Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
I first noticed that a rift runs through the German liberal scene in the mid-2010s. Liberal debates were then held on Facebook, where one looked for like-minded people, resonance, but also for substantive argument.
How wide the differences had grown became visible in two moments above all: in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea, and in 2015 with the so-called refugee crisis. Suddenly, people who had previously counted themselves as a matter of course to the same liberal spectrum were fighting each other fundamentally. The subject of the fight was no longer tax rates but national borders, solidarity, the question of who counts as enemy. Who belongs to us? To whom do we owe responsibility?
The Hayek Society stands as the case in point. Its internal tensions broke into the open in 2015. The question was liberalism itself. Even as an outsider, I could see that the topic of immigration in particular drove a deep rift through its ranks. A representative of the Society gave a talk at Students for Liberty about Germany. His remarks on debt sustainability, on implicit and explicit state debt, still had the liberal mainstream more or less behind them. But when it came to demographics and immigration, the tone changed. Strongly migration-skeptical, he raised state interventions in birth rates to prevent a demographic shift.
Did Quinn Slobodian get this phenomenon right in Hayek’s Bastards? When a term catches fire, as Slobodian’s book titles often do, one always has to ask: is it precision or overstatement?
Either way, Slobodian names something many liberals know first-hand: in what was once their own camp, positions have hardened that are only loosely connected to a liberal order. Slobodian captures real phenomena: the attraction of exit-logics in the sense of isolation, the fascination with private orders, the skepticism toward pluralist societies. At the same time, this has to be said about Slobodian: he often meets ideas of freedom with the suspicion of malicious intent.
The question is: should those who fall out of the liberal spectrum to the right be called Hayek’s Bastards? In fact, the figures Slobodian means draw less on Hayek than on Mises. And even from him, most of the problematic tendencies do not come. Slobodian sees correctly that there is extremist political behaviour. But it is not primarily Hayek’s heir. Much of what today goes by „right-libertarian” feeds on a Rothbardian conception of freedom: freedom as retreat, as secession, as homogeneity. Hayek’s concept of freedom was a different one. Freedom as the result of orders that grew evolutionarily, reliant on institutions and rules as on trial and error. It would be a mistake to confuse freedom in open orders with freedom from order.
Where then does the line run? What must liberals own, and what not? Liberalism protects individuals, not cultural majorities or minorities. Group rights exist only insofar as they secure individual freedom. Freedom is abstract and general, not bound to identity. Markets need open access, not pre-political exclusions. The order of the state serves the limitation of power, not the enforcement of cultural homogeneity.
Liberal freedom is holistic and indivisible. Anyone who calls for economic freedom but bets on authoritarianism socially is not pursuing a consistent liberal politics. Anyone who defends freedom only where it serves his own preferences is not pursuing a doctrine of freedom. He is pursuing interest politics in a liberal vocabulary. This is most visible in the case of immigration. Rules to manage migration are one thing. A general rejection of immigration is another. The latter contradicts the principle of individual freedom fundamentally. The place of birth is chance, not merit. Whoever thinks freedom selectively, yes here, no there, instrumentalises it.
Single strands have here moved markedly away from classical-liberal principles. The combination of pro-market arguments with socially conservative or reactionary positions on social policy is especially found in paleo-libertarian positions. One can still call such positions „right-libertarian”. The open question, however, is whether they still correspond sufficiently to the liberal and libertarian core idea of individual freedom. A liberalism that demands economic openness but legitimises social closure is at best half a liberalism.
The diagnosis is sober: the camp of those who call themselves liberal is full of tension. But not along the lines of economic policy, since on questions of market, competition, and limiting the state, there is relative consensus. The actual fault lines run socially: at immigration, women’s rights, cultural identity. These positions are often voiced especially loudly by a minority that stages itself as the spearhead of freedom. But it is not.
