Unlike Hirschman, I argue that a version of this justification of capitalism was central to neoliberal thought in the inauspicious circumstances of the twentieth century. For Hayek, who described his own project as doing 'for the twentieth century what Montesquieu had done for the eighteenth', and for his neoliberal colleagues, the challenge was to revive the argument that a society coordinated through the competitive market would replace the coercion, conquest and conflict endemic to politics with voluntary, mutually beneficial, harmonious social relations. The tendency to view neoliberalism as the dominance of the economy over all other spheres of life has obscured its distinctive political argument for the competitive market. Throughout the twentieth century, neoliberals argued that the demise of market competition was a threat to individual freedom that augured the rule of a coercive, bureaucratic power. They faulted socialism and social democracy for politicising distribution and replacing consensual market relations between individuals with violent sectional conflicts over ends. In the wars of the twentieth century, they saw the inevitable result of a turn away from the market economy.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 34