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Neoliberals held that rights originate from capitalism rather than nature

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tagsja-picks, define, deepthinking, xref, definitional_content, singleton, category/definitional-content
aliases@whyte_morals_2019, loc. 41

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Neoliberals held that rights originate from capitalism rather than nature

Evidence

Today, much critical work on human rights is devoted to deflating the notion that human rights are the codification of a moral sense originating in human nature. Such a claim has little critical purchase on neoliberal accounts of human rights. Hayek, for instance, explicitly rejected the view that morals and rules are ‘permanently implanted in an unalterable nature of man’. His mentor Mises had put it in these blunt terms decades earlier: ‘The fact is that Nature grants no rights at all’. Rejecting the dichotomy between natural law and rationally constructed rules, Hayek argued that culture, institutions and morals are ‘neither natural nor artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed’. Morals develop, he argued, through the unconscious selection of the values and institutions that provide those who submit to them with the greatest benefits. The morals of the market initially emerged in urban, commercial centres, Hayek argued, where substantive bonds were weaker and individuals more accustomed to cooler, more distant market relations with others. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 28 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Pinochet’s Chile was not the only place where Friedman had identified a dual miracle. Two years prior to heralding Chile’s miraculous transformation, he and his wife, Rose Director Friedman, declared that the ‘story of the United States is the story of an economic miracle and a political miracle’. The Friedmans attributed these earlier miracles to two complementary sets of ideas, both published in 1776. Alongside Smith’s account of the market as a realm of voluntary social relations that requires ‘no external force, no coercion, no violation of freedom’, they placed the US Declaration of Independence’s contention that all individuals are ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’, among them ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’. According to the Friedmans, these two ideas were mutually constitutive. ‘Economic freedom’, they argued, ‘is an essential requisite for political freedom.’ The market enables individuals to pursue their own values and ends, while the guarantee that they will be unmolested in doing so fosters economic development. Both Smith and Jefferson, the Friedmans argued, saw concentrated government power as the great danger, and ‘protection of the citizen against the tyranny of government as the perpetual need’. The inalienable rights of the American Declaration of Independence, from this perspective, existed not to found a sovereign state, but to ensure that state power was used to foster economic initiative. It would ultimately be towards this same end that the neoliberals would mobilise individual rights in Chile. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 335 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Capitalism absorbed its critics’ language to legitimize neoliberal privatization — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 439; Neoliberal legal scholars opposed constitutional privacy rights and favored private contracts instead; For most neoliberals, property rights are contingent instruments for competitive order, not absolutes — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 194 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

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