From the perspective of this book, these accounts of the amoral economism of neoliberalism miss the distinctive morality that was central to its rise. What distinguished the neoliberals of the twentieth century from their nineteenth-century precursors, I argue, was not a narrow understanding of the human as homo economicus, but the belief that a functioning competitive market required an adequate moral and legal foundation. As Foucault recognised of the German ordoliberals, neoliberal thinkers aimed to establish (or revive) a set of moral values that would secure social integration in a context of market competition. The founding statement of the Mont Pèlerin Society makes this clear: diagnosing a civilisational crisis characterised by the disappearance of the conditions for ‘human dignity’ and threats to freedom of thought and expression, it states that these developments ‘have been fostered by the growth of a view of history which denies all absolute moral standards’. Rather than an external supplement, or a pragmatic partner, social conservatism, including explicit appeals to family values, Christianity and ‘Western civilisation’, was foundational to the consolidation of organised neoliberalism in the mid twentieth century.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 19