Hayek feared UN selectivity more than apartheid itself
Evidence
Hayek’s public statement on South Africa echoed Friedman’s. Amid widespread criticism of the visits he and Friedman paid to Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, Hayek complained in 1977 of the “international character assassination” aimed not just at the South American nation but at South Africa too, a country he would visit for the second time the following year. While condemning apartheid in strong terms, he expressed fear that the “arbitrary measures” of the UN in singling out certain nations for punishment had become one of the greatest threats to the liberal world economy. “The U.N. can only protect its influence,” he wrote, “when boycotts or similar matters against individual countries are instituted according to set and posted rules, not when it lets itself be seduced through vote-catching in individual cases.” — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 585
Categorization
- SEED: Angle: ‘procedural liberalism’ — the priority of set-and-posted rules over substantive justice outcomes in the neoliberal canon, traceable through Hayek’s UN positions.
- XREF: connects to: Hayek and Mises favored global governance, not unfettered free markets — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 79; Apartheid collapsed partly because its collectivism clashed with global neoliberal individualism — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1566
Broader Connections
- Apartheid collapsed partly because its collectivism clashed with global neoliberal individualism
#expands(0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1566