Neoliberal legal scholars opposed constitutional privacy rights and favored private contracts instead

Evidence

However easy it is to dismiss the idea of Kensington’s absentee investors as the subjects of human rights, it is more difficult to demarcate a ‘true’ human rights discourse from cynical appropriations of it. The ‘human right to dominate’ exists alongside the human rights of the dominated, and human rights have often proved more useful in protecting the wealthy and legitimising the interventions of the most powerful states than in protecting the powerless. Rather than being an isolated instance, Finkelstein’s argument for the human rights of property owners has a long lineage among neoliberal politicians and thinkers. When former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher began privatising council housing in the 1980s, she justified it as a way to secure human rights. Evoking a deep connection between liberty and property, Thatcher argued that ‘countries which deny private property rights also deny other human rights’. The claim that property rights are an ‘essential foundation for other human rights’, as the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman put it, provided a political justification for the neoliberal counter-revolution of the late twentieth century. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 7 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

This neoliberal legacy was a windfall for the new surveillance capitalists. As another legal scholar, Frank Pasquale, observed, it produced a model that treated privacy as a competitive good, assuming that “consumers” engage only with services that offer the level of privacy they seek. Regulatory interference, according to this view, would only undermine competitive diversity. It also credits the “notice and consent” model—click-wrap and its “sadistic” relatives—as accurate signals of individual privacy choices. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 348 (#expands, via linked claim)

Faced with the rise of collectivist mass politics, mid-twentieth-century neoliberalism was a defensive liberalism. Breaking with the optimism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the early neoliberals believed the survival of the competitive market required the re-establishment of its moral foundations. It was through this lens that they viewed human rights. Redefined to exclude social protections, human rights, they believed, could protect the market order by securing property and private investment and fostering the morals of the market. From the neoliberal perspective, the UN human rights process, with its expansion of membership beyond the bounds of the ‘civilised’ family of nations, and its challenges to racial hierarchies, threatened the continuity of civilisation. But the neoliberals saw the potential for the language of human rights to provide that ‘generally observed and undisputed code of moral norms and principles of behavior’ which, the German ordoliberal Wilhelm Röpke argued, was the precondition of economic integration. Human rights, from this perspective, were not a product of international consensus. They were a product of ‘Western civilisation’, and their role was to support the extension of capitalist social relations by fostering the legal security, morals and forms of subjectivity conducive to an international market order. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Privacy law’s negative liberty tradition conflicts with capitalism’s data extraction drive. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 549; Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 76; Neoliberal ideology framed privacy as a competitively traded good to justify deregulation — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 348 (+5 more)

Related

• Neoliberals deployed human rights language to justify property rights and dismantling welfare (similarity 0.83)
• Neoliberal ideology framed privacy as a competitively traded good to justify deregulation (similarity 0.83)
• Property rights discourse was wielded as a human rights claim to justify neoliberal privatization (similarity 0.82)
• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order (similarity 0.81)
• Neoliberal ‘economic rights’ protect capital’s market freedom, not welfare entitlements. (similarity 0.81)
• Neoliberals supported market contracts in sex but opposed state-subsidized rights (similarity 0.80)
• Neoliberals held that rights originate from capitalism rather than nature (similarity 0.80)
• Neoliberals judged human rights solely by whether they supported market relations. (similarity 0.79)
• Neoliberal human rights primarily preserve the market order rather than protect individuals (similarity 0.79)
• Neoliberals redeployed human rights to protect investors and property (similarity 0.78)
• Neoliberalism converged with human rights activism around shared political aims. (similarity 0.78)
• Neoliberals crafted their own human rights account supporting market order. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals deployed human rights language to justify property rights and dismantling welfare #corroborates (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 7
• Neoliberal ideology framed privacy as a competitively traded good to justify deregulation #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 348
• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order #corroborates (0.78) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76
• Privacy law’s negative liberty tradition conflicts with capitalism’s data extraction drive. #complicates (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 549
• Neoliberals favored contractual freedom for intimate life only if costs are privately internalized #expands (0.75)
• Neoliberalism redefined liberty as economic rather than political. #qualifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 380
• Neoliberals held that rights originate from capitalism rather than nature #qualifies (0.72)