Appropriating the work of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson – for whom human history supposedly passed through a sequence of stages, from the hunter to the herdsman to the farmer to the trader – Hayek argued that the evolution from the ‘small band’ to the ‘Great Society’ required the abandonment of feelings of personal loyalty and egalitarian commitments more suitable to tribal existence. It required that the purpose-driven rules of small societies, in which individuals worked together towards shared ends, were replaced by abstract rules applicable to large numbers of strangers – and ultimately to all of humanity. From this perspective, the transition to the market economy was achieved through (deeply resented) breaches of the solidarity that governed earlier social relations. ‘Man’, Hayek contended, ‘has been civilized very much against his wishes.’

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 29