In the summer of 1940, Hayek was pondering the fate of his own family. Then living in London, the Austrian economist believed it likely that he might soon be killed by enemy bombing. Fearing the worst, he considered a number of offers to place his small children with ‘some unknown family’, who would presumably continue to raise them if he did not survive the war. In the most concrete terms, he considered the relative merits of sending his children to the United States, Argentina or Sweden, on the assumption that their social position in the country would be determined largely by chance. From behind this veil of ignorance, Hayek decided that ‘the very absence in the US of the sharp social distinctions which would favour me in the Old World should make me decide for them in favour of the former’. The absence of aristocratic hierarchies and the relative social equality produced by the New Deal, he recognised, would give his children the best possible chance in life. As if as an afterthought, Hayek then added a bracketed qualifying sentence: ‘(I should perhaps add that this was based on the tacit assumption that my children would there be placed with a white and not with a coloured family.)’ In the midst of an anecdote that Hayek introduced in order to justify the impersonal allocation of social positions through the market, white supremacy appeared between two brackets, as a ‘tacit assumption’ underpinning a narrative of success through hard work and chance. Hayek’s Rawlsian thought experiment thus exemplified Saidiya Hartman’s claim that ‘abstract equality produces white entitlement and black subjection’. The ignorance that Hayek often argued prevents us from altering the distributional outcomes of the market was, patently, what Charles Mills calls ‘white ignorance’, which makes the liberal social contract a ‘racial contract’.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 221