The neoliberals portrayed these moral and subjective qualities as the products of a civilisation whose foundations were in Greece, Rome and Christianity, and whose 'basic individualism' was the inheritance of Erasmus, Montaigne, Cicero, Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides. This construction of Western civilisation was deeply anachronistic. Neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans understood themselves as part of 'the West', and nor were their various conceptions of the self and the subject compatible with neoliberal individualism. Yet the claim to speak on behalf of Western civilisation allowed the neoliberals to recast their adversaries not merely as representative of rival political and economic movements but as threats to civilisation and the freedoms and rights it provides.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 70