Neoliberals saw capital controls as a fundamental threat to Western civilization.

Evidence

Who killed Bretton Woods? Scholars have yet to deliver a final verdict on the question of how and why we moved from an age of fixed but adjustable exchange rates and capital controls designed by John Maynard Keynes and others in 1944 to that of flexible rates and free capital movements in which we still live—a shift that proved fundamental for the neoliberal counter-revolution at large. After the Great Depression and well into the 1960s, most economists and policy-makers saw free markets for international capital and currency flows as too destabilizing for a robust and well-functioning capitalism. The neoliberals around the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) disagreed and the Bretton Woods order was a deep thorn in their side. In fact, they saw capital and exchange controls as one of the most fundamental threats not only to the market system but to Western civilization itself. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 407

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Mirowski’s broader MPS network literature and the ‘embedded liberalism’ framing common in Ruggie and the ordoliberalism scholarship. — connects to: Neoliberals anachronistically invented a Western-civilization lineage to delegitimize their opponents. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 70