Today the word ‘totalitarianism’ evokes images of gulags and death camps. For the neoliberals who helped to pioneer the concept, its semantic sphere was much broader, encompassing all ‘collectivist’ interventions into the market order. ‘The common features of all collectivist systems’, Hayek wrote, ‘may be described, in a phrase ever-dear to socialists of all schools, as the deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal.’ The various collectivisms differed in the goals towards which they wished to direct society, he acknowledged; but they all differed from liberalism in refusing the supremacy of individual ends, and were therefore ‘totalitarian in the true sense of this new word which we have adopted to describe the unexpected but nevertheless inseparable manifestations of what in theory we call collectivism’.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 153