Far from reducing all of life to economics, I show that the neoliberals of the mid twentieth century were deeply suspicious of the very idea of the economy. In his polemical 1944 critique of socialist planning, The Road to Serfdom, the founder of the Mont Pèlerin Society, Friedrich Hayek, complained about his contemporaries’ preoccupation with economic concerns. The values that rank lowest today and are dismissed as nineteenth-century illusions, he argued, are the ‘moral values’ – ‘liberty and independence, truth and intellectual honesty, peace and democracy, and respect for the individual qua man instead of merely as the member of an organized group’. Around the same time, the German ordoliberal Wilhelm Röpke criticised the ‘economism’ that ‘judges everything in relation to the economy and in terms of material productivity, making material and economic interests the center of things’.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 20