Neoliberals framed the spread of markets as dependent on moral and religious foundations

Evidence

If economic disintegration was a product of moral disintegration, then a revival of dreams of perpetual peace required the development of moral and legal standards to support the global spread of the competitive market by protecting private property and human dignity. The market economy, Röpke argued, ‘belongs essentially to a liberal social structure and one which respects individual rights’, while non-market, collectivist coordination is coercive, ignoring such rights. … For the neoliberals, human rights could only play this role if they broke with the rationalism of the French Revolution and fostered submission to the market order. While Christianity could not provide history or the market with a providential guarantee, they believed it could secure the moral foundations of a competitive market order ‘truly compatible with human dignity’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 120

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the core neoliberal framing that market order depends on moral, not merely institutional, foundations.
• XREF: Connects to the broader austerity/neoliberalism reading list — the moral legitimation of markets recurs in Wendy Brown’s and Philip Mirowski’s work. — connects to: Free-market advocates believed market defense required a holistic spiritual worldview — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 354; Neoliberalism’s distinctiveness was not homo economicus but a demand for moral foundations for markets. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 19; Neoliberal thinkers rejected natural-rights foundations, deriving morality from market evolution — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 28 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals traced market morality back to eighteenth-century liberal philosophy #expands (0.78) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 205