Property rights discourse was wielded as a human rights claim to justify neoliberal privatization

Evidence

However easy it is to dismiss the idea of Kensington’s absentee investors as the subjects of human rights, it is more difficult to demarcate a ‘true’ human rights discourse from cynical appropriations of it. The ‘human right to dominate’ exists alongside the human rights of the dominated, and human rights have often proved more useful in protecting the wealthy and legitimising the interventions of the most powerful states than in protecting the powerless. … Rather than being an isolated instance, Finkelstein’s argument for the human rights of property owners has a long lineage among neoliberal politicians and thinkers. When former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher began privatising council housing in the 1980s, she justified it as a way to secure human rights. Evoking a deep connection between liberty and property, Thatcher argued that ‘countries which deny private property rights also deny other human rights’. The claim that property rights are an ‘essential foundation for other human rights’, as the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman put it, provided a political justification for the neoliberal counter-revolution of the late twentieth century. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 7

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s interest in market ethics debates and to Article 17 of the UDHR on property rights; also to Sumption’s similar claims. — connects to: Neoliberals embraced human rights language as interventionist enforcement of private capital rights — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 139; Neoliberals deployed human rights language to justify property rights and dismantling welfare — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 7; Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 76 (+6 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘property as human right’ rhetoric migrated from Thatcher/Friedman into today’s investor-state arbitration and housing debates.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals deployed human rights language to justify property rights and dismantling welfare #corroborates (0.95) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 7
• Neoliberals weaponized human rights language to protect private property and market order #corroborates (0.92) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 76
• Capitalism absorbed its critics’ language to legitimize neoliberal privatization #corroborates (0.90) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 439
• Neoliberals redeployed human rights to protect investors and property #corroborates (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 428
• Neoliberals framed human rights as a tool to enforce global standards protecting private capital #corroborates (0.90)
• Human rights discourse can be mobilised to defend property owners against popular demands #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 4
• Neoliberals actively shaped the postwar human rights discourse that later legitimized markets #expands (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 40