In his letter to Commentary, Bauer protested the ‘fanciful’ contention of ‘The United States in Opposition’ that Third Worldism was a variant of Fabian Socialism. Moynihan’s vision of the Third World as ‘a brotherhood of gradually evolving Fabians’, he argued, obscured the blatant reality that it was in fact characterised by virulent antagonism to the West and the market system, and severe maltreatment, including expropriation and massacre, of millions of people. Despite rejecting this account of Third Worldism as a form of Fabianism, he nonetheless held late British colonial policy responsible for the politicisation of economic life in the former colonies. At the end of the British Empire, he argued, updating earlier neoliberal criticisms of Britain’s Fabian-inspired post-war colonial policy, limited government had been replaced by economic controls and ‘the ready-made framework of a dirigiste or even totalitarian state was handed over by the British to the incoming independent governments’.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 433