Hayek’s Bastards: Misusing Liberalism For Anti-Liberal Development

In a recent piece for Liberal Currents, Gary T. Gunnels reviews Quinn Slobodian’s provocative new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (2025).
The article, titled “The Bastards of Mont Pèlerin,” offers a disturbing yet timely reflection on how elements of liberal economic thought—especially those stemming from Friedrich Hayek—have been distorted by far-right actors to promote inequality, exclusion, and even racism or culturalism.

Slobodian argues that certain thinkers—Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Charles Murray, Peter Brimelow—have hijacked the rhetoric of spontaneous order and free markets to promote a deeply illiberal agenda grounded in racial determinism, IQ-based hierarchies, closed borders, and fetishization of hard money. Through institutions like the Mises Institute, these ideas have gained visibility and influence.

What Slobodian shows—primarily through his critique of the so-called “savanna story” used to naturalize cultural superiority—is how ideas rooted in 19th-century colonial thinking have infiltrated right-wing versions of neoliberalism. Yet the most profound danger is not that Hayek is being misread, but that many libertarians and free-marketeers have failed to guard their intellectual boundaries.

Despite such behaviours and ambitions, there is no philosophical or ethical continuity between liberalism and far-right nationalism. To believe in freedoms, human rights, and individual dignity is to believe in equality before the law, openness both locally and globally, and the capacity of diverse individuals to flourish through interhuman cooperation.

When you tolerate racists at your conferences or publish pseudoscientific screeds in your journals, you’re not defending liberty—you’re betraying it. The idea of a “free market” that operates only within one culture, one ethnicity, or one nation is not liberalism—it is apartheid style politics. It even undermines everything Hayek himself stood for when he emphasized universality, decentralization, and globalism.

If more humans around the world truly believe in the transformative potential of markets, we must expand our understanding beyond the narrow frame of national economies. The future of economics is not gated, monocultural capitalism—it is decentralized, green, and global.
Liberalism must evolve from the ideology of 20th-century nation-states to a 21st-century ecosystem of local and global cooperation. This means empowering human beings across borders to co-create value through open-source tools, peer-to-peer networks, and crypto-enabled communities.

Cryptocurrencies and decentralized platforms are not just financial innovations; they represent a social, economic, and philosophical change. They enable individuals from vastly different backgrounds to transact, organize, and build systems of mutual trust without requiring centralized control or nationalistic or ethnocentric hierarchies. The logic of the liberal market must be one of inclusion through access, agency through decentralization, and sustainability through cooperation.

The real successors to Hayek’s thought are not racial determinists who cling to gold standards and gated communities, but communities and developers building regenerative economies, digital commons, and governance protocols that empower people on the margins—from local farmers to migrant gig workers. Let the future of the world be built through open, green, and globally networked communities where freedom is inseparable from solidarity.

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