Interview by Kia Golsorkhi-AinsliePortrait by Bénédicte Roscot

KGA Most know Friedrich Hayek as an advocate of the free market, but Hayek’s Bastards instead focuses on the legacy of his writing on human differentiation.

QS Hayek won the Nobel Prize for work he published in the 1930s, and he published “The Use of Knowledge in Society” at the end of the Second World War. He then departed from economics and became more like a political philosopher with a promiscuous interest in social sciences and, eventually, natural sciences, as he tried to uncover the foundations for a market order. He became interested in the qualities of human nature that made markets possible, and he started to imagine that traits of frugality or industriousness were developed within collectives over a long period. So, for Hayek, by the 1980s, the focus was less on state design or market craft, and more on how to create conditions for long-term cultural evolution that would lead to fitter populations. He internalised this idea of evolution by which populations develop traits over long periods of time that could be emulated by other groups, and this became a critique of modernisation theory and international development efforts, and by the 1980s, a defence of, you could say, white Western society. He finds his way back to the ideas of people like Herbert Spencer, analogising human populations to animal populations and pushing against demands for social justice by appealing to the idea of human nature.

KGA Hayek’s Bastards examines intellectuals on a similar path. Why do you call them Hayek’s “bastards”?

QS Because although Hayek opens the door to cultural evolution, he resists the idea that certain forms of behaviour are the sole property of a genetically defined community. By the 1990s, some of the libertarians I describe in Hayek’s Bastards are making that jump to genetics. They fell prey to what Hayek warned about, which was imagining that science offers a basis on which we can build social order. Hayek thought that we should be informed by science, but shouldn’t build philosophy on top of it. People like Charles Murray and Murray Rothbard eventually try to construct their philosophy on the unquestionable basis of scientific claims.

KGA How did Charles Murray become co-author of The Bell Curve (1994)?

QS According to Murray’s early work, the problem with the welfare state was that it rewarded people for pleasurable things, like having sex and switching partners. So you needed to reintroduce negative repercussions for socially destructive behaviour. Then, in the late 1980s, he became friends with Richard Herrnstein, who introduced him to psychologists and sociologists making different arguments. Rather than questioning incentives, they argued that humans are different, so there is a hierarchy of capacity that’s innate, and can’t be improved. So social programmes should be built with human inequality in mind. The move was canny of Murray as a political entrepreneur, because the 1990s were a hinge moment when the language of human nature was shifting away from a constructivist mode associated with Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.

KGA Neoliberalism is often associated with globalisation and even the free movement of labour, but some intellectuals married libertarianism with advocacy for hard borders.

QS I see neoliberalism as an ongoing project to save capitalism from democracy, and capitalism has different opponents, and can accommodate different solutions, at different times. An openness to free movement of labour sometimes made sense for business elites and neoliberal intellectuals, and looked like a threat at other times. In the 1980s the Wall Street Journal supported free movement of people, because there was a belief in the self-ordering qualities of the market and the ability of the US economy to soak up reserve armies of labour, even while neoliberal intellectuals were warning about the possibility of welfare parasitism and lower quality labourers overrunning the efficient economy of the United States. There was conflict within the libertarian and neoliberal worlds, where some people advocated for relatively open borders and others argued for “designer” immigration, introducing a points-based system based on skilled labourers, and not allowing for so-called chain migration and family reunification. A third group hardened the idea of human qualities into a more or less stable hierarchy, mapping them onto IQ, which suggested not just a filter based on skill, but a filter based on ethnic identity.

KGA You pay attention to 1990s US politics – in an era when communism in Eastern Europe vanishes, and the Democrats in America shift to the right, there’s nonetheless a ferment of apocalyptic right-wing thinking.

QS It was a time of anxiety and excitement, when the dissolution of the “evil empire” inspired some libertarians and paleo-conservatives to think that something similar could happen in the US. American libertarians and hard-right conservatives had been at war with the New Deal and Civil Rights and, before that, the idea of the administrative state altogether, following the introduction of income tax. The search for the culprits of this domestic tyranny is a through line from the Red Scare to hysteria about the Black Panthers or Weather Underground. By the 1990s, the enemy became anti-racism, feminism, gay rights and rising environmentalism. In the mind of the right, including libertarians like Murray Rothbard, the left had won this Gramscian meta-political victory in which they had gone from campus protest into the civil service and universities, consolidating a monopoly over all cultural institutions.  The challenge for the right was how to defeat this enemy, and that might mean partnering with neo-Confederates, or candidates like Pat Buchanan in 1992, who was not very neoliberal, but who could act as the locomotive for their goals of breaking the leftist control of civil society and dismantling the tax-collecting administrative state. Seeing the Stasi’s offices looted by activists in East Berlin was a sign to them that populism could be a force against the state, rather than something to be feared. The big switch in the neoliberal genealogy that I describe in the book is the move from Hayek’s idea of enlightened elites working with policy makers to constrain the demands of democratic masses, to the Rothbard idea of enlisting the masses to overthrow the socialist elites who are keeping America and other countries in chains. That reversal makes me reach for the term “bastard”. .