Hayek's Bastards

Hayek’s Bastards demonstrates how a history of ideas can be riveting. Slobodian grounds intellectual abstractions in the lives of the people who espoused them... His book offers an illuminating history to our current bewildering moment, as right-wing populists join forces with billionaire oligarchs to take a chain saw to the foundations of public life, until there’s nothing left to stand on'' - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times A revelatory exploration of how today’s rightwing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within it After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated – and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek’s disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of