"The output of new fusionism was and continues to be virulently, nauseatingly racist. One prominent figure in the movement gleefully recalled watching a peer tell “a black intellectual that his race’s problems might be caused by an hereditary IQ deficiency.” Another, Richard J. Herrnstein, a co-author of the notorious “The Bell Curve,” wrote in a letter to a friend: “It continually amazes me that even biologists deny having eugenic sentiments, as if they were shameful.”

The end goal of such a noxious politics was to enshrine racial and gendered inequalities as inevitable, to outsource the difficult work of democratic dispute to pseudoscientists, and to appeal to the ostensible authority of biology to quash dissent. (Never mind that virtually all credible biologists rejected its assertions.) It was a political movement that aspired to eliminate politics altogether, replacing disagreement in the public sphere with the fatalism of genetics.

“Hayek’s Bastards” can be dense — a risk for any serious work of intellectual history — but it can also be entertaining. Slobodian’s wry commentary offers welcome respite from both the difficulty and the moral odiousness of his subject: He describes a neoliberal economist’s choice to live in an artists loft as “off-brand” and decries the “punitive neo-Victorian tone” of new fusionist books with titles like “The Loss of Virtue.”"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/04/04/hayeks-bastards-quinn-slobodian-review/