Quinn Slobodian
Quinn Slobodian
Quinn Slobodian
Quinn Slobodian has established himself as one of the most incisive intellectual historians of our moment, with a distinctive talent for excavating the ideological foundations of contemporary political movements. His work characteristically traces how twentieth-century economic thought has been weaponized in service of far-right politics, combining meticulous archival research with a writer’s gift for making abstract ideas viscerally present on the page. Slobodian’s scholarship moves fluidly between intellectual history, political economy, and cultural criticism, revealing the often-hidden genealogies that connect seemingly disparate figures and movements across decades.
His 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award–winning work, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, exemplifies this approach. The book traces a direct lineage from classical liberal economic thought through contemporary white nationalist ideology, demonstrating how the supposedly neutral language of free markets has been entangled with pseudoscientific racism and conspiracy theory. By following the career of a single intellectual tradition across the twentieth century and into the present, Slobodian unmasks the deeply political choices embedded in what often presents itself as apolitical economic science. The recognition from the National Book Critics Circle confirms what readers and scholars have increasingly recognized: that Slobodian’s work is essential for understanding how economic ideas become vectors for extremism and how the intellectual genealogies we ignore at our peril continue to shape political movements today.
