Hayek himself almost never treated knowledge as a "thing," but instead rather as tacit, local, and embodied—rather similar to the way in which Michael Polanyi described science. However, in order to render this proposition coherent with a number of other tenets later developed in the neoliberal thought collective, many subsequent neoliberals found it convenient to recast knowledge as more resembling a thing-like commodity, if only to have it resonate more closely with developments in the natural sciences and economics.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 2162