Neoliberal order theorists saw authoritarian state coercion as protecting the market’s spontaneous order

Evidence

In Chile, Hayek praised the junta for its willingness to run the country ‘without being obsessed with popular commitments or political expectations of any kind’. Coercion was justified, he believed, to ‘provide an effective external framework within which self-generating orders can form’. The fragile ‘spontaneous order’ of the market required a strong state to protect it from political interference. … James Buchanan struck a similar note in his paper ‘Limited or Unlimited Democracy’, presented at the regional Mont Pèlerin Society meeting in Viña del Mar, the Chilean seaside town where the coup was plotted. The Virginia School neoliberal criticised the ‘totalitarian thrust of unlimited democracy’, and stressed that any government (whether a democracy or a ‘junta’) must be strictly limited for the sake of ‘insuring and protecting individual liberties’. … The single proactive role of the state, he contended, would be ‘to enforce market discipline on society’. In Chile, constitutionally enshrined rights, including human rights, became tools for enforcing such market discipline. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 364

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Naomi Klein’s account of the Chicago Boys in Chile, and to Milton Friedman’s Market Forces in Chile defense of the junta. — connects to: Neoliberal freedom amounts to submission to market sovereignty enforced by price fluctuations; Neoliberal market freedom required state violence to enforce submission to the market — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 328; Dictatorship solved the neoliberal problem of replacing popular sovereignty with market sovereignty — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 330 (+8 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies the neoliberal theory that the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market must be actively shielded by a strong coercive state — the core paradox of market-state relations in this literature.
• SEED: Could support an essay on how contemporary austerity advocates inherit the Pinochet-era framing that democracy must be limited to protect market stability.

Broader Connections

• Ordoliberalism makes state policy the guardian of fragile market mechanisms #corroborates (0.90) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1258
• Neoliberals pursued an engineered order rather than expecting free markets to emerge naturally #corroborates (0.88) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1907
• Thatcherism fused authoritarian state power with free-market neoliberalism #exemplifies (0.85)
• Neoliberal spontaneous-order rhetoric masks theorists’ Schmittian power to define state sovereignty #qualifies (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2196
• Neoliberalism reversed the state’s protective role toward shielding markets #qualifies (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 745