Christian Arnsperger (2007) has captured the double truth doctrine nicely by insisting that Hayek had denied to others the very thing that gave his own life meaning: the imprimatur to theorize about society as a whole, to personally claim to understand the meaning and purpose of human evolution, and the capacity to impose his vision upon them through a political project verging on totalitarianism. It was, as Arnsperger puts it, a theory to end all theories; not so different from the end of history scenarios so beloved of his epigones. The doctrine of special dispensation for the Elect is a very powerful source of ongoing attraction of neoliberalism for a certain type of person, the feeling of having surrendered to the wisdom of the market by coming to know something most of the nattering crowd can’t possibly glimpse: freedom itself must be as unequally distributed as the riches of the marketplace.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 2148