Neoliberals framed human rights as a tool to enforce global standards protecting private capital

Evidence

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)

While the human rights advocates of LSF mobilised neoliberal economic analyses to challenge Third Worldism and the NIEO, the neoliberal economists embraced the language of human rights. They soon saw that this new language, and the organisations that mobilised it to curtail the range of feasible political options and to license interventions into postcolonial societies, could bolster their own agenda of imposing market discipline on former colonies. Neoliberal human rights dispensed with the project of guaranteeing broad popular rights to basic welfare, but not with ‘economic rights’ per se. Rather, they saw in human rights the possibility of securing the rights of investors and the wealthy in the face of challenges to their property and power. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 428 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

By the time major states and international financial institutions had embraced the belief that only free markets could secure free people, and that human dignity was intimately tied to a market order that freed individuals from dependence, these had been neoliberal articles of faith for decades. Since the end of World War II, organised neoliberalism had been focused on promoting a world order in which morals and interests would reinforce each other. In human rights standards, they too saw a means to ‘depoliticise’ international economic relations, protecting the right to trade and securing the space in which individuals and corporations could pursue their interests unhindered. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 450 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Neoliberals sought enforceable capital flight rights that outstripped human rights protections. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 481; Geneva School neoliberals co-opted human rights language to defend market freedoms — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 906; Neoliberals deployed human rights language to justify property rights and dismantling welfare — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 7 (+31 more)

Related

• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order (similarity 0.95)
• Neoliberals judged human rights solely by whether they supported market relations. (similarity 0.92)
• Neoliberal human rights legitimize state violence to protect global markets. (similarity 0.92)
• Neoliberals redeployed human rights to protect investors and property (similarity 0.92)
• Neoliberals adopted human rights language to enshrine a moral order for global capital. (similarity 0.91)
• Neoliberal human rights primarily preserve the market order rather than protect individuals (similarity 0.91)
• Neoliberals embraced human rights language as interventionist enforcement of private capital rights (similarity 0.90)
• Neoliberalism and human rights are commonly seen as opposing globalizing logics. (similarity 0.90)
• Early neoliberals championed human rights as instruments for market order, not as social protection (similarity 0.90)
• Neoliberals saw human rights standards as a way to depoliticize international economic relations (similarity 0.90)
• Neoliberals crafted their own human rights account supporting market order. (similarity 0.90)
• Neoliberals sought enforceable capital flight rights that outstripped human rights protections. (similarity 0.90)
• Neoliberal thinkers reframed human rights as protections for market freedoms. (similarity 0.89)
• Neoliberals actively shaped the postwar human rights discourse that later legitimized markets (similarity 0.89)
• Neoliberalism converged with human rights activism around shared political aims. (similarity 0.89)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order #corroborates (0.95) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76
• Neoliberals redeployed human rights to protect investors and property #corroborates (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 428
• Neoliberals saw human rights standards as a way to depoliticize international economic relations #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 450
• Neoliberal human rights discourse entailed a duty to spread capitalism globally #expands (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 283
• Human rights law and neoliberal economics converge to regulate conduct by quantifying freedom #expands (0.75)
• Neoliberalism economizes justice, sovereignty, and the rule of law #expands (0.70) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 32