First rolled out in the analysis of the economic order, these epistemological ground rules were later extended by analogy to all “spontaneously arising orders”: common law, language, aesthetics, traditions, etc. By the end of the 1930s, the socialist calculation debate had been reframed in terms of the defence of liberalism against totalitarianism, giving political leverage to epistemological arguments which had been originally devised to discredit the idea of economic planning. Far from evident at the outset, this recoding has become a hallmark of neoliberal thinking.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 74