Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader library on freedom/information, IMF/World Bank linkages, and the debate over whether human rights law can coexist with austerity economics. — 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; Capitalism absorbed its critics’ language to legitimize neoliberal privatization — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 439 (+45 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the early-neoliberal view of human rights as a moral foundation for markets rather than a protection from them.
• SEED: Article angle: how ‘human rights’ shifted from welfare protections to property guarantees in mid-century neoliberal thought — a genealogy of the term’s capture.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals redeployed human rights to protect investors and property #corroborates (0.97) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 428
• Neoliberals saw human rights standards as a way to depoliticize international economic relations #expands (0.92) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 450
• Neoliberal human rights discourse entailed a duty to spread capitalism globally #expands (0.88) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 283
• Neoliberal freedom is recoded as negative liberty to protect market supremacy #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2130