Human rights discourse can be mobilised to defend property owners against popular demands

Evidence

Writing in The Times a month later, Conservative Party peer Daniel Finkelstein cited these events as reason to support the Human Rights Act. Comparing Corbyn to the former Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, he argued that this was ‘exactly the reason we have human rights protection’ – so people can ‘secure their individual liberty – in this case their right to property – when the popular will is against them’. For this wealthy lord, human rights were not for Grenfell’s survivors, among them undocumented migrants who, as Hannah Arendt noted long ago, should have been the exemplary subjects of human rights. Rather, human rights were necessary to protect a weak minority, Kensington’s absent property-owners, from the passions of the masses. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 4

In the wake of 2017’s devastating Grenfell fire, the leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, sparked outrage by calling for the requisitioning of empty investment properties to house survivors of the incinerated apartment block. As the survivors slept out in churches, mosques and local halls, Corbyn’s call to appropriate ‘land-banked’ houses challenged the sanctity of private property. Writing in The Times a month later, Conservative Party peer Daniel Finkelstein cited these events as reason to support the Human Rights Act. Comparing Corbyn to the former Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, he argued that this was ‘exactly the reason we have human rights protection’ – so people can ‘secure their individual liberty – in this case their right to property – when the popular will is against them’. For this wealthy lord, human rights were not for Grenfell’s survivors, among them undocumented migrants who, as Hannah Arendt noted long ago, should have been the exemplary subjects of human rights. Rather, human rights were necessary to protect a weak minority, Kensington’s absent property-owners, from the passions of the masses. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 4

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s critique that human rights exclude those who need them most — the stateless — and to the reader’s interest in how rights discourse serves market/neoliberal ends. — connects to: Critics saw the convention as erecting property rights over the human right to eat — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 469; Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 76; Neoliberals redeployed human rights to protect investors and property — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 428 (+8 more)
• SEED: Angle: human-rights language as a class weapon — how property rights get framed as the paradigmatic human right against ‘the popular will’.
• DEFINE: Shows how human-rights discourse gets appropriated by the wealthy to defend property — a concrete instance of the discursive contest the reader is tracking.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 4

Broader Connections

• Human rights language was mobilized against demands for postcolonial economic redistribution. #corroborates (0.95) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 379
• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order #corroborates (0.92) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76
• Neoliberals redeployed human rights to protect investors and property #corroborates (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 428
• Neoliberals deployed human rights language to justify property rights and dismantling welfare #corroborates (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 7
• Liberal human rights discourse actually licensed powerful states’ interventions for their corporations #corroborates (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 287
• Neoliberal human rights legitimize state violence to protect global markets. #corroborates (0.80)
• Human rights discourse flourished alongside welfare-state retrenchment and anti-revolutionary politics #corroborates (0.78) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 8
• Some slave insurgents framed their demands in the language of the Rights of Man #exemplifies (0.72) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 363