All this was laid out clearly in the MPS’s original statement of aims, which condemned central economic direction because it conflicts with the ‘right of each individual to plan his own life’. Like the preamble of the UDHR, the neoliberal statement stressed freedom of speech, thought and expression, and restraint of arbitrary power. Rejecting now-outdated nineteenth-century laissez-faire, it framed the competitive market as the product of an appropriate institutional framework and a rule of law. It also noted that the trends leading towards ‘totalitarianism’ were not confined to the economic realm but had also emerged in morality, philosophy and the interpretation of history. Conflating communism, fascism and social democracy, the neoliberals argued that all systems that organise social efforts towards a single goal ‘are totalitarian in the true sense of this new word which we have adopted to describe the unexpected but nevertheless inseparable manifestations of what in theory we call collectivism’.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 71