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đŸȘ” The Threshold

Neoliberals framed welfare states as existential threats to individual rights and civilisation

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tagsja-picks, xref, contrarian_or_surprising, singleton, category/factual-claims
aliases@whyte_morals_2019, loc. 114

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Neoliberals framed welfare states as existential threats to individual rights and civilisation

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Röpke regularly cited the remark of the nineteenth-century French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835 text Democracy in America warned that, in a democracy, individuals would entrust their private needs to an ‘immense tutelary power’ that would reduce them to ‘a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd’. Writing a decade after World War I, Röpke argued this threat had been realised by the welfare state, which ‘takes care of the sort of comfortable stall-feeding of the domesticated masses’. Röpke sought the measure of ‘respect for human personality’ in the masses’ responsibility for their own welfare, remarking that it is hardly progress to treat increasing numbers of people as ‘economic minors’ under the ‘tutelage of the state’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 176 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Neoliberal culture recasts welfare-state dependence as a moral failure to embrace risk — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 338; American welfare opponents framed socialized risk as a threat to family morality; Neoliberalism framed itself as a defence of individual freedom against all collectivist systems. (+19 more)

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