The treatment of abuses of civil rights on the same plane as the licensing of economic activity or the establishment of state monopolies reflected the refusal of the neoliberals to view the economy as a separate sphere, distinct from the political. Rather than an economy inhabited by egoistic 'man' and a political sphere inhabited by abstract citizens, the neoliberals argued that economic control was 'not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest, it is the control of the means for all our ends'. Securing freedom therefore required the shaping of a competitive market and the use of rights to protect the sphere of individual's means from political intervention. In contrast to the common argument that the entrenchment of neoliberalism saw the decline of 'social and economic rights', neoliberals had their own distinctive account of 'economic rights'. These were not the rights to food, clothing, housing and education enshrined in the UDHR, which sought to offer some protection from market forces. On the contrary, neoliberal 'economic rights' sought to protect the market freedom of private capital.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 430