Human rights discourse flourished alongside welfare-state retrenchment and anti-revolutionary politics

Evidence

The language of human rights is notoriously slippery, marked by a ‘tactical polyvalence’ (in Michel Foucault’s words) according to which the effect of identical formulations differs ‘according to who is speaking, his position of power [and] the institutional context in which he happens to be speaking’. Nonetheless, to recognise that human rights lack a single meaning – that they are contingent political discourses, not unchangeable, metaphysical attributes of human nature – is not enough to explain the ease with which human rights discourses have been mobilised in defence of wealth and power in the period of neoliberal hegemony. Nor does it explain why it was that a distinctive politics of human rights became prevalent in the period of neoliberal ascendancy and flourished alongside the retrenchment of the welfare state. It does not help us explain why, as the neoliberals instituted a closure of the political imagination by insisting that there was no alternative to endless austerity, human rights defenders disparaged revolutionary politics as totalitarian. For some of their most prominent defenders, the role of human rights was ‘not to open the gates of paradise, but to bolt the gates of hell’ (in the French ‘New Philosopher’ André Glucksmann’s words). — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 8

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Foucault’s ‘tactical polyvalence’ as a way of treating human rights as contingent political discourse rather than fixed meaning.
• QUESTION: Why exactly did human rights politics rise concurrently with welfare retrenchment — is this the book’s central causal puzzle to track.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 8
• XREF: 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; Human rights discourse can be mobilised to defend property owners against popular demands — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 4; Meritocratic racelessness discourse accompanied the neoliberal retreat from the welfare state — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1739 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Meritocratic racelessness discourse accompanied the neoliberal retreat from the welfare state #corroborates (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1739
• Neoliberals actively shaped the postwar human rights discourse that later legitimized markets #expands (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 40
• Neoliberals deployed human rights language to justify property rights and dismantling welfare #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 7
• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76
• Neoliberals saw human rights standards as a way to depoliticize international economic relations #expands (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 450
• Human rights NGOs absorbed the neoliberal civil-society-versus-coercive-state dichotomy #exemplifies (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 60
• Neoliberal human rights discourse entailed a duty to spread capitalism globally #expands (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 283