In his writings from the 1930s to the 1980s, Haberler insisted that the open world economy was important as a means of disciplining potentially inflationary social spending and rash projects of industrialization – and the potential problems of the developing nations were never far from his mind.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Hayek began to suggest using the drafting of constitutions as a way to anchor economic freedoms against the attempts of legislatures to enact protectionist or redistributive policies.

Ordoglobalism was haunted by two puzzles across the twentieth century: first, how to rely on democracy, given democracy’s capacity to destroy itself; and second, how to rely on nations, given nationalism’s capacity to “disintegrate the world”.

Hayek’s message to Hutt and others was that a state captured by black voters would cease to be a problem if the state itself was stripped preemptively of its right to grant exemptions from the discipline of the competitive market.

Scaling national government up to the planet, creating a global government, was no solution. The puzzle of the neoliberal ­century was to find the right institutions to sustain the often strained balance between the economic world and the po­liti­cal world.