Neoliberals reinterpreted dignity as worth earned through market self-reliance, not inherent

Evidence

The term ‘dignity’ did not appear in those eighteenth-century rights declarations Marx examined, yet today it has become synonymous with human rights. The preamble of the UDHR begins by recognising the ‘inherent dignity’ of ‘all members of the human family’, and major human rights NGOs describe their raison d’être as upholding human dignity. The founding statement of the Mont Pèlerin Society also begins with the warning that ‘over large stretches of the Earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared’. For the Lebanese delegate Charles Malik, who drafted the UDHR’s preamble, this reference to dignity reflected a Christian understanding of the human as a person, created in the image of God and requiring protection from the predations of mass politics and the state. Many early neoliberals had considerable sympathy with this Christian conception, and, for them too, upholding dignity meant restraining politics. Yet it meant more than this; for them, dignity retained some of the original sense of its Latin root dignus, which signified worth or desert. Just as dignity was originally a term of moral standing, the neoliberals believed that only the self-reliant and responsible could lead dignified lives. Seeking welfare from the state, from this perspective, was inherently undignified. For the neoliberals, dignity required a competitive order in which individuals were responsible for their own fates. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 55

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows two competing genealogies of ‘dignity’: the Christian inherent-person dignity in the UDHR versus the neoliberal dignus-worth reading.
• SEED: An essay angle: how contemporary human-rights discourse and market ethics talk past each other by using ‘dignity’ with opposite meanings.
• XREF: Connects to Amartya Sen and the ethics-of-markets debate on whether capability/dignity is prior to markets, as well as the reader’s prior material on sumptuary codes treating dress/dignity as signalled standing. — connects to: Neoliberalism works best when subjects voluntarily adopt market-logic selves — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 21; Neoliberals conditioned self-government on accepting market discipline — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 297; Early neoliberals framed welfare dependency as a degrading threat to human dignity — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 176 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals conditioned self-government on accepting market discipline #expands (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 297
• Early neoliberals framed welfare dependency as a degrading threat to human dignity #corroborates (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 176
• Neoliberalism works best when subjects voluntarily adopt market-logic selves #corroborates (0.80) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 21
• Neoliberal selfhood reframes reward and punishment as risk outcomes, not justice #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 273