Although the neoliberals harked back to an earlier era of free trade, they also broke with the laissez-faire anti-imperialism of nineteenth-century liberalism and its assumption that free trade would naturally lead to harmony. Writing during World War II, Mises argued that, while earlier liberals had correctly recognised that there could be no conflicts between correctly understood interests, they had drastically overestimated the ability of the masses to understand their own interests. In typically aristocratic mode, he argued that liberalism had failed because 'most men are too dull to follow complex chains of reasoning'. … Mises contended that the success of a liberal market relied on an institutional and legal order that would shape liberal subjects. 'The essential feature of the advanced West was not its technique', he wrote (in terms that resonated with Charles Malik's arguments at Lake Success), 'but its moral atmosphere'; a competitive market would thrive only in a society that encouraged saving, entrepreneurship, and peaceful competition.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 264