Röpke, who was in the audience during Robbin’s lecture and enjoyed it ‘tremendously’, borrowed terms from Roman law to define this vision of liberal peace. A liberal economy, he argued, separates imperium from dominium, ownership from sovereignty, and therefore prevents conflicts over resources. Referring back to the liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith, he described the (old) liberal principle as that of the ‘thorough separation between the spheres of the government and of economy, between sovereignty and the apparatus which provides material goods, between the Imperium and the Dominium, between the political power and the economic power’. It was a central article of faith for the neoliberal thinkers that a state that rules an area rich in natural resources does not own those materials, which are owned by private individuals who may enter into mutually beneficial relations for their sale. Multilateral relations of trade allow industrial nations to obtain raw materials by running their export chains through several countries, neutralising state borders and making the political rule of regions rich in resources unnecessary, Röpke argued. The goal, as Quinn Slobodian puts it in his striking account of neoliberal ‘globalism’, was a liberal world in which ‘nobody would mistake the lines on the map for meaningful marks in the world of dominium’.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 258