In the wake of the war, 'civilisation' was retooled in a social-democratic direction, and even liberals increasingly recognised that competing with the temptations on the left and the right required them to recognise the social and economic needs of the working classes. … 'To be civilized, in the old liberal sense', the historian Mark Mazower notes, 'was not necessarily to be modern'. … On the contrary, it was to prioritise a set of civil liberties and property rights that increasingly appeared antiquated. … For the neoliberals, too, these developments threatened to subject the whole world to totalitarianism. … The threat to the central values of civilisation, identified in the MPS statement of aims, was, first of all, a threat to market competition in the face of the 'revolt of the masses'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 143