Neoliberal thought framed welfare rights as contradicting rather than completing civil rights

Evidence

In returning to the French Revolution in the immediate wake of World War II, Jouvenel sought a ‘usable history’ with which to challenge his contemporaries’ ‘attacks on those same individual rights which in 1789 had had their sacredness proclaimed’. For this man of the right, whose sympathies lay with the Vichy regime, the primary threat to individual rights was not fascism, but the promise of a ‘larger social welfare’. It was US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he believed, who embodied the sacrifice of individual rights for social rights. Jouvenel criticised those narratives that were so common during the drafting of the UDHR, for which social and economic rights were a progressive extension of the older civil and political rights. ‘The new rights of man are given out as coming to complete those already proclaimed in the eighteenth-century’, he wrote. But instead, ‘they contradict and abrogate them’. While the old rights decreed liberty and made individuals responsible, he argued, the new social rights replaced this adult responsibility with tutelage. The old liberty was thereby sacrificed for a new security, he argued; the new promises ‘close the cycle which was opened by the declarations of earlier days’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 162

Categorization

• XREF: Ties into human-rights history literature on the UDHR drafting and the civil/social rights dichotomy, linking to the reader’s stated focus on human-rights discourse. — connects to: Neoliberals deployed human rights language to justify property rights and dismantling welfare — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 7; Neoliberals framed welfare states as existential threats to individual rights and civilisation; Drafting of welfare rights pitted flexible standards against state obligations — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 196 (+7 more)
• DEFINE: Illustrates the neoliberal distinction between ‘old’ liberty-bearing rights and ‘new’ tutelage-creating welfare rights.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal development framed egalitarian welfare norms as obstacles to be overcome #corroborates (0.88) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 409
• Meritocratic racelessness discourse accompanied the neoliberal retreat from the welfare state #corroborates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1739
• Neoliberals reinterpreted inalienable rights as instruments to foster economic initiative #expands (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 335