Roosevelt may have sought to distinguish government from politics, but, for the neoliberals, any challenge to the role of the market in distributing resources was a political threat to an open society. If the neoliberals were vehement opponents of the New Deal (and of the post-war welfare state), this was certainly not because they wanted to 'talk politics', or because they objected to the perpetuation of a sexual division of labour and racial segmentation. Rather, they believed that state-welfarism cushioned people from the consequences of their actions, and thereby undermined 'the moral and social health of the nations'. … Those, like himself, who were concerned with the foundations of liberal civilisation, he argued, held up 'the ideal of the well-ordered house – security through individual effort supplemented by mutual aid'. On the other side was a philosophy of collectivism, massification and family breakdown, which was embraced by demagogues and used to manipulate the masses. Holding up Roosevelt as the paradigmatic figure of such demagoguery, Röpke put the point in blunt terms: all talk of 'freedom from want' kills genuine freedom.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 167