For all their undoubted diversity, the neoliberals of the early Mont Pèlerin Society were largely united around the programme outlined in Friedman’s short paper. At the inaugural MPS meeting, Hayek argued that, while it is known that a functioning market relies on the ‘protection of certain rights, such as property and the enforcement of contracts’, it was only once this was accepted that ‘the real problem begins’. In The Road to Serfdom, he faulted previous liberals for neglecting the fact that a competitive market requires an ‘appropriate legal system’, and stressed that it was ‘by no means sufficient that the law should recognise the principle of private property and freedom of contract’. Human rights played an important role in the neoliberal attempt to develop an appropriate legal system and moral framework for a global capitalist market. The rights they formulated were not the rights of man that Marx had criticised. The correlate of seeing the competitive market as the sine qua non of peace, freedom and rights is that that neoliberal human rights exist not so much to protect the individual – even the egoistic individual – as to preserve the market order.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 45