His deprecation of a language of “classes” drew on an insight that advocates of free markets should represent themselves as guardians of government neutrality, in contrast to a perceived leftwing tendency to divide societies into oppositional groups. He hoped to turn his po liti cal allies into defenders of equality and the ordinary individual, and interventionists into practitioners of social differentiation and paternalist elites. Characteristically, Friedman solved a rhetorical problem by restructuring the terms of the debate.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 487