A leading neoliberalism theorist grounded anticolonial critique in natural law and human rights

Evidence

Rüstow was distinctive among neoliberal thinkers in the period of decolonisation in his conviction that colonialism was ‘a bloody stain on the historic record of humanity, an endless chain of gravest crime against humanitarianism’. Along with his pragmatic concerns about the propaganda value the Soviets were drawing from European colonialism, he grounded his critique in natural law, which he depicted as ‘the legal armory of the struggle for freedom and human rights’. Singling out the cruelty of the Spanish conquistadores, he denounced the sharp contrast between their ‘unrestrained bestiality’ and their ‘professions of Christianity and the values of their Western civilization’. Challenging the rhetoric of the civilising mission, he denounced the colonial powers for trampling on the ‘human dignity of the colonial peoples’, and labelled their claims to be carrying out the ‘white man’s burden’ pure hypocrisy. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 278

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on whether early neoliberalism embraced anticolonial natural-law traditions, relevant to the reader’s interest in human-rights discourse and market ethics.
• QUESTION: How widely shared was natural-law/human-rights language among early neoliberals versus later figures who rejected universal rights discourse?