This book begins in the late 1940s, with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society. The early parts of the book explore those strands of neoliberal thought that were particularly focused on the requirements of a 'civilisation' that early neoliberals depicted as indistinguishably moral, racial and economic. In the first three chapters, I focus predominantly on early neoliberalism, and on the leading figures associated with the Austrian School of economics and the ordoliberalism of the German Freiburg School. The central characters of these first chapters are Austrian School figures Mises and Hayek, British economist Lionel Robbins, German ordoliberals Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow, Swiss diplomat and economist William Rappard, and French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel – though many others make cameo appearances. While not without their significant disagreements with one another, these figures were united by a concern with world order (as Quinn Slobodian has highlighted), and by the conviction that international economic integration presupposed what Röpke called 'extra-economic integration (social-political-moral-institutional-legal integration)'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 63