Neoliberals judged human rights solely by whether they supported market relations.

Evidence

However, I show that, despite their horror at the ‘collectivism’ and ‘politicisation’ that characterised the human rights process in the United Nations, the neoliberals did not simply turn away from human rights; rather, they developed their own account of human rights as moral and legal supports for a liberal market order. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 38 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

For all their undoubted diversity, the neoliberals of the early Mont Pèlerin Society were largely united around the programme outlined in Friedman’s short paper. At the inaugural MPS meeting, Hayek argued that, while it is known that a functioning market relies on the ‘protection of certain rights, such as property and the enforcement of contracts’, it was only once this was accepted that ‘the real problem begins’. In The Road to Serfdom, he faulted previous liberals for neglecting the fact that a competitive market requires an ‘appropriate legal system’, and stressed that it was ‘by no means sufficient that the law should recognise the principle of private property and freedom of contract’. Human rights played an important role in the neoliberal attempt to develop an appropriate legal system and moral framework for a global capitalist market. The rights they formulated were not the rights of man that Marx had criticised. The correlate of seeing the competitive market as the sine qua non of peace, freedom and rights is that that neoliberal human rights exist not so much to protect the individual – even the egoistic individual – as to preserve the market order. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 45 (#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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Neoliberals crafted their own human rights account supporting market order. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 38; Neoliberal human rights primarily preserve the market order rather than protect individuals — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 45; Neoliberals saw human rights standards as a way to depoliticize international economic relations — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 450 (+8 more)

Related

• Neoliberals crafted their own human rights account supporting market order. (similarity 0.94)
• Early neoliberals championed human rights as instruments for market order, not as social protection (similarity 0.94)
• Neoliberal human rights primarily preserve the market order rather than protect individuals (similarity 0.94)
• Neoliberals judged human-rights claims by their conduciveness to markets (similarity 0.93)
• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order (similarity 0.93)
• Neoliberal thinkers reframed human rights as protections for market freedoms. (similarity 0.93)
• Neoliberals framed human rights as a tool to enforce global standards protecting private capital (similarity 0.92)
• Neoliberals reframed human rights as instruments of market submission (similarity 0.92)
• Neoliberalism converged with human rights activism around shared political aims. (similarity 0.92)
• Neoliberals actively shaped the postwar human rights discourse that later legitimized markets (similarity 0.91)
• Neoliberalism’s founding manifesto borrowed human-rights language to frame markets as civilization’s defense. (similarity 0.91)
• Neoliberals redeployed human rights to protect investors and property (similarity 0.90)
• Neoliberal human rights legitimize state violence to protect global markets. (similarity 0.90)
• Neoliberals adopted human rights language to enshrine a moral order for global capital. (similarity 0.89)
• Neoliberals rejected universal human-rights consensus as a civilisational regression toward tribal morality. (similarity 0.89)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals crafted their own human rights account supporting market order. #corroborates (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 38
• Neoliberal human rights primarily preserve the market order rather than protect individuals #corroborates (0.88) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 45
• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order #corroborates (0.88) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76
• Neoliberals deployed human rights language to justify property rights and dismantling welfare #corroborates (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 7
• Neoliberals redeployed human rights to protect investors and property #corroborates (0.84) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 428
• Geneva School neoliberals co-opted human rights language to defend market freedoms #exemplifies (0.82) — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 906
• Market competition was framed by neoliberals as guarantor of rights and peace #expands (0.80)
• Neoliberals actively shaped the postwar human rights discourse that later legitimized markets #expands (0.78) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 40
• Neoliberals saw human rights standards as a way to depoliticize international economic relations #qualifies (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 450