Quinn Slobodian
Quinn Slobodian has established himself as one of the most incisive contemporary historians of economic thought and its darker political entanglements. His work consistently excavates the hidden genealogies connecting intellectual movements to far-right ideology, exposing how seemingly abstract economic theories become weaponized in service of racial and nationalist projects. Slobodian writes with the precision of a scholar and the urgency of someone convinced that understanding these connections matters profoundly for our political present.
His 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award win for Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right represents recognition of his distinctive method: tracing how libertarian and free-market philosophies have been adopted and distorted by white nationalist movements, revealing uncomfortable truths about the ideological family tree of contemporary far-right politics. The book exemplifies Slobodian’s refusal to treat economic history as separate from the history of race, class, and political extremism. Instead, he demonstrates how thinkers positioned as defenders of individual liberty have often provided intellectual cover for hierarchical and exclusionary visions of society.
This award placement among the year’s most significant critical works signals the growing importance of intellectual history that doesn’t compartmentalize its subjects—that insists we look unflinchingly at how respectable economic theories circulate through less respectable political movements, and how ideas about markets, money, and human worth become entangled with ideas about racial difference and national belonging.
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Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right