ABSTRACT
It seems a commonly accepted fact that neoliberalism has prevailed and dominated the last quarter of a century, at least in the Western hemisphere. Hayek’s ideas about what constitutes ‘true individualism’ and about the market as an institution that bears the promise of ensuring ‘spontaneous order’ have indeed been highly infl uential in the realm of political ideas. Rhetoric is one thing and reality another, however, for when it comes to the current regime of international economic governance Hayek’s ideas have had no impact whatsoever, it seems. The IFA endeavours to design and implement a particular social order to be adopted by all economies throughout the world. It is diffi cult to see in this regime of global disciplining an attempt to ‘prevent coercion by others’ and to ‘reduce the total of coercion to a minimum’. How can neo-liberalism have won, and Hayek lose? How did neo-liberalism become the mirror image of everything false and crooked in the eyes of its intellectual founding father?
