Pinochet’s jurist legitimized suspending rights to defend the market order

Evidence

In June 1976, Guzmán responded to criticisms of the junta’s human rights record by arguing that the ‘theme of human rights is a problem of free, modern states’. Faced with terroristic, international communism, he continued, it is necessary to ‘guarantee the rights of all the persons within a community’, especially the ‘majority who want to live in peace’. Guzmán’s understanding of rights gave a neoliberal twist to Schmitt’s assertion that ‘there exists no norm that is applicable to chaos’. If a functioning competitive market is the only guarantee of social peace and human rights, Guzmán believed, then it is legitimate to suspend the rights of those who threaten the market order. … Guzmán himself attributed his conversion to neoliberalism to his ‘discovery of Hayek’. In Hayek’s work, Pinochet’s crown jurist found proposals for a ‘constitution of liberty’ that would protect the market from (democratic) interference. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 359

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on human-rights discourse and neoliberalism — the Pinochet junta weaponizing rights talk against communism parallels later debates on market-embedded rights in austerity regimes. — connects to: Pinochet’s 1980 constitution embedded human-rights language to legitimize a repressive market order — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 366
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the irony that Schmitt — an enemy of liberalism — frames the suspension logic that neoliberal jurists adopt for markets. How far does this debt run?

Broader Connections

• Pinochet’s 1980 constitution embedded human-rights language to legitimize a repressive market order #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 366