Neoliberals redeployed human rights to protect investors and property

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Reverses the standard assumption that human rights and market fundamentalism are opposed; argues they were mutually reinforcing — a paradigm-shifting claim central to the reader’s project.
• XREF: Connects to Moyn’s argument that human rights and neoliberalism coexisted; also to Wendy Brown’s work on the mutual legitimation of rights discourse and neoliberal governance. — 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; Neoliberal investor-rights proposals mocked in the 1950s became the 21st-century norm. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 479 (+22 more)

Broader Connections

• 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 freedom is recoded as negative liberty to protect market supremacy #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2130