Montesquieu wrote at a time when world trade was violent and dangerous, inseparable from colonial conquest and the slave trade. Marx mocked such accounts of the pacifying role of commerce in his writings on the 'primitive accumulation' of capital. After describing in garish detail the history of Dutch colonialism, with its secret prisons, assassinations, bribery and enslavement, he remarked sarcastically, 'That is peaceful [doux] commerce!' Yet, according to Hirschman, it was only when this violence 'came home' – with the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the social dislocation of the industrial revolution – that belief in the sweetness of commerce lost its grip on the European imagination. By the twentieth century, Hirschman concluded, no observer could still subscribe to this hopeful vision of the pacifying market. Its subsequent defenders therefore focused on its economic benefits, borrowing from Adam Smith to valorise the increased productivity and efficiency made possible by the division of labour. For most critics, the neoliberal thinkers exemplified this shift from a political to an economic justification for capitalism.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 33