At stake in this emancipatory language was an attempt to mobilise the republican valorisation of freedom and independence against a welfare system that was implicitly racialised and aligned with slavery, blackness and dependence. But the centrality of this myth of independence to neoliberal attacks on welfare goes back much further than Reagan, as does the association of state welfare provision with moral hazard and family breakdown. For Röpke, the most serious symptom of the revolt of the masses was the decline of the family. As the family is 'the natural sphere of the woman, the proper environment for raising children and indeed the parent cell of the community', the German neoliberal argued that women were the real victims of a welfare state that prevented them fulfilling their 'vital functions'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 175