Neoliberal human rights discourse entailed a duty to spread capitalism globally

Evidence

Rüstow prefigured this later anti-totalitarian politics of human rights in another way also – by articulating a human rights discourse that broke decisively with the defences of self-determination as a human right that echoed in the speeches at Bandung. In his paper ‘Human Rights or Human Duties?’, presented at the 1960 MPS meeting, Rüstow laid out a human rights–based duty to bring freedom to the world. In contrast to the common assumption that neoliberal human rights are individualistic, he argued that freedom is social, and that human rights therefore presuppose social relations mediated by the competitive market. What Rüstow elsewhere described as the ‘manly fight for human rights’ generated a robust duty to defend capitalism. Rüstow’s position was universalist, and, by extension, interventionist: we live in ‘one world’, he argued, and therefore have a duty to realise a vision of freedom for all humanity. The endpoint of this vision was a radically federalist global arrangement in which political options were limited by human rights, ‘ethics and legal standards’. In Rüstow’s neoliberal ‘anti-colonialism’, we see the emerging outlines of a world whose dominant human rights ideology entails a duty to enmesh all of humanity in the capitalist division of labour. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 283

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reading on human-rights discourse and its entanglement with market ideology — the reader’s stated purpose for this book. — connects to: Geneva School neoliberals co-opted human rights language to defend market freedoms — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 906; Human rights discourse flourished alongside welfare-state retrenchment and anti-revolutionary politics — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 8; Neoliberals deployed human rights language to justify property rights and dismantling welfare — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 7 (+16 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the specifically neoliberal conception of human rights as social, market-mediated, and universalist-imperialist rather than individualist.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals saw human rights standards as a way to depoliticize international economic relations #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 450
• Neoliberals held that rights originate from capitalism rather than nature #complicates (0.80)