The Twilight of Mammon
On the moral anthropology of the market order.
Nativist populism, the belief that the nation belongs to the native-born, burns brighter today than at any point since WWII. Across Western democracies, far-right parties are, owing to a combination of wage stagnation, rising unemployment, declining living standards, and the rampant financialisation of economies that produce less and less, on the rise. One might see in all of this an inevitable reaction to what Francis Fukuyama called the End of History, or the idea that the post-war liberal consensus is generating the antibodies its own contradictions demand. But if one looks beneath the surface of the nativist movements, at the intellectual grammar that gives them coherence, one finds something more revealing than generalised discontent.
In Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany Abolishes Itself”), widely credited with providing the intellectual groundwork for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Thilo Sarrazin makes a case that Muslim immigrants are a drain on German society. His argument does not rest on abstract ideas rooted in the Aryan North or the Hyperborean tradition, nor on appeals to “Judeo-Christian” values. Rather, Sarrazin frames Muslim immigrants as unproductive populations with high time preference and a propensity towards instant gratification, whose offspring contribute little to the German economy. What gives his argument its veneer of intellectual seriousness is the Austrian economic framework operating beneath it, in which populations are sorted by their capacity to serve the market order. Indeed, Sarrazin has been repeatedly hosted by the Hayek Institute in Austria and the Hayek Society in Germany.
The Austrian fingerprint repeats elsewhere. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets observed four types of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina. Japan, lacking natural resources and devastated by war, developed. Argentina, blessed with fertile land, abundant resources, and no comparable destruction, has been essentially stagnant for decades, a situation caused first by Peronist protectionism and then compounded by successive (and failed) applications of neoliberal economic programmes. In 2023, the populist Javier Milei became Argentina’s President, having campaigned on an anarcho-capitalist manifesto: abolish the state and privatise everything. Afuera. He is currently engaged in what can only be described as economic shock therapy, a programme whose historical pattern is well established. Countries subjected to it tend to cycle through crashes and speculative recoveries, with global financial elites benefiting from the instability while ordinary citizens absorb the cost. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2024, the American Republican Vivek Ramaswamy met Milei and remarked, “You’re more of a Mises guy. I’m a Hayek guy,” to which Milei responded, “But one of the most wonderful thinkers of liberty was Murray Rothbard,” after whom one of his pet mastiffs is named. The exchange is revealing. These are not merely economic preferences but confessional identities.
Curtis Yarvin, a software developer-turned-political philosopher, is an architect of the so-called Dark Enlightenment movement, which advocates an end to democracy and a return to monarchical governance. In an interview in 2022, Yarvin traced his own intellectual formation: “My ideas really came from reading the Austrian School, Mises and Rothbard, and then Hoppe. Hoppe opened a kind of door to the pre-revolutionary world for me.” Yarvin, whose ideas have been cited by US Vice President J.D. Vance and the German-born tech billionaire Peter Thiel, argues that liberal democracies are governed by what he calls a “Cathedral,” a quasi-religious establishment in which academics, the media, and the professional class worship the tenets of human rights law and progressive values. To destroy this “Cathedral,” Yarvin and his followers call for the weakening and eventual dissolution of the EU, which they regard as the institutional heart of the liberal international system, and they are willing to empower far-right parties to further that aim, irrespective of the cost to European stability. Vance himself flew to Hungary in April 2026 to openly campaign on behalf of its (now former) Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who announced that, if he were to win the Parliamentary elections, he would “launch a Reconquista” of European institutions. Orbán lost the elections.
The epistemic roots of these movements trace back to a common source, which also gave rise to neoliberalism several decades earlier: the Austrian School of Economics, which has become less a practical matter and more a theology with its own sacraments. Its prophets are Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and their disciples are Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In this theology, the market is not merely a practical mechanism of exchange. It is civilisational, moral, and revelatory. Hayek, the Austrian-British economist and author of The Road to Serfdom, insisted that dispersed individuals generated knowledge spontaneously through market exchange, a system he described as a “marvel” and a “mechanism for communicating information” that no central authority could rival. This extraordinary claim has shaped the modern world more profoundly than any idea since the Enlightenment: the Market is a priori. This claim replaces not just state central planners, but also religious authority as a repository of communicating information. Civilisational truths are no longer downstream of religious edicts or moral intuitions, but are divined through market interactions.
Financial platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, contemporary prediction markets that seek to price political and social reality itself, have followed this belief to its logical conclusion. In doing so, they have created the advanced stages of hyperreality, where a slew of insider-trading claims and prosecutions show how “market signals” are being used to influence material events such as elections and even military action, rather than merely price them. Beyond, the believers span the political landscape: New Right populists, hedge-fund libertarians, Bitcoin maximalists, and Silicon Valley rationalists.
The origin of this theology is often traced to the aftermath of WWII, to the Chicago School and its leading scholar, Milton Friedman, who positioned himself as Hayek’s successor as the primary post-war intellectual antagonist of John Maynard Keynes. However, the deeper genealogy lies not in post-war Chicago but in the early 20th century, in the imperial Viennese salons of the fin de siècle, where a different intellectual class, terrified of mass democracy, watched a dying empire and sought to save the market from the people.
The Cradle of Market Theology
At the turn of the 20th century, the Habsburg Empire was fracturing under the weight of imperial overextension. It governed an extraordinary number of people: Slavs, Jews, Magyars, Croats, Romanians, and Albanians, all lived beneath one political roof, but no one believed the house would hold. Democratic movements were threatening aristocratic control, universal suffrage had entered the popular imagination, and collectivist ideologies were gaining ground. The aristocratic order that had held the empire together was losing its grip. Prominent Austrian thinkers, among them Hayek and Mises, confronted a question that was genuinely difficult and, in its way, urgent: what force could maintain a capitalistic social order in a multi-ethnic empire whose imperial authority was dissolving?
Their answer was market selection. The term requires situating within the intellectual milieu in which it was conceived, because that milieu was not, as it is sometimes retrospectively presented, one of dispassionate economic analysis. This was the era of Social Darwinism and race science, theories that posited competition as the natural and moral mechanism for social selection. In other words, survival of the fittest. These ideas permeated political science, anthropology, and colonial theory across Europe, and the Austrian School lived within this current, not adjacent to it or outside of it. The structural parallel between Social Darwinism and Austrian economics lies in a shared logic. Social Darwinism asserts that Nature selects winners, that intervention interferes with natural evolution, and that hierarchy among peoples is the natural order of things. Austrian economics asserts that the Market selects winners, that intervention distorts the spontaneous order, and that inequality is the natural and desirable outcome of free exchange.
Mises made the connection between Social Darwinism and Austrian economics explicit in ways his intellectual descendants have been less eager to revisit. In Nation, State, and Economy (1919), he argued that superior cultures naturally displace what he termed “primitive civilisations,” including Slavic peasants, Baltic communities, and Ottoman subjects who inhabited the Habsburg Empire. In Liberalism (1927), Mises would adopt a more anti-colonial stance, castigating the actual practice of colonialism as a “system of blood and iron” and a contradiction to liberal principles. However, he insisted that while colonial methods were brutal and often unjust, the spread of Western civilisation—through capitalism, free markets, and technology—remained a net good for the “primitive cultures” in the long run.
This was not economics, as the discipline is understood in the contemporary sense: a technical inquiry into the allocation of scarce resources. For Hayek and Mises, market selection was a cosmic sorting mechanism, a sort of moral Darwinism that determined which peoples and which civilisations deserved to persist and which deserved to be displaced. The racial context in which this logic was first articulated was eventually dropped, but the frame remained, universalised, and later exported as the intellectual foundation and language of the neoliberal project.
Leaving the Tribe
An economic theory, however internally coherent it may be, cannot sustain the moral weight of a civilisational project. It requires a story about human nature, one that grants its prescriptions the weight of moral necessity. Hayek understood this. Over the course of his career, he developed a narrative anthropology, or more simply, a story about human nature, that provided an evolutionary justification for market selection.
According to Hayek, human beings evolved in small hunter-gatherer bands on the savannah, where they instinctively cooperated, shared resources, and strove for equality. These were adaptive behaviours for small-group life, and they produced the moral intuitions that most people still carry: solidarity, fairness, and the impulse towards redistribution. However, as humanity transitioned from small bands to large, anonymous, commercial societies, these inherited instincts became liabilities to the development of markets. The morality of the tribe, Hayek argued, was dangerous to civilisational order. The market operates on principles that are counterintuitive to our evolved nature: deferred gratification, competitive self-interest, and the tolerance of inequality as the price of dynamism. Those individuals and cultures that internalised these market values occupied a higher position in the civilisational hierarchy.
The implications Hayek drew from this narrative were sweeping. To sustain the modern world, Hayek believed, market selection must reign supreme, and its moral code, competitive self-interest, accumulation, the Darwinist sorting of winners and losers, must be understood as civilisational achievements to be aspired to, not pathologies to be corrected. The inherited instincts that call human beings towards justice, cooperation, and redistribution are vestiges of a tribal past that must be actively suppressed if civilisation is to survive.
This story solved a deep ideological problem. It gave neoliberal thinkers a story, a narrative anthropology that made the market order feel natural, even inevitable, a destiny, and it reframed resistance to that order as regression. This story was also fiction.
Hayek’s portrait of the tribal band as egalitarian, communal, and instinctual was partially derived from the Victorian imagination of pre-colonial Africa, the image of the “savage” living in primitive simplicity before European civilisation arrived to elevate him. As David Graeber and David Wengrow contend in The Dawn of Everything, drawing on decades of accumulated archaeological evidence, the standard narrative of a linear transition from egalitarian bands to hierarchical civilisations is not supported by the record. Early human societies were far more varied, politically sophisticated, and institutionally experimental than the savannah myth allows. Hayek reproduced the moral framework and logic of colonial hierarchy, whether or not he recognised it as such, and universalised it into a theory of civilisational destiny.
What Hayek’s foundational myth accomplished, stripped to its essentials, was to turn the profit motive into a civilisational pursuit. This is the specific claim on which the entire moral architecture of neoliberalism rests.
The Birth of Neoliberal Power
The market selection story was born, but it had nowhere to grow. In the aftermath of the Great Depression and WWII, the intellectual landscape was dominated by an overwhelming Keynesian consensus. Markets had failed, states had prevailed, and economic life would henceforth be managed. Hayek and Mises found themselves increasingly irrelevant as their warnings about planning, central authority, and the moral dangers of redistribution were overtaken by the tangible successes of post-war governance. History, for a time, seemed to have settled the argument.
The foundational architects of the Austrian School also found themselves at loggerheads. Mises regarded the state itself as the principal enemy of the market order. Hayek concluded that capitalism required a strong state, one capable of insulating the market from democratic pressure while refraining from directing economic life towards social ends. Neoliberalism as a political project would emerge from this Hayekian accommodation: the market order protected by state power, but never subordinated to it.
What the Austrian School lacked was a pragmatic operational vision, or in short, a way to govern, a way to actualise its theories. Milton Friedman supplied the manual. Friedman translated Austrian moral philosophy into a policy toolkit: monetarism via rules-bound central banking to manage inflation and govern in a fiat world, with the primary objective of guaranteeing market credibility. The Chicago-Austrian synthesis promised an impersonal, disciplined market order in which justice was subordinated to efficiency.
The convergence of Hayek and Friedman was institutionalised in 1947 with the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society, a transnational network of economists, philosophers, journalists, and financiers assembled to preserve a worldview in waiting. Neoliberalism was born with Austrian anthropology as its moral core, but it required over two decades of patience before the post-war Keynesian order began to fracture.
“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
– Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom, preface to the 1982 edition)
When President Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system in 1971 by breaking the dollar’s tether to gold, the decision was pragmatic. The United States was overstretched, running currency deficits it could no longer sustain in large part due to Vietnam War financing, and convertibility could not be maintained without either crushing domestic demand or surrendering geopolitical ambition. Nixon chose to continue the imperial project. But the decision shattered something fundamental, as monetary sovereignty dissolved into abstraction. Coupled with the 1973 oil crisis, governments around the world confronted stagflation, fiscal crises, labour unrest, and an inability to command capital flows. The Keynesian toolkit, designed for a world of fixed exchange rates and managed trade, looked antiquated. Friedman’s crisis had arrived.
In 1974, Hayek won the Nobel Prize. With renewed intellectual legitimacy, it was Friedman who supplied the governing levers to bring the Chicago-Austrian synthesis into the mainstream, as the only coherent framework capable of explaining the new reality and prescribing a response. By the time Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to power in the early 1980s, the intellectual groundwork had already been laid. Thatcher famously kept Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty in her handbag. Reagan, advised by Friedman and his students, framed inflation and regulation as enemies of freedom rather than political choices. The neoliberal “long march through the institutions” would begin to bear fruit. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, capital controls were dismantled, finance was deregulated, deindustrialisation accelerated, labour was disciplined, and public goods were privatised. Inflation control replaced full employment as the central policy objective.
On the international stage, the Volcker Shock completed the globalisation of the market order. In 1979, Paul Volcker, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, dramatically raised interest rates to control inflation. This transformed the developing world’s dollar-denominated debt into an existential crisis, forcing governments across Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe to seek IMF and World Bank assistance in the form of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) as a condition for survival. These institutions, increasingly staffed by Chicago-trained economists, exported neoliberal structural adjustment programmes that compelled states to liberalise trade, privatise public assets, and cut social spending, as they had previously done in Pinochet’s Chile. Crisis became the lever through which the market order was imposed on countries that had never chosen it, a dynamic that continues to shape the conditions of much of the Global South today.
In 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. The United States stood alone as the unopposed hegemon of the global order. Neoliberalism had won. Markets were ascendant, the state was restrained, and Hayekian moral anthropology became the background assumption of governance worldwide. Market logic became moral logic, and human beings were reframed as economic units of consumption in liberal democracies. It was, by all appearances, the end of history.
The House Always Wins
Unchallenged for decades, neoliberalism successfully re-engineered the modern state to deliver growth that was uneven, financialised, and detached from production. Its human consequences have become impossible to ignore. Inequality has reached levels unseen since the early 20th century. Wages across much of the developed world have stagnated despite rising productivity, while housing has been transformed from a social good into a speculative asset class, pricing entire generations out of stability. Financial crises have become more frequent and more severe, each resolved through larger central bank interventions designed to safeguard the market order rather than reform it. Across the Global South, the legacy of dollar-denominated debt, structural adjustment, and capital flight has produced a permanent condition of fiscal fragility, entrenched dependence, and elite corruption enabled by the system’s own architecture.
What is striking is the political direction these failures have produced. The 2008 financial crisis should have been the political left’s moment. Movements did emerge: Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britain, Bernie Sanders in America, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain. None has yet achieved lasting structural transformation. The left demonstrated that it possessed no credible institutional alternative beyond Keynesianism. The vacuum it failed to fill was claimed by a harder, more absolutist ideology drawn from the same Austrian tradition that had produced neoliberalism itself. This absolutist ideology represents a radicalisation within its own tradition. The neoliberal settlement was Hayekian: it accepted state power as a necessary instrument for insulating markets from democratic pressure. The new insurgency draws on the other branch, on Mises and his disciples Rothbard and Hoppe, who regarded the state itself as the enemy and democracy as an obstacle to the natural market order. The institutional compromise, or the Hayekian peace with state power, is being abandoned in favour of the older Misesian moral absolutism: the market is not something to be protected by institutions, but it is a force that requires no institutions at all.
On the political right, movements once framed as populist revolts increasingly reject redistribution, pluralism, and democratic mediation, while embracing markets as moral sorting mechanisms and inequality as natural hierarchy. In counter-establishment elite circles, similar assumptions reappear stripped of electoral politics entirely. Silicon Valley rationalists, Bitcoin maximalists, and hedge-fund libertarians articulate a world in which democracy is inefficient and social obligation is distortionary. What unites these factions is the abandonment of democratic consent as the primary source of legitimacy, as power migrates to networks, platforms, and privately governed systems.
The post-neoliberal moment produces multiple elite exits from democracy: some authoritarian, some technological, some pursuing capital mobility and jurisdictional arbitrage as ends in themselves. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the figure of the billionaire oligarch, the neoliberal order’s most consequential offspring, who now transcends corporate power and wields personal resources to advance an anarcho-capitalist world order by subverting democracy itself. In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama posited that the “last men” might restart history out of sheer boredom and the desire for megalothymia, the need to be recognised as superior. It is an apt heuristic for this new aristocracy. Peter Thiel epitomises it. Influenced by Curtis Yarvin and considered to be one of the errant philosopher’s chief patrons, Thiel said this on the founding of PayPal at the Libertopia conference in 2010: “The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world... We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.” The populist right, the libertarian cabals, and the billionaire aristocracy are converging, not as a backlash or revolt, but as a mutant coalition engaged in intra-elite warfare with the old neoliberal guard.
Nowhere is this more visible than in what is unfolding across Europe. On one side stands the status quo: EU technocratic governance, independent central banks, and rules-based integration, an order shaped by late 20th-century liberal internationalism and defended by figures such as George Soros, Christine Lagarde, and the Brussels institutional class. This vision seeks to preserve open markets, capital mobility, and supranational coordination while containing democratic volatility through legalism and technocracy. It is neoliberalism in its mature form.
Opposing it is a new insurgency that draws, often implicitly, on the harder edge of Austrian economic thought. The AfD, Reform UK and their allies present themselves as populist challengers to Brussels, hostile to regulation, sceptical of supranational law, and increasingly indifferent to democracy. Foreign money has fueled them. The Mercer Family Foundation funded Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the centre of the targeted disinformation campaign during the Brexit referendum. Elon Musk has platformed Tommy Robinson, amplifying far-right British activism within the global media ecosystem. Peter Thiel and Robert Shillman have funded movements, media ventures, and political personalities across the Atlantic, all with the common objective of weakening the EU regulatory state.
Europe has thus become the frontline of an intra-elite war over what form of capitalism emerges and endures: technocratic or plutocratic. Both sides accept the casino. They differ on whether democracy should be managed or rendered obsolete. Regardless of which faction prevails, the house always wins: the likely outcome is a more authoritarian market order, less accountable and more hierarchical than anything that preceded it.
God or Mammon
This intra-elite conflict is not new. Whether it appears as neoliberal technocracy, senatorial landowners, billionaire oligarchs, or Napoleons and Caesars, the underlying pattern is as old as civilisation itself: the capture of power, wealth, and legitimacy by a narrow elite, and the gradual hollowing out of the social order that sustains the polity. Markets change form, institutions evolve, and ideologies are renamed. The pattern endures.
Writing about Rome, Will and Ariel Durant observed in The Lessons of History that injustice was never corrected by legal means because law reflected the prevailing power dynamics. Reformers like the Gracchi were murdered, democracy was hollowed out, and stability was restored only through strongmen who preserved elite wealth while offering enough order to prevent outright collapse. The Durants’ pessimism is not about reform as such, but the absence of moral renewal. Without it, exploitation reasserts itself under new management. Rome did not reform itself morally before its fall. It was morally refounded after its collapse, as Christianity produced two divergent civilisational heirs, the Byzantine Empire in the East and Latin Christendom in the West, both of which constrained the very structures of elite domination that had characterised the late Republic.
Today, democracy appears unable to wield its legitimacy to restrain the worst excesses of the market order. The Hayekian moral anthropology that underwrites this order insists that it should not even try. The market is upstream of civilisational values, and inequality is the natural and desirable outcome of free exchange. Those who resist this are clinging to instincts that civilisation has outgrown. At the heart of what is missing from this moral anthropology is the recognition that what civilisation most values and depends on is the uneconomical transaction, made for the benefit of justice and charity. At scale, only the Abrahamic faiths (in the West, Christianity) have applied these principles. Shorn of these moral roots, there are no guardrails left to defend societies from the worst predations of the market—especially from the actors that seek to monopolise them for their own ends.
In the ancient world, Mammon personified the greed, materialism, and corrupting influence of wealth that demands ultimate loyalty and subordinates all of life to for-profit motives and accumulation. Today, Mammon has returned with renewed vigour as the Market God, and societies across the world now face a choice, articulated in its starkest form two millennia ago:
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”
Further Reading:
Hayek’s Bastards, Quinn Slobodian
The Invisible Doctrine, George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson
The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein
The Fatal Conceit, Friedrich Hayek
Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Democracy Will Not Survive the Age of Consumption
Author: Imran Khan works in big tech and is based in London. He is interested in the intersection between technological innovation, economic systems, and political history.
Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.
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