It has been difficult to restrain our criticism while outlining the discussion in this chapter. Let us now comment on the neoliberal school of social and economic thought and its programs for development. Neoliberalism is founded on an assumption about the inherent nature of human beings, seen by von Mises as “egotistic and self-interested” and by Friedman as “imbued with freedom.” This assumption is elaborated into the further view that social phenomena are spontaneous, unplanned outcomes of choices made by rational, freedom-loving, self-interested individuals. Markets can harmonize these selfish choices. And markets and price systems are not conscious inventions but arise spontaneously. The question is: Does this vision have any basis in historical reality? Take markets, for instance. Karl Polanyi (1944) argues, to the contrary, that there was nothing natural or spontaneous about “free markets”—“The road to the free market was paved with continuous political manipulation, whether the state was involved in removing old restrictive regulations... or building new political administrative bodies.” Markets are social and institutional constructions that require rules and regulations to function effectively. The assumption of egotism made in neoliberal thought is pure make-believe. Was the person purely egotistical in feudal society, with its communal social orders and guild allegencies, or in the state societies of India and China, with their long traditions of social obligation and respect for order and ascribed position (as with the caste system in India—imposed by people with freedom in their hearts?)? We are dealing here with a fabrication, a utopian vision, a fantastic dream about an imagined past. The idea is that these natural qualities of the human being and these spontaneous events of history culminated in 19th-century laissez-faire liberal society, when the economy ran itself via self-regulating markets. But, as Polanyi says: “There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course.... Laissez-faire itself was enforced by the state.” The late 19th century was in fact full of state intervention, as with British imperialism. The countries that grew most powerful had the most state intervention (Chang 2002). As to the notion that markets are populated by autonomous, self-interested actors, economic sociology has argued conversely that actors in markets develop durable moral relationships of trust, with a sense of fairness and responsibility, while abstaining from opportunism (Granovetter 1985).