This conception of the market also had its theological lineage, as earlier neoliberals were well aware. Yet, rather than being structurally modelled on the miraculous interventions of a transcendent God, the idea of the market as a natural order had the same systematic structure as a world ordered by an absent God who governed exclusively through natural laws. Neoliberalism was founded on the rejection of this model of the market, which the German ordoliberal Alexander Rüstow disparaged as a reflection of theological faith in the 'eternal wisdom of the natural law'. Wilhelm Röpke mocked the idea that the competitive market was a natural order 'miraculously directed by the "invisible hand" mentioned by Adam Smith, which in reality is nothing but the "divine reason" of deistic philosophy'. The problem with such a belief, according to the neoliberals, was that it led to misplaced optimism about the self-regulating properties of the market, and neglect of the 'non-economic prerequisites' of a market economy, including its moral prerequisites.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 332