Early neoliberals attacked economism rather than reducing life to economics.

Evidence

Far from reducing all of life to economics, I show that the neoliberals of the mid twentieth century were deeply suspicious of the very idea of the economy. In his polemical 1944 critique of socialist planning, The Road to Serfdom, the founder of the Mont Pèlerin Society, Friedrich Hayek, complained about his contemporaries’ preoccupation with economic concerns. The values that rank lowest today and are dismissed as nineteenth-century illusions, he argued, are the ‘moral values’ – ‘liberty and independence, truth and intellectual honesty, peace and democracy, and respect for the individual qua man instead of merely as the member of an organized group’. Around the same time, the German ordoliberal Wilhelm Röpke criticised the ‘economism’ that ‘judges everything in relation to the economy and in terms of material productivity, making material and economic interests the center of things’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 20

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the common left critique that neoliberalism = economisation of all life; relates directly to the reader’s interest in market-ethics debates. — connects to: Early postwar free-market advocates were riddled with internal tensions, not doctrinaire ideologues. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 32; Neoliberals rejected ‘economy’ because it implied manageable collective ends. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 21; Early neoliberals explicitly distanced themselves from classical laissez-faire doctrine — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 117 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Contrasts economy-as-household-management (oikonomia) against the market order as a non-manageable spontaneous whole — a load-bearing conceptual distinction developed in the next paragraph.

Broader Connections

• Early neoliberals explicitly distanced themselves from classical laissez-faire doctrine #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 117
• Neoliberalism defined itself in opposition to the constructed object of the economy #corroborates (0.82) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1919
• Early neoliberals rejected laissez-faire and wanted strong state action #expands (0.80)
• Early neoliberalism rejected laissez-faire in favor of a state-built competitive order. #expands (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 365
• Early neoliberalism emerged partly from a critique of laissez-faire and naturalist philosophies of history #corroborates (0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 379