In attributing the development of morality to the ‘survival of the successful’, Hayek presented a racialised narrative that took for granted that those Europeans who had developed commercial relations were more successful than others. He saw their success as a result of their adoption of ‘moral conceptions which do not prescribe particular aims but rather general rules limiting the range of permitted actions’. In his contemporaries’ demands for social justice and social and economic rights Hayek saw atavistic attempts on the part of ‘the non-domesticated or un-civilized’ members of society to resurrect the morals of a ‘tribal society’. From such a perspective, socialism and social democracy were not merely economic threats to the productivity and efficiency of economic relations; they were civilisational regressions, the return of ‘suppressed primordial instincts’ that threatened the moral foundations of the competitive market.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 30