Book Forum on Quinn Slobodian's Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

Abstract

In this forum, Valentina Ausserladscheider, Béla Greskovits, and Daniel Šitera discuss Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Zone Books, 2025), which examines the relationship between neoliberalism and the contemporary far right. Slobodian challenges the dominant view that right-wing populism represents a bottom-up revolt of globalization’s “losers” and instead argues that today’s far right emerged from within neoliberal thought itself. Through an intellectual genealogy, he traces how segments of neoliberalism evolved to incorporate racism, xenophobia, and male chauvinism as natural components of the market order, producing a far-right neoliberal vision of free markets fortified by borders and hierarchy. The contributors to this forum discuss both the book’s key insights and its limitations. While Ausserladscheider explores its conceptual implications for understanding the state and nationalism, Greskovits and Šitera test Slobodian’s argument against the post-socialist contexts of Hungary and Czechia. Slobodian concludes the forum with a polemical response to their critiques.

Keywords

capitalism, Europe, race, far right, neoliberalism

Author Biography

Quinn Slobodian

Quinn Slobodian teaches international history at Boston University. His books include Globalists, Crack-Up Capitalism, and Hayek’s Bastards. Forthcoming with Ben Tarnoff is Muskism. A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has also been a fellow at Chatham House, Harvard, and FU Berlin.

Valentina Ausserladscheider

Valentina Ausserladscheider is an assistant professor at the Department of Economic Sociology, University of Vienna. Before moving to Vienna, she completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on institutional change in times of crisis drawing on both economic sociology and political economy. Her work has been published in New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, Comparative European Politics, and the Sociology Compass. 

Béla Greskovits

Béla Greskovits, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus at the Department of International Relations of Central European University, Vienna and Budapest. His research interests are the political economy of East-Central European capitalism, social movements, and democratization. His articles appeared among others in Studies in Comparative and International Development, West European Politics, Journal of Democracy, European Journal of Sociology, East European Politics, European Journal of Public Policy, and Comparative Political Studies. His book Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, written together with Dorothee Bohle, and published by Cornell University Press, was awarded the 2013 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.

Daniel Šitera

Daniel Šitera works as an assistant professor at the Faculty of International Relations, Prague University of Economics and Business. He is also a researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague. His research interests include comparative and international political economy, Central and Eastern Europe, and the economic dimension of European integration. He has published, among others, in Critical Sociology, Journal of International Relations and Development, and Journal of Contemporary European Studies.