Prominent Historian Misrepresents Mises

Academic works on “neoliberalism” almost invariably share three characteristics. First, they portray neoliberalism as the dominant paradigm of the global economy since the mid-twentieth century. Second, they treat that development as harmful, attributing a long list of social ills to its rise. Third, they rarely explain what “neoliberalism” actually means. Nevertheless, the term has become one of academia’s favorite buzzwords, generating tens of thousands of books and journal articles purporting to document its corrosive effects on society.

Boston University Professor of International History Quinn Slobodian ranks among the most visible figures in this burgeoning genre of “neoliberalism studies.” His 2025 book Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He holds various elite academic honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, visiting stints at Harvard and Brown, and six-figure grants from a Hewlett Foundation program, which funds research opposing neoliberalism. All evince a strong adversarial stance toward the subject of his research.

Hayek’s Bastards has gained high cachet on the political Left, as it purports to uncover a “neoliberal” origin of MAGA populism, especially its far-right underbelly of race theorist and conspiracist types. As his title suggests, Slobodian portrays these elements as intellectual offspring born out-of-wedlock from the free-market-oriented Austrian School of Economics, particularly its two great twentieth-century expositors: Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

The central claim of Slobodian’s thesis is that, while Mises and Hayek were not racists themselves, they left a “parenthetical opening” to racial pseudoscience in their writings, which later bigots and cranks exploited. These ideological descendants, he argues, include figures associated with the “Alt-Right,” such as Curtis Yarvin and Richard Spencer, who have shaped political discourse through white identity politics and movements like the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. According to Slobodian, their worldview is fundamentally an outgrowth of neoliberalism, albeit a distorted one. As Hayek’s Bastards puts it, they are “less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it.” Slobodian casts himself as the physician providing the genealogical “X-rays” needed to expose the neoliberal project’s deeper intentions.

There’s a problem with Slobodian’s argument, though. He constructs his case for the “parenthetical opening” through chronic misrepresentations of the Austrian economists that he places at the top of his neoliberal family tree.

Slobodian’s research overlaps with my own historical interest in Mises, and to its credit, his earlier works such as his 2018 book Globalists explored a neglected chapter of the economist’s life: the period he spent in Switzerland after fleeing the Nazi regime in his native Austria. Yet, like much of the “neoliberalism studies” genre, Slobodian approached the subject from a position of pronounced hostility. Even mundane episodes in the history of the Austrian School were recounted with not only disdain for its ideas but also a heavy dose of innuendo about the motives of its leading figures. Despite his precarious position as an exiled Jew and refugee from near-certain imprisonment, Mises’s voluminous writings against the Nazi regime weighed little on Slobodian’s interpretation of his works in this period. Indeed, Slobodian made the sneering suggestion that the Austrian economists only turned against fascism after it imperiled free markets and free trade.

Slobodian began to lay the groundwork for Hayek’s Bastards shortly after Globalists in a series of working papers and shorter articles. By 2019, he had fully formed his thesis about a posited “parenthetical opening” to the scientific racism of the Alt-Right in an academic article for Cultural Politics. In a second article, published in Contemporary European History, he supplied the supposed evidence of Mises’s parentage by mining the economist’s writings.

Whereas prior scholarly treatments interpreted Mises as a pro-immigration, anti-colonialist classical liberal living in an era and region plagued by a race-based authoritarian nationalism, in Slobodian’s Contemporary European History essay, he assembled quotations that appeared to defend the utility of European imperialism as a mechanism for extracting wealth from the Southern Hemisphere. He further suggested that Mises’s critiques of Nazi race theory reflected a bounded form of liberalism—one that affirmed the equality of non-Germanic white Europeans, including Jews such as himself, while excluding other racial groups from its moral and political framework.

Slobodian’s provocative argument purported to explain a long-observed tension on parts of the political Right, where professed followers of Mises’s economic libertarianism nonetheless rejected his support for more open immigration and the cosmopolitan dimensions of his geopolitical outlook. In Slobodian’s telling, Mises himself was a less consistent adherent of those positions than commonly assumed. Though he never explicitly embraced the opposing view, Slobodian argues that he left enough room for his ideological “bastard” offspring to cultivate explicitly racial doctrines within a broadly “neoliberal” economic framework.

Intrigued, and taken aback, by these unfamiliar arguments, I decided to examine Slobodian’s evidence more closely. My worst suspicions were quickly confirmed. Slobodian had not, in fact, uncovered the much-touted “parenthetical openings” to racism and colonialism in Mises’s writings. Instead, I found a pattern of contextomy: selectively edited quotations in which phrases were clipped from sentences and adjoining passages omitted, all to shoehorn Mises’s interwar-era words into Slobodian’s own twenty-first-century political interpretations.

A revealing example appears below. Slobodian quotes a passage from Mises that seems to rationalize the violent history of European colonialism by appealing to its net economic benefits. In reality, he simply omits the second half of the sentence, where Mises explicitly disavows the very position that Slobodian uses the first half to attribute to him.

In his Contemporary European History essay, titled “Perfect Capitalism, Imperfect Humans: Race, Migration and the Limits of Ludwig von Mises’s Globalism,” Slobodian wrote (underlining added):

When necessary, the opening of world markets had to be achieved through violence. Though ‘one can think only with shudders and anger of the fearful mass murders that prepared the basis for many of the colonial settlements flourishing today’, [Mises] wrote in a book published the year after the First World War, the net gain made it worthwhile; in the end, ‘all other pages of world history were also written in blood.’ Violence in the project of expanding the space of foreign investment, wage labour and commercial exchange was not only acceptable, it was necessary.

In Nation, State, and Economy, Mises wrote (underlining added):

It is true that those colonies were not taken with smooth talk, and one can think only with shudders and anger of the fearful mass murders that prepared the basis for many of the colonial settlements flourishing today. But all other pages of world history were also written in blood, and nothing is more stupid than efforts to justify today’s imperialism, with all of its brutalities, by reference to atrocities of generations long since gone.

In another example, Slobodian accuses Mises of drawing a distinction between persecuted white European minorities and nonwhite racial groups. Yet a review of the full paragraph reveals that he simply misrepresented its argument. Mises was describing Nazi efforts to identify purportedly “Jewish” ancestry among other white Europeans through facial features and bodily characteristics. Slobodian then spliced this discussion into an unrelated passage about differences in black and white skin color. Contrary to his claim, the second quotation appears nowhere near the argument to which he attributes it.

In “Perfect Capitalism, Imperfect Humans,” Slobodian wrote (underlining added):

Yet Mises proved incapable of extending a similar cosmopolitan attitude to populations of colour. Even as he argued emphatically that ‘there are today no pure stocks within the class or race of white-skinned people’, he did so by pointing out the difference with black populations. ‘Negroes and whites differ in racial – i.e., bodily – features’, he wrote, ‘but it is impossible to tell a Jewish German from a non-Jewish one by any racial characteristic’. Mises’s rejection of anti-Semitism was premised on an affirmation of white–black race difference.

In Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, Mises wrote (underlining added):

For more than a hundred years anthropologists have studied the bodily features of various races. The undisputed outcome of these scientific investigations is that the peoples of white skin, Europeans and non-European descendants of emigrated European ancestors, represent a mixture of various bodily characteristics. Men have tried to explain this fact as the result of intermarriage between the members of pure primitive stocks. Whatever the truth of this, it is certain that there are today no pure stocks within the class or race of white-skinned people.

Further efforts have been made to coördinate certain bodily features—racial characteristics—with certain mental and moral characteristics. All these endeavors have also failed.

Finally people have tried, especially in Germany, to discover the physical characteristics of an alleged Jewish or Semitic race as distinguished from the characteristics of European non-Jews. These quests, too, have failed completely.

Struck by these and other similar examples, I began checking quotations in Slobodian’s related works. I soon found another instance in a 2015 precursor to the Hayek’s Bastards thesis. Once again, Slobodian excised Mises’s unequivocal condemnation of colonialism from the surrounding passage and instead portrayed him as a qualified defender of the institution who favored an alleged “muscular super-state” to uphold free trade under European economic domination.

In a 2015 lecture, Slobodian stated (underlining added):

For Mises, the demands of the world economy trumped all other political claims. In discussing colonialism, for example, he remarked that “no chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism” but still insisted that keeping the colonies was the first priority once Europe became dependent on the empire for raw materials. Self-determination might be thinkable but only under the control of a muscular super-state that could ensure the continuation of free trade.

In Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, Mises wrote (underlining added):

No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified. The dominion of Europeans in Africa and in important parts of Asia is absolute. It stands in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism and democracy, and there can be no doubt that we must strive for its abolition. The only question is how the elimination of this intolerable condition can be accomplished in the least harmful way possible.

Even this textual comparison understates the gap between Mises’s original argument in Liberalism (1927) and Slobodian’s portrayal of it. The supposedly ominous “muscular super-state” was simply the League of Nations. And far from treating the retention of colonies as a “first priority,” Mises left little doubt about his position a few paragraphs later: “the final goal must continue to be the complete liberation of the colonies from the despotic rule under which they live today.”

I found multiple other examples of similar contextomy in Slobodian’s works. In one instance, he parsed, spliced, and rearranged passages from Mises’s 1940 German-language treatise Nationalökonomie to make them appear as a qualified concession to scientific racism, provided it was not “misused” by the Nazis. In reality, Mises offered a sweeping repudiation of eugenic theory, concluding that repeated attempts to establish it on scientific grounds had failed. Slobodian’s editing practices also extended to other free-market economists. In Globalists, for example, he transformed a passage from William H. Hutt condemning South Africa’s apartheid government into what appeared to be a defense of white-minority rule.

Taken together, these and similar misrepresented quotations supplied much of the textual “evidence” for Slobodian’s thesis about the Alt-Right—the same thesis he would later expand into his award-winning book, Hayek’s Bastards.

Given the severity of the misrepresentations, I began drafting a scholarly response. I completed a manuscript in late 2019. The paper not only showed how Slobodian built his central argument on distorted quotations; it also challenged that argument with evidence he had overlooked and archival sources he never examined. Whereas Slobodian maintained that these groups drew inspiration from the passages he highlighted, I could find no evidence that any prominent Alt-Right figure had ever cited, quoted, or referenced them. Instead, they typically grounded their arguments in distinctly non-Misesian sources, including the eugenic theories of J. Philippe Rushton, the racial dystopian fiction of Jean Raspail, and right-wing adaptations of concepts borrowed from the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory tradition. In short, Slobodian’s intellectual genealogy identified the wrong parentage for the Alt-Right’s racial theories, and then attempted to obscure the DNA evidence.

I presented my paper at an economics conference and circulated a draft to other Mises scholars for feedback—both routine parts of the scholarly process. At the time, my goal was to challenge Slobodian’s argument in a professional academic setting where he would have an opportunity to respond. In early 2020, I formally submitted the paper to Contemporary European History, the journal that had published his principal arguments only months earlier.

Any hope of a productive scholarly exchange was quickly dashed. The journal’s editors issued a rapid desk rejection. There would be no debate in their pages, nor would Slobodian be required to address the evidence I had assembled concerning his misuse of sources.

I was not deterred and wrote to the editors seeking an explanation for their decision. It was not an unreasonable request. After all, I had identified multiple examples of misrepresented quotations in the pages of their journal. The ensuing exchange produced little more than stonewalling. One reply insinuated—incorrectly—that my article had already been published elsewhere because I had posted an earlier draft online for circulation at the economics conference where I presented it. Another suggested that my response lacked an original archival contribution, even though it drew on archival sources far more extensively than Slobodian’s original article.

It soon became clear that the editors had little interest in engaging the substance of the issues I had documented. Shortly thereafter, I learned that Slobodian had been appointed a co-editor of Contemporary European History.

Still undeterred, I changed tack and sent the journal another inquiry. If it would not publish a response to Slobodian’s thesis, would it at least issue a corrigendum or similar correction addressing the most egregious examples of his misquotations? The grounds for doing so seemed clear. After all, Slobodian had transformed Mises’s statement that “all other pages of world history were also written in blood, and nothing is more stupid than efforts to justify today’s imperialism” into an apparent endorsement of imperialism simply by deleting the second half of the sentence.

In response, I received the following unsigned email:

Dear Dr Magness,

Our publication process involves a rigorous peer-review system of multiple reviewers for each piece, a process which ensures the high-quality of our research articles. Scholarship, of course, evolves, and interpretations differ. This is why we host roundtables to discuss different viewpoints on broad topics (the Spanish Civil War, most recently).

However, in this specific case, we are confident about the academic rigour    of Slobodian’s piece.

We hope you and yours are keeping well in these difficult times.

All Best,

Contemporary European History

I would soon learn that the journal had been less than forthright about the “academic rigour” of its “peer-review system.” After reaching a dead end through its official correction procedures, I went public with my findings and with the editors’ dismissive responses. In the process, I discovered that the same misquotation issues had been flagged during peer review by one of Contemporary European History’s referees in 2018, who had recommended that the article be rejected.

The referee contacted me after seeing my findings on social media and shared a copy of the original peer-review report to the journal on Slobodian’s thesis. It described the paper as “based on dubious historical scholarship: quoting out of context, partial reading of the relevant material, and ascribing views to other’s [sic] that they did not hold.” The referee flagged an “out-of-context quote” in which Slobodian misrepresented Mises’s position, seeking to depict it as an opening for scientific racism. In doing so, the report continued, Slobodian had ignored an adjacent “four-page refutation of race theories, arguing very clearly that all people’s [sic] are mixed and that social circumstances are for [sic] more important than genetics.”

The report concluded with a recommendation to the editors of Contemporary European History: “I strongly suggest that the article is not published in its revised form.” The journal nevertheless overruled its own reviewer and published the piece, despite having been warned about the same problems that I later identified after it appeared in print.

Armed with this revelation, I submitted another complaint to the journal, requesting a review of its editorial processes. Several months passed before I received notice of the outcome of its “internal investigation.” The publisher was standing by both Slobodian and its review procedures. It would not address any of the issues raised by either me or its own referee. The long string of misquotations, I was told, amounted to permissible differences of “interpretation.”

Four years later, Hayek’s Bastards appeared in print, repeating and expanding the same thesis that Slobodian had first developed in his Contemporary European History article. The book continued to portray Mises’s writings as a “parenthetical opening” to Alt-Right racism and supplemented that argument with a similar stream of insinuations directed at Hayek.

While the academic Left lavished Slobodian’s book with accolades for having supposedly demonstrated the “neoliberal” family tree of scientific racism, I undertook yet another review of his then-latest work.

In a key passage, Slobodian again quoted from Mises’s untranslated 1940 book Nationalökonomie, purporting to find an additional “parenthetical opening” to scientific racism. I compared it with the original text and found yet another example of his now-familiar interpretive practice.

In Hayek’s Bastards, Slobodian wrote (underlining added):

[Mises wrote] that “we may take as given that the racial element plays a role among the factors that form the personality and, with it, our values and understanding.” What he objected to was not the possible truth content of race theory but its misuse. “In the doctrine of National Socialism and its derivative teachings in Italian fascism,” he wrote, “there is an unbridgeable gap between the statements of the founders of racial biology and their application to propaganda and use for practical policies.” The fascist politicization of race theory should not discredit it permanently. “Because the keywords of race theory are used to justify measures with which it has nothing to do,” he wrote, “does not free scientific thought from the responsibility to think through to the end the problem of human races (Menschenrassen) in its praxeological significance.”

In Nationalökonomie, Mises wrote (underlining added):

We may take as given that the racial element plays a role among the factors that form the personality and, with it, our values and understanding, i.e., everything with which a man is born, his physical endowment, the hereditary qualities derived from his ancestors. But in the present state of our knowledge, we know nothing about the connection between the physical and the mind, and therefore cannot make any statement as to whether and in what way the physical is capable of influencing Verstehen. Some have attempted to assign certain value judgments (types of Verstehen, Verstehen types) to specific peoples; these attempts failed because it is easy to prove that every attempt to group people according to types of Verstehen thwarts the classification according to ethnicity.

In the passage at issue, Mises was once again arguing against the scientific validity of efforts to link intellectual capacity to race or ethnicity. And once again, Slobodian was “bastardizing” the text—rearranging quotations, splicing together unrelated excerpts, and constructing a false version of Mises’s position that conveniently reinforced the political narrative of Hayek’s Bastards.