Hayek’s critique of the household model of the economy was not original. The nineteenth-century political philosopher John Stuart Mill was the first to criticise the belief that political economy ‘is to the state, what domestic economy is to the family.’ The management of a household is not a science but an art, Mill contended in 1844; it is, in Aristotle’s terms, a form of phronesis or practical wisdom, governed by maxims of prudence, and aimed at securing the greatest physical comfort or enjoyment with a given means. Political economy, in contrast, was not a governmental paradigm, but a scientific one; not the art of household management writ large, but a science with its own laws and truths.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 157