Chilean constitutionalism weaponized individual rights to protect markets against democratic masses.

Evidence

If these men were struggling for human rights – and it is worth temporarily suspending disbelief – this was a distinctive notion of human rights for which preserving human dignity required protecting the person (and the market) from the political revolt of the masses. Guzmán, as his biographer Renato Cristi correctly notes, was more than Pinochet’s ‘crown jurist’: ‘When it came to constitutional matters, Guzmán wore the crown.’ The story of human rights and neoliberalism in Chile is not simply a story of the massive human rights violations that accompanied market reforms, or of the new human rights NGOs that contested the Junta’s violence. It is also the story of the institutionalisation of the conservative vision of neoliberal human rights, whose development I have traced in the previous chapters. Chile was the testing ground for a model of individual rights that aimed to depoliticise civil society and preserve the inequalities of a market order by protecting the market from the intrusions of ‘the masses’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 358

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reader’s human-rights-discourse reading — mirrors how Pinochet-era legalism flipped rights from empowerment to depoliticization, resonant with later critiques of rights-centric anti-poverty policy. — connects to: Constitutional social rights in Pinochet’s Chile empowered private enterprise over state provision. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 369; Chile’s 1980 constitution embedded Hayekian free-market ideals within a repressive state structure. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1591; Ordoliberals wanted to reduce democratic participation to protect the market — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 525 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the 1980 Chilean Constitution as the template where ‘rights’ became a market-protection device against popular sovereignty — how the same rights language anchors both NGO critique and junta legitimation.
• DEEPTHINKING: That the junta’s own constitutional order claimed to institutionalize human rights while repressing democracy — and that human rights NGOs missed this because they indicted lawlessness — is a paradigm-shifting inversion of the familiar rights-vs-dictatorship story.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order #expands (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76
• Constitutional social rights in Pinochet’s Chile empowered private enterprise over state provision. #corroborates (0.88) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 369
• Chile’s 1980 constitution embedded Hayekian free-market ideals within a repressive state structure. #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1591
• Ordoliberals wanted to reduce democratic participation to protect the market #corroborates (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 525
• France framed its civilizing mission as a duty to defend individual rights #complicates (0.75)