Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

In his apologia for Pinochet’s tyranny, Hayek is clear that it’s a stopgap, and all the fault of the left. The class nature of the ideology is clear when you remember that Hayek lambasted left-wingers who were prepared to countenance the idea of ‘temporary’ suspensions of democracy as ‘stages’ towards socialism. Neoliberal praxis is thus based on Hayek’s extreme right-wing critique of democracy, itself based on that of Nazi jurist and legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whom Hayek praised. The logically consequent idea that emergency dictatorship may be necessary to preserve liberal society from democracy is in neoliberalism’s source code. Neoliberalism, contrary to myth, is an authoritarian ideology, committed to defending property and wealth by violence both physical and structural. This isn’t ‘because’ of Hayek in any crude way—unlike him, we must eschew the ‘great man’ theory of history—but he was a vector. In short, the Austrian School’s historic role as an ideological centre of gravity to the right of the bourgeois mainstream enabled it to both influence the rise of neoliberalism and then become a stern ideological critic of actual neoliberal praxis from the right. Just as the original Austrian School was marginalism-but-more-so, its later form continues to serve as fanatical boosters of capitalism while also lurking at the extreme rightward fringe of capitalist society’s intellectual, ideological, and political range of what is acceptably avowable. Its position explains it...