by Disha Karnad Jani
On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Quinn Slobodian about his latest book, Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right (Zone Books, 2025). Here, Slobodian looks to various figures like Murray Rothbard, Charles Murray, and Javier Milei—and their (mis)readings of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises—to reveal the entangled relationship between neoliberalism following the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the Far Right today.
Quinn Slobodian is Professor of International History at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His most recent books are Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023), Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South (2022), and Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018).
Disha Karnad Jani is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Training Group (RTG) “World Politics” at Universität Bielefeld. Her current book project is an intellectual history of the League Against Imperialism, 1927-1937. She is the co-host of In Theory, the podcast of the JHI Blog.