Drawing on the theorisation of the market as information processor that enabled people to draw on dispersed, tacit knowledge, developed by his MPS colleague Hayek, Bauer depicted the market as a system of disseminated knowledge and mutually beneficial free exchange that produces order without the need for conscious and deliberate planning. Prices for raw materials were set by the market and not determined by the West, he argued – they were the products of numerous individual decisions, and not of the actions of a single decision-maker or of collective collusion. For the neoliberals, any intervention that altered the results achieved by the subtle mechanism of the price system would prevent its feedback loops from operating. … But the neoliberals' argument was not simply economic; rather, they followed Montesquieu in arguing that, as commercial relations were founded on mutual need, the 'natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace'. Neoliberal thinkers depicted the market as a realm of peaceful and mutually beneficial relations, and portrayed politics as a Schmittian field of friend/enemy distinctions and violent coercion.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 403