Defending hierarchy, challenging ideas

By now, it is well established that economic ideas matter most when the social orders which they support come under pressure. Political upheaval rarely produces struggles over interests alone (e.g. Blyth, Reference Blyth2002). It also generates conflicts over meaning and legitimacy: why are some forms of inequality justified while others are not? Which hierarchies should be preserved and which overturned? As established answers to such questions lose credibility, intellectual actors seek new ways of understanding, explaining, and defending the social order.

Both Clara Mattei’s The Capital Order (Reference Mattei2022) and Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards (Reference Slobodian2025) can be read as studies of such moments. Although they focus on different periods and intellectual traditions, both examine attempts to defend hierarchy in the face of mounting egalitarian challenges. Mattei’s account traces how interwar labor mobilization, factory occupations, and democratic demands threatened the foundations of capitalist social relations. Slobodian examines how the expansion of civil rights, feminism, anti-racism, and environmental politics challenged established understandings of market order and social difference. In both cases, intellectuals responded by developing new ways of making hierarchy appear legitimate, necessary, and enduring.

Yet the two books differ in a way that raises a broader set of question for scholars of economic ideas: while both examine how appeals to expertise can help make particular social arrangements legitimate, natural, or necessary, they diverge in how they understand the relationship between ideas and power. Mattei tends to explain economic doctrines through the interests they serve and the disciplinary functions they fulfill. Slobodian, by contrast, begins by reconstructing the intellectual worlds within which such doctrines are formulated, revised, and made persuasive. This difference points to a longstanding tension in the study of political economy. If ideas are treated primarily as expressions of underlying social conflicts, their intellectual content can disappear from view. Conversely, if ideas are studied in isolation from the power relations they sustain, their political significance becomes difficult to grasp.

Read together, these books reaffirm the conclusion that ideas cannot be reduced to the interests they serve. Economic doctrines derive political force not only from the coalitions they sustain but also from their capacity to persuade or constrain actors operating within particular intellectual milieus. It is this latter dimension which receives greater attention in Slobodian’s account than in Mattei’s, and which makes for an altogether more persuasive contribution. The contrast between the two thus illuminates not only how justifications of hierarchy have evolved, but also the methodological challenges involved in studying the political work which ideas perform.

Austerity and the problem of Capital Order

The core analytical claim of Capital Order is that despite its now widely recognized adverse economic effects, austerity should not be seen as a misguided set of policy prescriptions or a recurring technical mistake. This ‘dangerous idea’, to quote Mark Blyth (Reference Blyth2013), is instead best understood as a deliberate political project designed to defend capitalist social relations when they are under threat. For Mattei, this political function explains austerity’s eternal return, even as its economic costs have become undeniable.

Mattei traces the origins of modern austerity to interwar Britain and Italy. Wartime suspension of the gold standard and unprecedented state intervention in the market during World War One had loosened the ideational stranglehold of capitalism. In this environment, newly emboldened workers began demanding more control over the fruits of their labor. Confronted with unprecedented labor militancy, mass mobilization, and intense debates over the socially optimal organization of work and production, political and economic elites turned to austerity as a deliberate strategy to restore what Mattei calls ‘capital order’, a social system in which the private ownership of production and the disciplinary rigors of wage labor dominate economic life. This push was frequently spearheaded by employers with strong material interests in this regime, sometimes in alliance with the state. Mattei clearly demonstrates that employers were driven by a desire both to bring workers to heel and to restore profitability.

It is in describing these dynamics that Mattei is at her best. She traces in detail how wartime economic mobilization blurred the boundary between economic management and deeply intrusive social control, as governments managed labor and production with a heavy hand. During the transition to peace, these efforts were then redirected toward weakening workers’ bargaining power and restoring hierarchical wage relations. Interwar macroeconomic stabilization policies in both Britain and Italy therefore operated alongside measures that deliberately undercut unions, pushed down wages, and raised unemployment. Though Mattei’s reliance on nominal wage measures sometimes makes it difficult to assess the full extent of interwar changes in workers’ material conditions, her evidence nevertheless suggests that these measures imposed steep costs on large segments of the working population in both countries.

Mattei’s reconstruction of the lived experience of this moment is also excellent. Drawing on labor newspapers, archival sources, and workers’ testimony, she conveys the depth of the social tensions that followed the war and the extraordinary scale of working-class mobilization in response to capitalist repression. British labor papers described a situation in which many households faced ‘a constant struggle, not to live, but merely to exist’ as rising prices and depressed wages forced workers to cut even basic food consumption (Mattei, Reference Mattei2022: 47). In response, British miners, bakers, builders, and steelworkers engaged in widespread industrial action. Meanwhile, in Italy, mobilization reached genuinely revolutionary proportions: by 1920 more than two million Italian workers were involved in strikes, representing roughly half the labor force in key productive sectors. This culminated in the Italian factory occupations of September 1920, in which roughly half a million workers seized hundreds of industrial plants across sixty cities, taking over the management of production while guarding factory gates and flying red flags. Participants later recalled the sense of possibility that accompanied these events: ‘the master was overthrown from the factory which was directly managed by the workers’ (Mattei, Reference Mattei2022: 118).

Mattei’s account is stimulating and opens up an important perspective which captures how economic thinking, social discipline, and state power interact during periods of political upheaval. Nevertheless, the evidence she marshals falls short of fully demonstrating her key claim that austerity is best understood as a deliberate political strategy for defending capitalist social relations when they come under pressure. Three related difficulties stand out: first, Mattei’s expansive definition of austerity; second, her overemphasis on class interests at the expense of serious engagement with the macroeconomic ideas that shaped policymakers’ understanding of the available options; and third, the historical continuity she posits between interwar austerity and later episodes of economic retrenchment.

First, consider Mattei’s definition of austerity itself. In a departure from conventional usage, her tripartite definition extends beyond fiscal and monetary policy to include measures targeting industrial production and labor relations, as discussed above. By foregrounding workers’ experiences and the intensity of postwar mobilization, Mattei convincingly shows how uncertain the future of capitalist production appeared in the immediate aftermath of the war. Yet these episodes also point to an analytical tension in her broader argument. The industrial repression of labor that occupies a central place in the book was largely driven by employers and political authorities responding directly to challenges to profitability and workplace control. By contrast, the fiscal and monetary policies that form the other pillars of Mattei’s definition were shaped primarily by economists and financial officials operating within a prevailing macroeconomic orthodoxy that treated balanced budgets, sound money, and monetary stabilization as prerequisites for prosperity, painful though they might be. Bringing these distinct dynamics together under a single conceptual umbrella risks overstating the degree of coherence, coordination, and shared motivation between them.

This problem becomes particularly apparent in Mattei’s discussion of the Brussels Conference of 1920 and the Genoa Conference of 1922. These gatherings brought together policymakers, central bankers, and economists from across Europe and the United States to address the fiscal and monetary displacement caused by the war. While Mattei interprets these meetings as evidence of austerity’s status as a class project, what stands out even in her own reconstruction is the intellectual dominance of a particular diagnosis of economic disorder, and a policy agenda following from this diagnosis which centered on fiscal consolidation, monetary stabilization, and the gradual restoration of the gold standard. Many participants were undoubtedly anti-communist and committed to preserving capitalist institutions. Yet this alone does not establish that their policy prescriptions were primarily aimed at disciplining labor. Rather, Mattei’s own account is indicative of the extent to which policymakers were operating within the conceptual boundaries of a powerful and widely shared economic orthodoxy.

This is not to deny the distributive consequences of that orthodoxy. Policies aimed at restoring monetary stability often align with the interests of creditors, financial actors, and wealth holders. Yet such alignment does not demonstrate that the ideas themselves are mere ideological cover for class domination. Rather, over time, these doctrines have acquired a coherence and authority of their own, shaping how policymakers interpret economic crises and establishing widely shared standards of prudence and responsibility within state institutions. The attempted return to gold in Britain in 1925 illustrates this dynamic. This policy was widely defended as the only credible route to monetary stability, despite imposing significant costs, not only on labor, but also on important sectors of British industry. In this sense, orthodox monetary ideas structured political debate and narrowed the range of legitimate policy responses in ways that cannot be entirely reduced to the operation of material interests. Indeed, that this policy harmed some of the very economic actors who Mattei sees as both benefitting from and driving it complicates any straightforward account of austerity as a project uniformly aligned with capitalist interests. It suggests instead that policymakers were operating within the constraints of a powerful macroeconomic orthodoxy that shaped how economic problems were understood and what solutions appeared politically and intellectually viable.

A second difficulty follows from Mattei’s effort to demonstrate that alternatives to austerity were available but politically marginalized. To make this case, she contrasts prevailing macroeconomic orthodoxy with the intellectual ferment surrounding Ordine Nuovo, Antonio Gramsci, and related currents of worker-centered critique in interwar Italy. Yet, the existence of critiques of capitalism does not demonstrate the existence of a viable alternative framework for macroeconomic governance. These interventions offered powerful critiques of capitalist authority and compelling meso-level visions of workplace democracy, but not a coherent set of macro-tools for addressing sovereign debt, monetary instability, or currency management – the very pressing problems which policymakers faced at the time. In this respect, the constraints facing interwar policymakers were not merely the result of the suppression of alternative ideas, but also the absence of a fully articulated competing paradigm to which they could turn.

The subsequent rise of Keynesian macroeconomics further complicates Mattei’s interpretation. If adherence to orthodox policies is explained primarily by the social position of policymakers and economists, as she suggests, it becomes difficult to explain why elite actors embraced demand management and full-employment policies only a decade and a half after the episodes that Mattei focuses on. The Keynesian turn suggests that changes in the intellectual frameworks through which economic problems were understood mattered at least as much as the social interests those frameworks served. Indeed, once a viable alternative paradigm emerged, many of the same institutions and actors that had previously defended the older fiscal and monetary orthodoxy proved perfectly willing to adopt it.

This point is reinforced by Mattei’s treatment of Keynes himself. In Capital Order, Keynes appears largely as yet another austerity thinker. But the historical significance of Keynesianism lies precisely in its role as an alternative framework through which unemployment and stagnation could be addressed without a reliance on wage repression or fiscal retrenchment. Without this intellectual transformation, it is difficult to imagine the emergence of postwar welfare states and full employment policies. By treating Keynesianism largely as a continuation of austerity logic, Mattei risks overlooking one of the most consequential ideational shifts in twentieth-century political economy.

A third difficulty concerns the broader historical continuity Mattei posits between interwar austerity and later episodes of economic retrenchment. Her argument often implies that austerity is intrinsically linked to the defense of capitalist social relations. This implies that alternative political and social arrangements would have offered a fundamentally less austere path. Yet there is little historical basis for such a conclusion. Capital Order largely overlooks episodes such as the fiscal and monetary restraint pursued in Weimar Germany under Social Democratic leadership, where stabilization policies imposed significant social costs despite being carried out by governments formally committed to labor interests (Blyth, Reference Blyth2013). More broadly, austerity was by no means absent from socialist political economies themselves. The Romanian Ceaușescu regime, for example, pushed a highly coercive austerity drive in the name of macroeconomic stabilization and debt repayment (Ban, Reference Ban2012). Likewise, recent scholarship on socialist planning has emphasized the centrality of discipline, productivity norms, and strict temporal regulation in industrial socialist systems (Cucu, Reference Cucu2022). Even within Italy, austerity was sometimes embraced as a progressive project: in the late 1970s, Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer famously called for austerity as a moral and political program capable of renewing the economy and society while advancing socialist transformation. Taken together, these examples complicate the conclusion that austerity is uniquely capitalist and instead point to the broader constraints imposed by influential macroeconomic ideas and path-dependent institutional arrangements.

Finally, the strong historical continuity Mattei posits between interwar and contemporary austerity also underestimates the intellectual and institutional work required to re-legitimize austerity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Far from representing the natural continuation of the fiscal orthodoxy of the gold standard era, contemporary austerity had to be reconstructed and justified through sustained academic and policy entrepreneurship. Economists such as Alberto Alesina and the broader ‘austerian’ network stemming from Bocconi University played a central role in this process by advancing the idea of ‘expansionary fiscal contractions’ and reframing austerity as a potential engine of economic growth rather than merely a painful necessity. This intellectual project was no mean feat. It involved decades-long construction of new empirical claims, policy narratives, modeling approaches, and institutional networks that helped embed new austerity thinking within European and international policymaking circles (Blyth, Reference Blyth2013; Helgadóttir, Reference Helgadóttir2016).

Moreover, the macroeconomic context in which post-2008 austerity unfolded differed significantly from that of the interwar gold standard world which Mattei describes. While the fiscal retrenchment pursued after 2008 was – make no mistake – harsh and often unnecessary, with particularly severe consequences for those with lower socioeconomic standing, it occurred alongside unprecedented monetary expansion and was cushioned, however imperfectly, by the institutional legacies of Keynesian postwar welfare states. The presence of activist and expansionary central banks and still significant social safety nets meant that the social and macroeconomic dynamics of contemporary austerity diverged in important ways from those of the early twentieth century. In other words, the continuity between interwar austerity and its contemporary variants is far more tenuous than Capital Order suggests.

There is a deeper methodological irony running through these issues: in seeking to expose austerity as a politically constructed project serving particular social interests, Mattei adopts a framework that tends to cast the proponents of austerity primarily as agents of domination rather than as actors operating within historically specific intellectual milieus. As a result, the analysis risks obscuring the very contingency and openness of political-economic development that it seeks to recover. By treating austerity as a near-continuous feature of capitalist political economy, Capital Order risks underemphasizing the moments when alternative economic frameworks and policy regimes did in fact gain traction and significantly altered political and economic realities. Indeed, the twentieth century contains several important episodes in which austerity doctrines did not exercise the same intellectual or political hold, most notably the decades following the Second World War, when Keynesian macroeconomic ideas, expanding welfare states, and indicative planning temporarily displaced the fiscal and monetary orthodoxies that had dominated the interwar period. Recognizing these periods of institutional and intellectual rupture is important not only for historical accuracy but also because they reveal that the boundaries of political-economic possibility have been more open and more contingent than Mattei’s framework suggests.

By reducing intellectual disagreement to underlying social conflict, Mattei’s framework may ultimately underestimate the role of ideas in expanding the realm of political possibility. More fundamentally, it raises the question of how scholars should approach economic ideas whose political consequences they find objectionable. Is it sufficient to identify the interests such ideas serve, or must we also understand why they appeared plausible and compelling to the actors who embraced them? I would argue the latter. The task of intellectual history is not simply to reveal which interests ideas serve, but to explain how they come to define what actors perceive as true, necessary, and possible. To stop at interests is to leave unexplained how particular visions of the world acquire authority, shape judgment, and structure political action – a task that lies at the heart of Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards.

Hayek’s Bastards and the reinvention of inequality

Although the protagonists and historical contexts differ, similar themes animate Capital Order and Hayek’s Bastards. If Mattei’s economists confronted demands for greater economic democracy after the First World War, the right-wing thinkers in Hayek’s Bastards confronted a different wave of egalitarian pressures in the late twentieth century. Both books therefore examine intellectual responses to moments when established hierarchies appeared newly vulnerable. The question, in each case, was how inequality might be justified once older forms of authority came under pressure. Yet where Mattei primarily emphasizes the social interests served by economic doctrines and the disciplinary functions they fulfill, Slobodian devotes much greater attention to reconstructing the intellectual evolution of the ideas themselves.

Quinn Slobodian’s central argument in Hayek’s Bastards is that an important strand of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century neoliberal thought responded to the persistence of egalitarian political drives by attempting to ground its vision of social hierarchy in nature rather than culture. More specifically, he shows how an international network of libertarian and neoliberal thinkers, many connected to institutions such as the Mont Pelerin Society and an expanding ecosystem of think tanks, began to draw on claims from biology, evolutionary psychology, genetics, and intelligence research to defend economic inequality as both natural and ineradicable. Key figures include Charles Murray, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who reinterpreted the neoliberal project in this way in response to ongoing demands for redistribution, civil rights, gender equality, and environmental protection. For these thinkers, the political drive for equality rested on what they saw as a false premise: that human beings are fundamentally equal in their capacities and potential across groups. Turning to the language of science allowed them to recast inequality not as a social problem calling for political redress but as a natural outcome of biological variation.

Slobodian refers to this turn as a ‘new fusionism’, which replaced the mid-century fusionism that had combined libertarian economics with religious traditionalism to argue that culture was a key driver of economic inequality. Slobodian traces new fusionism across a series of domains in which variations of the ‘natural inequality’ argument emerged: some thinkers argued that differences in intelligence between individuals and (often racial or national) groups would inevitably produce new ‘cognitive classes’, or what Slobodian terms ‘neurocastes’. Others contended that stable market societies depended on cultural homogeneity, giving rise to the idea of an ‘ethno-economy’ in which borders should remain open for capital and goods but closed to most forms of migration. Still others revived arguments for hard money, particularly the gold standard, treating it not merely as an economic instrument but as a time-tested moral and civilizational anchor in an uncertain world. Across these debates, Slobodian shows how appeals to biology and natural limits functioned as a way of defending markets against the egalitarian political demands that had gained momentum in the second half of the twentieth century.

A second central argument which the book makes is that this scientized contemporary right-wing populism should not be understood as a backlash against neoliberal globalization. The political currents associated with figures such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, or Alternative für Deutschland are often portrayed as revolts against the economic orthodoxy of deregulation, free trade, and market liberalization that dominated the late twentieth century. Slobodian’s reconstruction points in a different direction. Rather than treating the populist right as a challenge to neoliberalism, he shows that many of the ideas now circulating in new right-wing movements were developed within neoliberal intellectual networks. What often appears as a break with neoliberal globalization therefore looks, in Slobodian’s account, more like a reconfiguration of it: longstanding neoliberal commitments to market hierarchy are recombined with increasingly explicit arguments about cultural difference, biological inequality, and the limits of egalitarian democracy.

Seen in this light, Hayek’s Bastards can also be read as a study of the ways in which policy entrepreneurs adapt when they encounter persistent political resistance. The neoliberal thinkers Slobodian examines were confronted with a recurring tension: if economic competition rewards merit and efficiency, why did market societies repeatedly generate strong political demands for redistribution, social protection, and greater equality? One response was to reinterpret the demands themselves. Rather than reflecting legitimate political claims, such demands could be cast as the product of mistaken assumptions about human similarity. Inequality, through this lens, did not represent a political distortion calling for political correction but an expression of deeper biological differences. Crucially, however, this reframing had to be made persuasive and palatable through concerted epistemic work. Appeals to science helped present such claims not merely as ideological arguments or expressions of cultural elitism, but as empirically grounded insights into human nature.

While carefully made, Slobodian’s argument points towards a tension that could have been explored in greater depth: the political figures and movements discussed in the book have, at times, departed from the orthodox commitments to free trade and market liberalization associated with late twentieth-century neoliberalism. To the extent that this is the case, it suggests a hierarchy between socio-political and economic commitments, within which concerns about cultural hierarchy, national identity, or migration control override market-liberal principles. By leaving this trade-off largely unexamined, Slobodian complicates the claim that these socio-political developments represent ideological continuity with neoliberalism. Moreover, the conditions under which economic principles give way to socio-cultural priorities remain unclear.

To an extent, Slobodian’s evocative metaphor of ‘bastards’ acknowledges the difficulties in fully resolving this genealogical question. Bastards, after all, do not stand outside the family tree; they are part of it, even if they do not always inherit the family name. Nor are they fully integrated into it. In this sense, bastards represent both continuity and tension within a single lineage. If the thinkers which Slobodian studies are indeed ‘Hayek’s bastards’, then, the key question is not simply whether they misread or distort Hayek’s ideas, but what sorts of new tensions they generate and where these tensions are likely to carry us. Viewed in this light, these ideological ‘illegitimate offspring’ might reveal fractures already present within neoliberal thought itself. One of the most significant of these fractures concerns the relationship between economic and socio-cultural reasoning. At times market competition is treated as the primary ordering principle, with social hierarchies emerging as its outcome; in other moments, cultural or biological differences appear to define the boundaries within which markets can operate. Which of these logics ultimately prevails is not a secondary matter, but one which will shape how neoliberal thought continues to justify hierarchy in an era of intensifying cultural and political conflict.

Slobodian’s account therefore carries broader implications for how neoliberalism itself is understood. Much scholarship has treated neoliberalism primarily as a policy regime associated with deregulation, privatization, and the retreat of the state. By contrast, Hayek’s Bastards reveals the extent to which neoliberal thought has always been an evolving intellectual and cultural project, continually adapting its justificatory frameworks in response to new political pressures. One of the strengths of Slobodian’s approach lies precisely in this careful reconstruction of such dynamics. He takes seriously the internal debates, conceptual innovations, and strategic adaptations that shaped neoliberal thought over time. The protagonists of Hayek’s Bastards appear not simply as mouthpieces for capital but as intellectual actors grappling, often in unexpected ways, with the tensions between market liberalism and democratic equality.

At its core, Hayek’s Bastards is therefore a history of ideas and political entrepreneurs. Crucially, Slobodian takes the intellectual work of the neoliberal thinkers which he studies seriously, while also situating their debates within the institutional and material contexts in which they unfolded, paying careful attention to networks, funding structures, and political alliances. Written with admirable clarity, his book guides the reader through a broad cast of intellectuals, activists, and political actors without losing analytical focus, showing how these figures interacted across different institutional settings. In doing this, the book offers a nuanced account of how initially marginal ideas, often developed within fringe intellectual milieus, came to circulate across a range of institutional and political contexts.

Ideas, interests, and political possibility

Read together, Capital Order and Hayek’s Bastards illuminate a longstanding tension in the study of economic ideas. Both books examine attempts to defend hierarchy at moments when established social arrangements appeared increasingly vulnerable to egalitarian challenge. In Mattei’s account, austerity emerged as a means of disciplining labor and restoring capitalist social relations in the aftermath of the First World War. In Slobodian’s, neoliberal thinkers responded to the advances of civil rights, feminism, anti-racism, and other egalitarian movements by developing new ways of grounding inequality in nature rather than culture. Different historical contexts produced different intellectual responses, but in both cases, expertise was mobilized to make hierarchy appear objective, necessary, and therefore legitimate.

The contrast between the books lies in how they explain this process. Mattei approaches economic doctrines primarily through the interests they serve and the political functions they fulfill. Slobodian begins instead with the ideas themselves, reconstructing the intellectual worlds within which arguments are formulated, revised, and made persuasive. This difference shapes what each account is able to explain. Economic doctrines undoubtedly have distributive consequences and often align with particular social interests. Yet an account that begins and ends with interests struggles to explain why certain arguments become persuasive, how intellectual paradigms shift, or why actors abandon doctrines they once held with conviction. As E.P. Thompson (Reference Thompson1963: 12) famously warned, scholars must guard against the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. The task is not simply to identify the interests served by particular ideas, but also to understand the problems historical actors believed themselves to be confronting and the intellectual frameworks through which they sought solutions.

In this respect, Hayek’s Bastards offers an important reminder: the defense of market order does not just depend on institutional power and material interests, but also on sustained intellectual work – the development, revision, and dissemination of arguments capable of adapting to changing political circumstances. Political orders, after all, are not sustained by coercion alone.