Hayek's Bastards
I’d read Crack Up Capitalism earlier in 2025 and felt like returning to Quinn’s books.
This book confirms his role for me as an excellent chronicler of the rise of the populist right globally. He achieves this by a much closer reading than I feel I get anywhere else. Someone who takes their conferences, books, speeches and networks of personal relationships seriously.
Perhaps most helpfully he paints a picture of how they see the world on their own terms. Given the growing role of these movements, the moment to ignore or casually characterise these movements now seems folly. To understand them and what they want, key.
Crack Up Capitalism traced the movements desire to break the world into smaller and smaller zones of sovereignty where exceptional orders can be tested. Here we’re looking at a genealogy. Where did they come from? Who paved the way?
The answer is unexpected for me, I would have placed the populist right of the US Tea Party as a kind of revolt against the existing right. In Hayek’s Bastards places them as more radical offspring. Emerging from within a claim to Hayek’s legacy but ditching the parts of the argument that held to liberal constitutionality.
Instead this generation looked to insulate markets from democracy altogether, solve the problem of voters and seek an economy shielded from popular sovereignty.
I came away seeing the movement not as an oppositional revolt, so much as a more radical strand of the same thought. One happy to both clad itself in the legitimacy of its intellectual forefathers whilst picking the bits they liked and wholesale dumping the rest.
After "Hayek's Bastards" I read: Capitalist Realism
Before "Hayek's Bastards" I read: Slow Horses