Hayek’s Bastards and the Rise of Neoliberalism

The Neoliberal turn of late capitalism [1] rules our world.  Quinn Slobodian has become the voice of our time in explaining how this has happened and why.  In Globalists The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2020), he described, among other things, how the Liberals of Central Europe who became Neoliberals were most interested in making the market safe from democracy.  Neoliberals are anything but anti-government.  They need active government to provide the unlevel playing field necessary to realize their ambitions.  The needs of the people or planet Earth are not considered particularly important in the Neoliberal world, where their rising tide sinks as many boats as it lifts, most boats being more akin to the rafts my childhood buddies and I constructed out of inner tubes and sheets of plywood than this vessel.  Globalists is intellectual history for the general reader that repays re-reading.

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023) followed Globalists.  Whether any current nation-state of the Global North is exactly a democracy is a matter of definition and considerable dispute, but the special economic zones dotting planet Earth described in Crack-Up Capitalism are incompatible with anything approaching democracy.  Milton Friedman would be pleased.  The current Masters of the Universe are pleased.  They will continue to accumulate billions in “net worth” and spend it how they choose, our world and our only home be damned, literally.

Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (2025) [2] completes a perfect triple axel in connecting the dots on how Neoliberals have made their world in which the rest of us live.  Perhaps Friedrich Hayek was less scientistic than his bastard intellectual offspring and he may have been the “softer” neoliberal.  The differences among Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises and the Cato Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution are not trivial, as is explained throughout Hayek’s Bastards.  But their collective outputs are congruent by virtually every measure.  Slobodian deals with the three “hards” of the Neoliberal fusionists: (1) hardwired human difference – genetic inheritance as destiny, (2) hard borders – mobile capital, captive people, and (3) hard money – gold for goldbugs with that fetish.  Here we will concentrate on the first, their misuse of the science of human variation in pursuance their goals.

Slobodian begins on a high note in which he described Charles Murray as a ‘longtime thinktanker and tireless advocate of a revived race science.”  The following is typical Murray, especially since publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1996), which he wrote with the Skinnerian Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein:

“For the last forty years, he said, “the battle cry of the left has  been ‘equality.’” Science would deal the death blow to this demand. “The explosive growth of genetic knowledge means that within a few years science will definitively demonstrate precisely how it is that women are different from men, blacks from whites, poor from rich, of for that matter, the ways in which the Dutch are different from Italians.

Basically, Murray believes, along with many of his conservative followers of every subgroup, that the facts of genetics will explain everything human and, most importantly, determine everything in society and political economy.  According to Murray et al. these “scientific” facts support the simple truth that people get what they deserve.  The intelligent (i.e., those with a high IQ) will get rich, and the stupid will get virtually nothing, which is also what they deserve.

The measurement of human intelligence has a long and mostly sordid history.  The Mismeasure of Man (Stephen Jay Gould, 1981; revised 1996) is a good place to begin.  Eugenics has been covered recently by Aubrey Clayton in Bernoulli’s Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science.  The Bell Curve is the subject of Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth, 1996.  A short history begins with Alfred Binet, who developed a test that would determine how French school children with different needs might be better educated; similar use of an IQ test would be appropriate to determine the extent of brain damage after accident or illness.  The Stanford-Binet and Wechsler Intelligence Scales were the eventual result of the development of IQ tests.  Intelligence Quotient (IQ) became a common metric in the United States under the influence of Lewis M. Terman, whose goal was to confirm that intelligence (as in factor g for general intelligence of Charles Spearman) was real and that it is inherited.  Even after Terman began to realize that his arguments for the innateness for human intelligence were weak he nevertheless wrote [quoted in Gould (1981), p. 191]:

After all, does not common observation teach us that, in the main, native qualities of intellect and character, rather than chance, determine the social class to which a family belongs?  From what is already known about heredity, should we not naturally expect to find the children of the well-to-do, cultured, and successful parents better endowed that the children who have been reared in slums and poverty?  An affirmative answer to the above question is suggested by nearly all the available scientific evidence (1917).

“Common observation, native qualities, intellect, character, and social class” are doing a lot of work in this passage.  “All the available scientific evidence” would have come from the labors of eugenicists, who were very persuasive a hundred years ago.  Included among their members was John Maynard Keynes, who had a deeper understanding of the issue.  But something remarkable happened to alter Terman’s view, and he was virtually silent about his previous views in his 1937 book on the Stanford-Binet revision, which include a few words of caution about heredity and intelligence.  As Gould put it:

Times had changed and intellectual fashions of jingoism and eugenics had been swamped in the morass of the Great Depression…all potential reasons for differences between groups are framed in environmental terms (in 1937).

Imagine that!  But it must have been a shock for Terman to see “well-to-do, cultured, and successful” fathers lined up at a soup kitchen through no fault of their own.  Chapter Two of Hayek’s Bastards is entitled “The Rock of Biology.”  It naturally begins with this quote from Murray Rothbard, about Patrick Buchanan’s presidential campaign in 1995, “This is a revolution of white Euro-males.”  Indeed.  Lewis M. Terman was a scientist of his time who nevertheless remained a scientist who paid attention to the evidence.  The scientistic protagonists of Hayek’s Bastards never got Terman’s 1937 memo.  But they were not looking for it, either.

Chapter Three is entitled “Ethno-Economy,” where heritable individual differences are naturally extended to “the Other” as a group.  The views of Hayek’s bastards can fairly be summed up in this passage about Peter Brimelow (NB: This is a link to an open-access article about Brimelow by Quinn Slobodian in Journal of American Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2024):

Brimelow used his perch at the Financial Post, Forbes, and Fortune, to mainstream the view that the immigration and reproduction of Brown and Black people was the new all-encompassing threat North America faced after the end of the Cold War. [3] In column after column, Brimelow built up a theory of nativism built on market logic, a mutation of conservative and libertarian thought we have come to call the alt-right: the dream of a zone in white skin.

The (lesser) native intelligence, reified as IQ, of these Brown and Black people, along with country people [4] and various additional categories of Other, became a “central category” for those in Brimelow’s wide circle of influence.  In Chapter Four, the term “neurocastes” (a word of the year) is introduced to describe how intelligence correlates with human worth in the objective market economy.  High-neurocaste people are intelligent and deserve the fruits of their natural endowment.  Members of the lower neurocastes fill up the world and provide necessary labor so that high-neurocaste people can think while living the good life.

In the minds of “race scientists” this was undoubtedly true.  And in the “race scientist” Richard Lynn, the incipient alt-right found the link between their scientism and the think tanks they needed.  A few years before The Bell Curve was published Lynn wrote to Herrnstein about his plan to rehabilitate eugenics:

It seems extraordinary that basically sound principles that we need to find ways to correct genetic deterioration should have become so widely accepted in the first four decades of the (twentieth) century and subsequently have become lost…One of our most important tasks is to convince the people of the significance of heritability of intelligence and criminality, and of race differences for the social problems confronting the US.  These Think Tanks have considerable influence on informed public opinion and on politicians far more than we in psychology do, and if some of them could be converted public understanding of these problems would be greatly advanced. [5]

In the words of Quinn Slobodian, IQ-centrism the perfect excrescence of “race science” in the post-industrial age:

It was built on mainstream concerns about the knowledge and information economy, national competitiveness, and analogies of human beings as information processors.  Thriving on the craze for standardized outcomes, rankings, benchmarks, and indicators, IQ-centrism offers a simple and powerful story about the world that naturalizes and hardens existing hierarchies, reinforces folk understandings of difference, and disempowers efforts of collective reform.  Perhaps most effectively, it does so with the elegance of a single number – IQ is a biologized credit score.

Still, one might wonder in 2025 how IQ as a biologized credit score [6] will be useful in the Age of Algorithmic Intelligence, which might well have the same effect on the employment and life chances of high-neurocaste individuals as did the Great Depression that made an impression on Lewis Terman ninety years ago.

The only problem with this “race science” is that it is not valid.  The “basically sound principles” of Richard Lynn were nothing more than “folk understandings of difference.”  Murray and Herrnstein constantly conflated genes with race, but in their own analysis in The Bell Curve racial status was based on self-identification rather than genetics.  So, which is it?  It has long been understood that genetic differences within so-called racial groups are greater than those between different groups; this has been confirmed by the recent science of the human genome.  Therefore, these differences cannot account for the conclusions of these latter-day eugenicists. [7]  The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (2021) by Kathryn Paige Harden is a recent restatement of the problem from the “gene’s perspective” using modern terminology.  Her update to the continuo of conservative thought is reviewed here, with responses by Harden and others here.  A large cup of coffee is recommended, but these links cover the relevant history well while giving voice to several common perspectives on the subject.

Yes, individuals are different, even including identical twins who may have different epigenetic markers (distinct labels attached to their DNA at different places with variable effects on gene expression) in their otherwise identical genomes.  But that is not the point.  Aside from superficial heritable traits, race is now and has always been a sociopolitical construct and nothing else.  This was recognized by the theologian, farmer, and revolutionary pastor Clarence Jordan (pronounced Jur-den) in the early-1940s when he established Koinonia Farm in the Southwest Georgia of Jimmy Carter.  Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields described the significance of race eighty years later in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2022), where biology has nothing to do with race beyond the standard, and mistaken, “folk understandings of difference.”

The question remains, “Why all this?”  A large part of the answer concerns the true objective of The Bell Curve:

The Bell Curve was never merely an academic undertaking.  It was a counterattack on what the authors saw as the corrosive doctrine of equality as sameness, a doctrine Murray later wrote had its political roots in the ‘legal triumphs of the civil rights movement and the rise of feminism.’

We can let the evils of civil rights and women’s rights just sit there for a moment before proceeding.  What most frightens (and that is the proper term) those to whom The Bell Curve provides their world view is their belief that any increase in moral, social, political, and economic equality will destroy their ideal society and lead inexorably to “equality as sameness.”  In their cramped vision, any increase in equality will lead to levelling.  And the key for them is that levelling is always down, never up.  This is a constant theme, sometimes stated outright, sometimes implied in conservative thought.  For example, in The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1985, orig. 1953), Russell Kirk in his discussion of Edmund Burke writes:

All values are not the same, nor are all impulses, nor all men.  A natural gradation teaches men to hold some sentiments dear and others cheap.  Levelling radicalism endeavors to put all emotions and sensations upon the same level of mediocrity, and so to erase the moral imagination which sets men apart from beasts.  “On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal of not the highest order.”  When Burke wrote of how “learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden under the hoofs of a swinish multitude”…(he)…was simply paraphrasing Matthew 7:6; and he meant what some eminent socialist critics are coming to dread, that the mass of men, shorn of proper intellectual leadership, “all the decent drapery of life torn rudely off,” will be indifferent, or perhaps hostile, to anything that is not flesh.

The identity of “some eminent socialist critics” remains unknown.  Most of The Conservative Mind reads like this, but there is the occasional clap of thunder through the steady drizzle.  Kirk would be surprised that working men and women are intelligent and have interests in the world around them.  So would the protagonists described in Hayek’s Bastards.  For the most part their jobs are not unskilled, and many can parse a box score as well as members of the Right and Left PMC can gloss Edmund Burke or Judith Butler.  The baseball box score and Professor Butler are equally recondite.  Kirk is now considered an early but minor conservative to the extent that anyone reads him, but the fear expressed by him still excites the conservative mind more than any single concern: The masses are dangerous and will swamp us, the true and necessary leaders of society, if we let them.

But it is important to remember that conservatives are not the only affinity group that thinks like this.  The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) is just as afraid of the levelling they sense will come when, not if, true moral, social, political, and economic equality is achieved and the cult of the expert fades.  Expertise will remain, however, and it will be found in the strangest places to Neoliberals of both the notional Right and Left as the world gets smaller in the coming inconvenient apocalypse.  Besides, they should have no fear.  Unless society totally collapses, admittedly a possibility, the rich will still be rich.

Finally, the approaches to science as a way of knowing among these conservatives provides an interesting contrast.  It is clear throughout the book that Hayek’s bastards believe our “economy” will and must grow in perpetuity.  Otherwise, capitalism, neoliberal and otherwise, cannot work for them.  The impacts of human activities on the ecosphere are generally not recognized as legitimate concerns in the Neoliberal worldview.  However, the hard science of limits in a closed material system says otherwise and has since the middle of the twentieth century.  Their “race science,” on the other hand has proven to them beyond doubt that social stratification placing them at the top of the heap is hardwired into the human genome now and forevermore.  No.  Actually, the “rock of biology” upon which they have built their castle in the clouds is as hard as talc and perhaps as pernicious as it is thought to be on the basis of some scientific evidence.

One last point: Hayek’s Bastards and other books from Zone Books are built as books should be, with cloth covers, strong binding, fine paper and ink, good printing, and agreeable proportions.  The craft still exists with Zone and a few other publishers!

Notes

[1] Both Neoliberalism and Late Capitalism (Ernest Mandel, 1975) can be technical terms.  The primary point here is that Neoliberalism is a development of recent, i.e., late capitalism, although Ernest Mandel’s book has relevance to our world fifty years later.  Anyway, the way things are going, we are perhaps very late in capitalism.  It does seem that “hundred-year catastrophes” occur every few years these days.

[2] The title Hayek’s Bastards is an homage to Voltaire’s Bastards by John Ralston Saul who wrote about the “tortuous history of reason and rationality in Western philosophy and politics.”

[3] In their search for meaning and relevance, sociopolitical affinity groups often “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”  This is in no way limited to the notional Right.  The notional Left, especially in the form of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), does the same thing.

[4] Rural people were a subject of Terman’s IQ studies in the early twentieth century.  That rural people have a lower IQ due to genetic inheritance would seem to give the lie to the entire project.  But maybe not.  Not long ago I read somewhere that to be a good farmer all you must do is punch a hole in the dirt and drop the seed in it.  Thus, in the mind of the certified intellect, farming requires nothing approaching the brain power of the “symbolic analyst” described by Robert Reich or the member of Richard Florida’s “creative class.”  Or the “high neurocaste” leader described in Hayek’s Bastards.

[5] Potential think tanks included Cato, Manhattan, and Pacific Research Institutes, the Hoover Institution, and the Institute for Humane Studies.  In reaction to his turn towards “race science” the Manhattan Institute sent Murray to the American Enterprise Institute, where he has retired as the F.A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies.

[6] This might seem strange to the younger members of the community, but not so long ago “credit score” was not the ubiquitous measure of the worth of a person.  And you never heard anyone brag about it.

[7] The literature of intelligence and race is littered with suspect studies done to prove a point.  For example, Sir Cyril Burt infamously compared the intelligence of twins separated at birth.  The heritability of intelligence in identical twins was shown in his publications to be identical in different populations of different sizes, with identical correlation coefficients to three decimal places.  This never happens in the real world.  At least two of his coauthors did not exist.  There is no evidence for research support that would have funded the complicated and expensive studies of multiple pairs of twins raised apart.  Besides, the family and socioeconomic environments of twins raised apart were very similar.  Still, even though it is undeniable he was just making stuff up, he still has his defenders.