However, Chicago neoliberalism transcends the classical liberal tension between the self-interested agent and the patriotic duty of the citizen by reducing both state and market to the identical flat ontology of the neoclassical model of the economy. (The situation prevalent at MPS was much more complex.) “Freedom” was recoded to mean only the capacity for self-realization attained through individual striving for a set of necessarily unexplained (and usually interpersonally ineffable) prior wants and desires. Once this new lexicon was firmly set in place, it became impossible within this discourse to regard any economic transaction whatsoever as coercive (Smith 1998, 80), which was a massive departure from prior classical liberal discourse.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 777