The neoliberals saw human rights and competitive markets as mutually constitutive. In his bestselling polemic The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argued that all claims made on behalf of individuals could be attributed to the rise of the 'commercial spirit'. ' "The ideas of 1789" – liberty, equality, fraternity – are characteristically commercial ideals which have no other purpose but to secure certain advantages to individuals', he wrote. For the author of The Road to Serfdom and his fellow neoliberals, the competitive market made individual rights possible, but the market's functioning also depended on the rule of law and the 'recognition of the inalienable rights of the individual, inviolable rights of man'. Hayek's account of the rights of man owed much to his more utilitarian mentor Mises, whose 1922 study of socialism argued that individual rights had emerged 'hand in hand with the development of capitalism'. Once 'men' gained economic freedom, Mises argued, they soon desired it elsewhere, and sought 'legal recognition of the subjective rights of citizens'. Rights, according to this perspective, do not inhere naturally in the human person; rather, they arise only when the capitalist division of labour allows individuals to pursue their own interests and values, freeing them from the arbitrary power of others. It was only capitalism, Mises argues, that made human relationships material and calculable, and brought freedom from the heavens down to earth: 'Such freedom is no natural right.'

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 41