Neoliberal security rights legitimize state violence policing the market order

Evidence

The right to security, according to Marx, was manifested in the police, who secured the universal egoism of civil society. With the global extension of capitalist social relations, neoliberal thinkers were met with the challenge of globalising this policing function. They believed that promoting a regime of rights would support the extension of the world market. ‘People without rights’, Mises warned, ‘are always a menace to social order’. They gave the state the role of protecting the competitive market from those who are unable to adjust themselves to its demands. Mises was typically clear about the role of the state in a ‘peaceful’ liberal market order: noting that the market itself is free of coercion and the state must not interfere with it, he wrote that, in a liberal order, the state ‘employs its power to beat people into submission solely for the prevention of actions destructive to the preservation and the smooth operation of the market economy’. A central function of neoliberal human rights has been to globalise this function, legitimising state violence aimed at the global dissemination of capitalist social relations. The neoliberal right to security is a right for states to beat into submission those who threaten the market order. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 50

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s human-rights discourse project — the claim that ‘rights’ language under coercion globalizes a policing function parallels Foucault’s biopolitics and recent police-abroad scholarship. — connects to: Neoliberal human rights legitimize state violence to protect global markets.; Neoliberal market freedom required state violence to enforce submission to the market — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 328; Neoliberal economic policy functions as covert structural violence — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 38 (+9 more)
• QUESTION: Pursue the textual link: Mises’s almost explicit ‘beat into submission’ wording invites checking whether later ILO and UN rights framings absorbed this coercion-tolerant view of the market.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal human rights legitimize state violence to protect global markets. #corroborates (1.00)
• Neoliberal market freedom required state violence to enforce submission to the market #corroborates (0.95) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 328
• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order #corroborates (0.95) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76
• Neoliberals reframed human rights as instruments of market submission #corroborates (0.95) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 120
• Neoliberal order theorists saw authoritarian state coercion as protecting the market’s spontaneous order #corroborates (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 364
• Neoliberal human rights primarily preserve the market order rather than protect individuals #corroborates (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 45
• Neoliberalism resorts to violent enforcement when local socialities reject its order #corroborates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1887
• Neoliberal economic policy functions as covert structural violence #expands (0.80) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 38
• Neoliberals pathologised political struggle by framing the market as peaceful and politics as violent #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 64
• Neoliberal states shifted from citizen wellbeing to policing and surveillance #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 203
• Market ideology functions to repress freedom rather than secure it #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 600
• Neoliberal freedom amounts to submission to market sovereignty enforced by price fluctuations #expands (0.75)