In a reversal of the scientific method, what is advanced as a philosophical set of arguments is then instantiated in reality. The individual as a disembedded, self-interested economic actor didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order. The imposition of the liberal order is accompanied by the legitimizing myth that its form was freely chosen by unencumbered individuals; that it was the consequence of extensive state intervention is ignored by all but a few
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