Quinn Slobodian Bastardizes Hayek and Mises
A historian tries to tie two classical liberal economists to the racialist right, and scrambles their words in the process.
Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian, Zone Books, 272 pages, $29.95
Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, has convinced himself that Trumpism traces its intellectual origins to the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. He first postulated his Austrianism-to-Trumpism thesis in a pair of academic articles in 2019, which claimed that Hayek's work contained a subtle streak of biological determinism that made them attractive to various eugenicists and IQ-obsessed cranks on the far right. He made even more direct claims about Mises, who allegedly left a "parenthetical opening to the possibility of race theory" that modern race theorists then "drove the proverbial truck through" until arriving at their present Trumpian destination.
Hayek's Bastards is a book-length expansion of these arguments, characterizing today's populist right as the product of a "new fusionism" between the "three hards": genetically hardwired human nature (often predicated in racial determinism), the hard borders of immigration restrictionism, and hard money. While each of these elements certainly hovers around the far right today, Slobodian's attempts to situate the first two in the works of Hayek and Mises suffers from a lack of clear evidence for the parentage.
Undeterred, Slobodian supplies the links by making them up.
When the 2019 articles first appeared, several readers—myself included—noticed that Slobodian made a habit of selectively editing quotations from Mises's works to create the impression of that "parenthetical opening" to racial bigotry, when in fact Mises was arguing the opposite. This pattern continues in his new book.
In a characteristic example, Slobodian charges Mises with "repeatedly express[ing] cautious optimism for a potential science of race" even though the economist actually condemned the eugenic theories of the time. To support this claim, he quotes a passage from Mises' 1944 book Omnipotent Government, implying that it encompasses the economist's own views: "There are few white men who would not shudder at the picture of many millions of black or yellow people living in their own countries." Slobodian omits Mises's next sentence, which would make it clear that he was describing the racial prejudices of others: Mises lamented that the "elaboration of a system making for harmonious coexistence and peaceful economic and political coöperation among the various races is a task to be accomplished by coming generations."
Slobodian accuses Mises of "grant[ing] even more ground to race science" in his 1940 book Nationalökonomie. He then presents a string of quotations that leave the reader with the impression that Mises hoped to rehabilitate the study of racial heredity after its discrediting at the hands of the Nazi regime. The original text reveals a different picture.
In the omitted portions of the passage, Mises condemns those failed attempts to link human capacity for understanding (or Verstehen in German) with ethnic and racial heredity. In place of Mises's actual context, Slobodian splices in a separate and later quote about Nazi race theory, thereby altering the passage's meaning to better fit his own thesis:
| Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards | Mises, Nationalökonomie |
| [Mises] wrote that "we may take as given that the racial element plays a role among the factors that form the personality and, with it, our values and understanding." What he objected to was not the possible truth content of race theory but its misuse. "In the doctrine of National Socialism and its derivative teachings in Italian fascism," he wrote, "there is an unbridgeable gap between the statements of the founders of racial biology and their application to propaganda and use for practical policies." The fascist politicization of race theory should not discredit it permanently. "Because the keywords of race theory are used to justify measures with which it has nothing to do," he wrote, "does not free scientific thought from the responsibility to think through to the end the problem of human races (Menschenrassen) in its praxeological significance." | "We may take as given that the racial element plays a role among the factors that form the personality and, with it, our values and understanding, i.e., everything with which a man is born, his physical endowment, the hereditary qualities derived from his ancestors. But in the present state of our knowledge, we know nothing about the connection between the physical and the mind, and therefore cannot make any statement as to whether and in what way the physical is capable of influencing Verstehen. Some have attempted to assign certain value judgments (types of Verstehen, Verstehen types) to specific peoples; these attempts failed because it is easy to prove that every attempt to group people according to types of Verstehen thwarts the classification according to ethnicity." |
Slobodian attempts to construct a parallel link between Hayek and heredity pseudoscience through what Slobodian calls the "savanna story": a metaphor for humanity's transition from a collective society of tribal solidarity to an individualistic and competitive order after the introduction of trade and commerce. In Slobodian's depiction, "the message of the savanna stories that neoliberals told was that the tribe will never go away," allegedly imprinting the stamp of racial heredity upon human nature. Yet this "savanna story" does not actually appear in any of the passages from Hayek that Slobodian references. Instead, the author coins the metaphor himself after reading an unrelated speech by the political scientist Charles Murray that never references Hayek.
There's a distinctive decoder-ring style to Slobodian's historical methodology. He offers little direct evidence that modern race theorists cite, or are even aware of, the alleged "parenthetical openings" to race theory in Mises or the imagined "savanna story" in Hayek. Slobodian has extracted these links through textual divinations that only appear in works by Quinn Slobodian.
Elsewhere, Slobodian's historical interpretations are simply mistaken assessments of the evidence. The key to his case is Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a self-described "anarcho-capitalist" who became a late-life acquaintance of Mises' American student Murray Rothbard. Hoppe's career crescendoed while Rothbard was pursuing a misguided political alliance with Pat Buchanan's right-wing populist movement, and Hoppe continues to have adherents on the far right today. Yet few academic economists take him seriously, and he may be better known among Austrians for having gotten himself disinvited from the Mont Pelerin Society (another recurring fixation of Slobodian's ire) in the late 1990s.
Slobodian is correct to place Hoppe in the "new fusionist" camp today. Hoppe's works contain overt appeals to eugenicists such as J. Philippe Rushton and even to Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, a racist dystopian novel in which the West is overrun with ships full of dark-skinned migrants. In one 1996 essay, which Slobodian does not cite, Hoppe espoused the right of towns to post signs excluding "Moslems, Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Chinese, Mexicans, etc….and to kick out those who do not fulfill these requirements as trespassers." And yet in his singular quest to link these noxious beliefs to Austrian economics, Slobodian misses Hoppe's explicit divergence from Mises on these same questions.
In his book Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe disavowed Mises' "classical" endorsement of unrestricted immigration, labeling it a "highly unrealistic—long bygone—situation in human history." Apparently unaware of this rift, Slobodian interprets Hoppe as a purist Misesian pushing back against the "hermeneutic" Austrians of the late 1980s: a group centered around the economist Don Lavoie, who synthesized the Austrian theory of subjective value with elements of continental philosophy. Hoppe is better understood as a competitor claimant to the same continental tradition: He was trained in Frankfurt School Critical Theory under Jürgen Habermas, and he attempted his own synthesis of its methods into Austrian economics. Indeed, Hoppe's two main scholarly works at the time directly evinced his pursuit of an Austro–critical theory synthesis: an attempt to "correct" and splice Karl Marx's historical materialism with Austrian subjective value theory, and an application of Habermas' "discourse ethics" framework to the institution of property rights, rebranded as "argumentation ethics."
Hoppe's descent into racial heredity theory comes not from Mises or Hayek but from a blend between his Frankfurt School philosophical training and the extreme immigration-restrictionist worldview of the journalist Peter Brimelow. In his quest to coax an exclusively Austrian genealogy for the modern far right, Slobodian has conflated the parents with other distinct camps on the racialist far right and missed an entire branch of the family tree that intersects with the academic left.
And therein lies the major interpretive problem with this book: Its author is blind to any evidence that confounds his story. The resulting narrative arrives with a spectacular crash in the concluding chapter. Here, Slobodian tries to link Trump, the "national conservative" movement, alt-right figures such as Paul Gottfried and Curtis Yarvin, the tech-libertarian blogosphere, the COVID-era Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), the public backlash against left-wing Modern Monetary Theory arguments during the 2022 inflationary crisis, and above all Argentina's libertarian-leaning president Javier Milei. In his own words, "our genealogies of [neoliberal] ideas are X-rays that leave little doubt" to its malicious intentions.
This attempted grouping is fraught with internal contradictions. It completely overlooks the war that erupted between pro-lockdown tech-libertarians and the anti-lockdown GBD. It shows no awareness that Yarvin explicitly rejects Mises and Hayek in favor of the anti-capitalist ramblings of the 19th century philosopher Thomas Carlyle. It ignores Milei's recent denunciation of Hoppe as an "economic idiot" and Hoppe's bromides against the Argentinian president. It is oblivious to the gaping chasm between the laissez faire Austrian school and the Trump administration's economic agenda of tariffs, industrial policy, and immigration restrictions. And it haplessly lumps national conservatism under the "neoliberal" label even as leading NatCon spokespersons blame neoliberalism for their economic grievances. Many on the "postliberal" far right today have more in common with Slobodian's own economic ideology than that of Mises or Hayek.
A more careful assessment of these subjects may yet decipher the political emergence of Trumpism and unsavory adjacent movements. But that will require more fidelity to the evidence—and a willingness to look beyond the author's decoder ring.
