Neoliberals deployed human rights language to justify property rights and dismantling welfare

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the core premise of the book: ‘human rights’ as a contingent political discourse weaponizable in defense of property and wealth, not an attribute of human nature.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing work on austerity and market ethics — the Friedman/Thatcher claim that property rights underwrite all other rights is a load-bearing claim in debates on market ethics and human rights. — connects to: Critics saw the convention as erecting property rights over the human right to eat — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 469; Neoliberals sought enforceable capital flight rights that outstripped human rights protections. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 481; Capitalism absorbed its critics’ language to legitimize neoliberal privatization — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 439 (+26 more)
• SEED: Angle: how the ‘property rights as foundation for human rights’ argument circulated from Chicago School economists into UK council-house privatization and now into arguments over housing speculation and gentrification.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order #corroborates (1.00) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76
• Neoliberals redeployed human rights to protect investors and property #corroborates (0.95) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 428
• Neoliberals framed human rights as a tool to enforce global standards protecting private capital #corroborates (0.90)
• Neoliberals actively shaped the postwar human rights discourse that later legitimized markets #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 40
• Neoliberal thought framed welfare rights as contradicting rather than completing civil rights #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 162
• Neoliberal human rights discourse entailed a duty to spread capitalism globally #expands (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 283