What did the neoliberals pose against the nation? Not only the world economy but the individual. In 1931 LSE economist William H. Hutt coined the term “consumer sovereignty.” Hayek ­adopted the term in 1935, and Bonn used it in 1933. For Hutt it was a solution to the demands of national sovereignty. As the term implied, it was not the nation-­state represented by legislatures that was sovereign but the individual within it. Hayek wrote that socialists, who allocated resources from above, ­were demanding the “abrogation of the sovereignty of the consumer.” He followed his Austrian pre­de­ces­sor Carl Menger by seeing the true creative force in the economy as ­those who ­either accept or reject a price, and by rejecting a price, produce a new one. At a time when nation-­states ­were claiming more and more of something called “sovereignty,” Hayek pickpocketed the term and reassigned it from the nation to the individual consumer.

Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, loc. 401