Neoliberals anachronistically invented a Western-civilization lineage to delegitimize their opponents.

Evidence

The neoliberals portrayed these moral and subjective qualities as the products of a civilisation whose foundations were in Greece, Rome and Christianity, and whose ‘basic individualism’ was the inheritance of Erasmus, Montaigne, Cicero, Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides. This construction of Western civilisation was deeply anachronistic. Neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans understood themselves as part of ‘the West’, and nor were their various conceptions of the self and the subject compatible with neoliberal individualism. Yet the claim to speak on behalf of Western civilisation allowed the neoliberals to recast their adversaries not merely as representative of rival political and economic movements but as threats to civilisation and the freedoms and rights it provides. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 70

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the ‘Western civilization’ narrative was a constructed, anachronistic strategic weapon — not an inheritance but a rhetorical invention deployed to recast economic rivals as civilizational threats — is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about how political movements manufacture legitimating traditions.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in critique of political/rights discourse — the civilizational framing of political opponents parallels later human-rights discourse’s own universalism claims. — connects to: Western domination depended on inventing a singular undivided West; Neoliberals saw capital controls as a fundamental threat to Western civilization. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 407; Western civilization legitimizes dominance by narrating itself as temporal superiority — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 281

Broader Connections

• Western domination depended on inventing a singular undivided West #expands (0.85)
• Neoliberals saw capital controls as a fundamental threat to Western civilization. #exemplifies (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 407
• Western civilization legitimizes dominance by narrating itself as temporal superiority #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 281