One of my key arguments here is that the neoliberal argument for the competitive market was itself moral and political, rather than strictly economic. Early neoliberals attributed to the market a series of anti-political virtues: checking and dispersing power, facilitating social cooperation, pacifying conflict, and securing individual liberty and rights. They presented commercial or 'civil society' as a space of mutually beneficial, voluntary relations that contrasted with the violence, coercion and conflict of the political realm. Market coordination was less a means to enhance productivity and efficiency than a substitute for the violence, coercion and despotism that they argued were endemic to politics – and especially to mass politics. Only the widespread adoption of the morals of the market, Hayek argued, offered 'the distant hope of a universal order of peace'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 31