Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right

A revelatory exploration of how today’s right-wing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within itBracingly original...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 TimesAfter 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 social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism