The neoliberals generally have to bend in pretzels to deny that in their ideal state, law is a system of power and command, and is, rather, a system of neutral general rules applicable equally to all, grounded in something other than the intentional goals of some (that is, their own) group’s political will. As Raymond Plant explains, for the Rothbard anarchists, this is something like natural law; for the Buchanan-style public-choice crowd, it is contract theory; for Chicago economics, it is a world where the economy is conflated with the universe of human existence; and for Hayek, it is his own idiosyncratic notion of cultural evolution. In everyday neoliberalism, the Chicago story seems to win out. However, in the recent crisis, the evolution story has been brought out of mothballs, as we shall observe in chapter 6.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 160