A decade before Hayek, in 1958, Hannah Arendt had drawn on Myrdal to criticise the modern tendency to model ‘the people’ on the family and entrust their care to ‘a gigantic nation-wide administration of housekeeping’. For both Myrdal and Arendt, the collective establishment of ends was necessarily political, and could not be determined on the despotic model of the household head. For Hayek and the neoliberals, in contrast, the critique of the household model served to discredit all politics and to privilege the market as resource-allocator. For them, there were only two options: the simple conditions in which ‘the father can supervise the entire economic management’, as Mises put it, or a system of monetary calculation and market prices in which decisions on the allocation of resources are removed entirely from political oversight.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 158