Neoliberal theorists framed social and economic rights as a dangerous expansion of state power

Evidence

Aron and Hayek were friends, and, despite their differences over the possibility of a ‘third way’ between the free market and economic planning, which ultimately led to Aron’s resignation from the MPS in 1955, the two had strikingly similar views about human rights. Both men criticised the drafters of the UDHR for having ‘confused incompatible ideas’, in Aron’s words, by failing to distinguish rights, which constrained the state in the interests of individual freedom, from social and economic objectives that relied on the extension of state power. In terms that were later taken up by participants at the LSF colloquium, Aron distinguished civil and political rights, which he depicted as what Immanuel Kant had termed ‘categorical imperatives’, or fundamental moral principles, from social objectives that may be ‘theoretically desirable’ but do not amount to rights. Just as Hayek had criticised the UDHR by arguing that to speak of rights in a socioeconomic context ‘debases the word “right”’, Aron argued that, when compared to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the UDHR reflected ‘the decline of all rights, of the very notion of the rights of man’. The eighteenth-century authors ‘did not entrust the state the goal of promoting what we today call “social and economic rights”’, he wrote, but were concerned to limit state power. In contrast, the twentieth-century drafters downgraded the right to private property and expanded the powers of the state to provide for the welfare of its population. In this transition, he argued, ‘the state is the victor’, since rights no longer restrict or condemn it. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 388

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘categorical imperative’ framing that casts civil-political rights as moral absolutes while demoting socioeconomic claims to wishable objectives.
• XREF: Connects to the modern debate over human rights vs. economic liberties in the Mont Pelerin Society; also to the reader’s focus on human-rights discourse and market ethics. — connects to: Leading neoliberals defended restricting political freedom to preserve economic freedom — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 500; Neoliberalism expands state penal power while professing to shrink government — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 179; Neoliberals framed welfare states as existential threats to individual rights and civilisation (+4 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did Aron’s resignation over the ‘third way’ mean the MPS rejected genuinely distinct positions, or only those deemed unworkable?

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism strengthens repressive state apparatuses rather than shrinking government #complicates (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1748