In seeking to confine the term ‘economy’ to organisations such as the family and the enterprise, Hayek drew on its ancient Greek origins in the word oikonomia, which signified the management of a household – an oikos. The multiple economic relations that defined the ancient oikos – those between masters and slaves, fathers and children, husbands and wives – were governed to ensure the household’s well-ordered functioning. The freedom that characterised Greek political life, for that minority of the population who could participate in it, relied on the labour of slaves and women, who were confined to the oikos. The household was devoted not to freedom but to the necessities of biological life, and was ruled by a household head with ‘uncontested, despotic powers’. Against this household model, Hayek borrowed the term ‘catallaxy’ to refer to the extended market order. Derived from the Greek verb katallatein, which meant both to exchange and ‘to turn from an enemy into a friend’, catallaxy embodied the neoliberal belief that the market was a peaceful realm of voluntary relations grounded in mutual interest. It served to distinguish a market society from the coercion and despotism the neoliberals took to be intrinsic to the political pursuit of shared ends.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 156