Suzanne Schneider in NY Review of Books:
In his 1892 book The Grammar of Science, the pioneering British statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson warned readers that “if society is to shape its own future,…we must be peculiarly cautious that in following our strong social instincts we do not at the same time weaken society by rendering the propagation of bad stock more and more easy.” Since “no degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings,” he argued, the only remedy was to winnow out corrupt genetic material via the evolutionary struggle for survival—assuming no pesky do-gooders got in the way of Mother Nature.
“Arguments about politics always rest on claims about human nature,” Quinn Slobodian reminds us in his new intellectual history of the American far right. Hayek’s Bastards focuses on a coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, and paleoconservatives who, a century after Pearson, returned to theories of immutable genetic and racial differences to make the case for market supremacy and a minimalist state, a current of thinking Slobodian calls “new fusionism.” While a previous generation of conservatives had welded religious traditionalism to free market principles—the original fusionism associated with Frank Meyer and the National Review—their ideological successors found evolutionary psychology, genetics, and biological anthropology more useful.
More here.
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