Hayek framed social rights demands as atavistic tribal regressions threatening civilization

Evidence

In attributing the development of morality to the ‘survival of the successful’, Hayek presented a racialised narrative that took for granted that those Europeans who had developed commercial relations were more successful than others. He saw their success as a result of their adoption of ‘moral conceptions which do not prescribe particular aims but rather general rules limiting the range of permitted actions’. In his contemporaries’ demands for social justice and social and economic rights Hayek saw atavistic attempts on the part of ‘the non-domesticated or un-civilized’ members of society to resurrect the morals of a ‘tribal society’. From such a perspective, socialism and social democracy were not merely economic threats to the productivity and efficiency of economic relations; they were civilisational regressions, the return of ‘suppressed primordial instincts’ that threatened the moral foundations of the competitive market. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 30

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how the same evolutionary-selection idiom that grounds market ethics also smuggles in a racialized civilizational hierarchy — useful for a piece on the hidden racial content of putatively neutral market morality.
• XREF: Ties into Robinson’s Black Marxism theme that putatively universal European theory encodes racialized narratives of who counts as civilized. — connects to: Hayek attacked rights language only when tied to centralized economic planning. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 410; Hayek framed individual rational self-direction as dangerous civilizational hubris — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 227; Hayek feared moral and religious decline could destroy market civilization (+5 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 30

Broader Connections

• Hayek rejected social and economic rights as incoherent and unenforceable #expands (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 145
• Hayek cast market progress as requiring the abandonment of tribal solidarity and egalitarian loyalties #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 29
• Hayek treated inherited inequality as natural and rejected state correction as impracticable #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 222