Contra Klein and Letelier, the neoliberals did not treat their technical economic agenda and the junta’s political repression as ‘entirely unrelated’. On the contrary, neoliberalism in Chile, as elsewhere, was always a political (or anti-political) project that found its normative justification in its claim to enhance the form of freedom that only a competitive market could provide. … Pinochet’s dictatorship offered a solution to a seemingly intractable neoliberal problem: how to replace popular sovereignty with the sovereignty of the market. It demonstrated what was necessary, in a context defined by strong collective politics and norms of solidarity, to induce subjects to abandon romanticism and the political contestation of ends, and adopt the morals of the market.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 330