The Neoliberals Read Slobodian

Welcome to #2 of So You Don’t Have to, a regular series in which I read and analyse the gumpf neoliberal intellectuals and culture warriors publish. Today: the London neoliberals read Quinn Slobodian’s latest book, Hayek’s Bastards.

Another day, another Institute of Economic Affairs podcast. This time, the London neoliberals review Quinn Slobodian’s latest book, Hayek’s Bastards.

For the uninitiated, Hayek’s Bastards argues that the recent resurgence of far-right politics across much of the ‘Western’ world should be understood less as a ‘populist backlash’ against some four decades of neoliberal rule than as what Slobodian calls a ‘frontlash’ that came out of the neoliberal movement itself. He points out that some of the ideas, individuals, and organisations that have been key to the mainstreaming of far-right ideas have come out of the neoliberal movement. This, Slobodian argues, matters: It shows that there is continuity of personnel, networks, and ideas between the neoliberal era and the present. Importantly, Slobodian’s claim isn’t that nothing has changed, or that neoliberal intellectuals are still as influential as they always were. Instead, it’s that we’re dealing with a ‘mutant’ form of neoliberalism that, in important respects, grew out of the neoliberal project, even if in other, likewise important respects, it’s violated some of the shibboleths of high neoliberalism. Hence the book’s title: These are less Hayek’s true heirs than his illegitimate offspring.

Rubbish, says Christopher Snowdon, the IEA’s Head of Lifestyle Economics. He submits that Hayek’s Bastards rests on bad scholarship that has worked backwards from its conclusions. It has ‘cherry-picked’ its evidence to find what it set out to find: Namely that neoliberalism is to blame for the far right. What’s more, the figures to which Slobodian attributes so much weight are in fact nothing more than marginal figures within the movement whose ideas have no real relation to neoliberalism. I think it’s worthwhile to unpack both of these arguments a little further.

The Cherry-Picking Charge

Snowdon accuses Slobodian of retrofitting the evidence to support the conclusions he wanted to reach. His example is that Slobodian’s discussion of Ludwig von Mises doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

It’s crazy to accuse Mises of racism, in Snowdon’s view, because, in his words, ‘Mises was incredibly not racist for somebody from Austria in the 1940s.’ Mises was in favour of open borders and rejected Nazism and Nazi race theory. Thus, Snowdon argues, the only way Slobodian can sustain the claim that Mises held questionable views on race is to ‘cherry-pick’ his quotes and lift them out of context.

There are two issues here. Firstly, Slobodian is careful not to accuse Mises of racism. He says, correctly, that Mises’s work assigned the concept of race a prominent place in his broader philosophy and, in so doing, created discursive space for future thinkers to draw on his ideas to develop a racially configured liberal philosophy. For Snowdon to suggest that Slobodian accuses him of racism is, therefore, dishonest.

Second, Snowdon offers no evidence to contradict Slobodian’s argument. He simply asserts that Mises was not a racial thinker. (In fairness, in the written version of his review he does offer a quote, though it doesn’t prove the point he thinks it proves.) That Mises spoke recurrently, systematically, and often in highly questionable terms about race is a matter of historical fact that many scholars, including Slobodian, Jessica Whyte, Julia Elyachar, and, as it happens, I myself, have documented in peer-reviewed research. But don’t take critics’ word for it: One of the most systematic discussions of Mises’s views on race has come from Jeffrey A. Tucker and Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., key figures in the aptly named Ludwig von Mises Institute (a key player in Slobodian’s story), in a 1991 paper published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

Clearly, then, there is something approaching consensus that for the entirety of his career, Mises believed that race, understood as innate genetic inheritance based on ancestral group belonging, was an important causal factor in determining such traits as intelligence, entrepreneurial drive, and, thus, the capacity for cultural development. He did reject the notion that normative hierarchies could be adduced from these differences. But race did matter, to his mind, and it mattered a lot. Indeed, Mises’s critique of Nazism was emphatically not that it encompassed a race theory but that its race theory was crass and unscientific. His objection was that this served to corrupt race theory, a branch of science he defended for most of his life. (This view was shared by plenty of other prominent neoliberals, including Alexander Rüstow and Wilhelm Röpke, Louis Rougier, and Mises’s erstwhile student, Stefan Possony.)

Snowdon glosses over all of this evidence without supplying any of his own. That would seem to me to qualify as ‘cherry-picking.’

The Obscurity Charge

Snowdon opens the interview with a peculiar admission: Slobodian ‘has read vastly more about the world of free market think tanks than I ever have.’ This is admirable, he finds, but it also leads Slobodian to attribute more weight to certain figures than they really merit.

Slobodian indeed illustrates his argument with examples. He foregrounds the careers and ideas of figures like Charles Murray, Peter Brimelow, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, each of whom he presents as a kind of bridging figure linking the neoliberal movement to the far right. This is sound historical practice, insofar as it allows him to follow specific ideas as they move through different spaces and contexts and, in that way, establish intellectual continuity.

The issue Snowdon has with this argument is that, in his view, these figures are marginal to the neoliberal tradition. ‘I'd never heard of them for the most part,’ he admits. They may well have held unsavoury views, but these are ‘people who, from what I can tell, are or were wrong-uns, and wouldn't be welcome at the IEA.’

Snowdon is simply wrong here, as I suspect he knows. Charles Murray was a frequent guest at and author for the IEA, even after he published The Bell Curve in 1994. The late Richard Lynn, arguably the 21^st century’s most prolific and well-known eugenicist, worked with the IEA for many decades, a relationship Slobodian’s book documents in painstaking detail. (See also recent work by Benjamin Thomas.) During this period, Lynn was already active in the eugenics movement and even convinced Ralph Harris, his friend and then the IEA’s Director, to join the British Eugenics Society. So, not only did the IEA welcome Lynn with open arms, but there is simply no chance its directorate didn’t know about his eugenicist leanings. It's not surprising Snowdon doesn’t mention Lynn or Harris in his review, because on this score Slobodian’s evidence is absolutely damning for the IEA.

More generally, Snowdon’s charge of obscurity doesn’t stick. Slobodian’s argument isn’t that Hoppe, Murray, Lynn, or any of the other ‘wrong-uns’ are in a strict sense of the word neoliberals. He’s saying that the neoliberal movement has long been perfectly content to work with them and that they, for their part, wove key neoliberal ideas into their own work. This is, simply, true. Even if they were obscure within the neoliberal movement, which, to be sure, remains debatable (Murray certainly isn’t), this doesn’t contradict Slobodian’s main contention.

Neoliberalism Fractured

In the final analysis, Snowdon’s is a knee-jerk reflex calculated to protect the neoliberal project and some of its most precious philosophers from what he perceives to be a smear campaign. He joins a rich tradition of neoliberals who adopt this defensive mode in the face of critique. (Slobodian is used to it.)

My own interpretation is that the resurgence of far-right political formations is causing fractures within the neoliberalism movement. As I’ve argued in a recent review essay, today’s neoliberals are split on how to interpret the far-right politics of figures like Donald Trump. Some see Trumpism as a fundamental rejection of neoliberal principles, and this would include Snowdon (and most other IEA neoliberals, as I’ve discussed previously). Others, however, have effectively joined the Trump project and are supplying it with ideological cover or intellectual justification. What I find striking about the former is their inability (or unwillingness) to entertain the thought that neoliberalism has helped spawn today’s far right in more ways than one.

This is more than mere disavowal: It’s part of a deeper dialectic, one which has long characterised not only neoliberal ideology but the tradition of liberal thought within which it’s nested. This dialectic rests on a division of labour within the ideology between conservative voices, whose role it is to forge coalitions on the (far) right, and more moderate ones, whose disavowal of these coalitions permits them to portray their own vision as the more moderate alternative. This dialectic allows the ideology to at once shift the broader ideological terrain rightward while continuing to insist on its relevance to the politics of the moment.