In so doing, he challenged not only socialist planning but also the positivism of neoclassical economics, telling both, in Michel Foucault's words, 'you cannot [act] because you do not know'. In his most influential article, The Role of Knowledge in Society (1945), Hayek distinguished between scientific knowledge of general laws and contextual knowledge of time and place, arguing that the specific knowledge possessed by individuals cannot be adequately aggregated or expressed in statistical form.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 211