic socialism or, somehow, AI could augment a more just socialist society trundles on in interesting ways, and it’s worth paying attention to because it is, in itself, I think, taking seriously the core challenge of neoliberal epistemology. At places like the Santa Fe Institute, for example, there’s a lot of interest in complex systems and neural nets as quasi-Hayekian entities—these are all, to me, ways that the more salvageable kernel of Hayekian thought is being played out without pulverizing it or reducing it to just a module on the grotesque golem of the culture wars.

The right-wing melancholia you describe is interesting because it is mirrored by a left-wing melancholia—an oscillating feeling that the tide of history is simply too strong, and every attempt at producing either freedom for the right or equality for the left is always thwarted by structural inertia or momentum. That’s why I found this 1990s moment so fascinating. It didn’t lapse into that same set of tropes for neoliberals. It did feel like a rupture and an interregnum in which they could realize new strategies and maybe even take up new hopes, but also be confronted with new challenges. Take the fear of someone like Charles Murray, who worried not that they hadn’t won, but that they actually might. He had a sense of dread about how bloody and potentially terminal the transition would be from an era of social welfarism to a properly dismantled post-welfare reality. That is an interesting diagnostic moment because it’s not so far from the one we’re in right now, where with both houses of government, the presidency and the Supreme Court, the right can no longer point to the institutional obstacles of the left that stand in their way, but are given the chance to ask themselves honestly: What is it that we want? And do we really want to end it all—

JD: They might realize their world, and they’re scared—

QS: Of the consequences, yes. As Charles Murray put it, citing Herbert Spencer, the only way to make an opium addict recover from their addiction is to remove their drugs, but the period of withdrawal is not always one that they survive. “Detox” is a metaphor used recently by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—a chilling way to think about the body politic. Yet that is what they face if victory is within reach.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore, “Elon Musk and Javier Milei at CPAC” (Flickr / CC-BY SA 2.0)