Rüstow had developed his position regarding the concept of the human person in a critical dialogue with Carl Schmitt, the legal philosopher who had erected an anti-liberal edifice of thought throughout the 1920s and whom Rüstow had admired for some time. In a letter to Schmitt from July 4, 1930, Rüstow remarked on the relation between a value-based rule of law and a self-limiting notion of “the political.” “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that the idea of a democratic state based on the concept of humanity represents not only a possible, but in a certain way an unavoidable utopia.” Other early neoliberals followed similar arguments, particularly Röpke, who built his “Civitas Humana” on the same fundamental concept, calling it at times “economic humanism” or “humane economy.”

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 358