The UDHR’s drafters largely agreed that unrestrained markets bred conflict, not civility.

Evidence

No doubt the drafting of the UDHR required compromise between defenders of rival political, economic and religious systems. But one thing the drafters largely agreed on – and Roosevelt was no exception – was that the unrestrained market produced not sweetness and civility but conflict and disorder. Looking back in 1966, Hayek was far less complimentary than McCloskey about the compromises that produced the UDHR: the document, he argued, was an incoherent attempt to merge the liberal rights tradition with a starkly different one derived from ‘the Marxist Russian Revolution’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 37

The Chicago School economist Deirdre McCloskey holds up the drafting of the UDHR as evidence that market capitalism promotes the ‘temperance to educate oneself in business and in life, to listen to the customer humbly, to resist the temptations to cheat, to ask quietly whether there might be a compromise here – Eleanor Roosevelt negotiating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948’. A recent defender of human rights similarly argues that the drafting of human rights standards provides a model for ‘deliberative, nonviolent, and noncoercive processes of global governance and change’ that could be extended to other areas. No doubt the drafting of the UDHR required compromise between defenders of rival political, economic and religious systems. But one thing the drafters largely agreed on – and Roosevelt was no exception – was that the unrestrained market produced not sweetness and civility but conflict and disorder. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 37

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the common framing of the human-rights project as inherently pro-market; connects to the reader’s interest in whether market ethics and rights discourse are rivals or allies. — connects to: The UDHR preamble’s religious language encoded Western-civilization claims against Islam and Communism.
• SEED: The UDHR as an anti-market document is a useful corrective for essays claiming human rights and capitalism are natural allies.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 37