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The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism
The fatal embrace of human rights and neoliberalism
Why did the rise of human rights in the 1970s coincide with the institutionalisation of neoliberalism? And why has the neoliberal age also been the age of human rights? Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society.In the wake of World War Two, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to ‘civilisation’. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects. Honing in on neoliberal political thought, Whyte shows that the neoliberals developed a stark dichotomy between politics, conceived as conflictual, coercive and violent, and civil society, which they depicted as a realm of mutually-beneficial, voluntary, market relations between individual subjects of rights. In mobilising human rights to provide a moral language for a market society, neoliberals contributed far more than is often realised to today’s politics of human rights.
Why did the rise of human rights in the 1970s coincide with the institutionalisation of neoliberalism? And why has the neoliberal age also been the age of human rights? Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society.In the wake of World War Two, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to ‘civilisation’. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects. Honing in on neoliberal political thought, Whyte shows that the neoliberals developed a stark dichotomy between politics, conceived as conflictual, coercive and violent, and civil society, which they depicted as a realm of mutually-beneficial, voluntary, market relations between individual subjects of rights. In mobilising human rights to provide a moral language for a market society, neoliberals contributed far more than is often realised to today’s politics of human rights.
289 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 5, 2019
About the author
Jessica Whyte
8 books4 followersJessica Whyte is Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Languages (Philosophy) and the School of Law, University of New South Wales, and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow. She is a political theorist whose work integrates political philosophy, intellectual history and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarianism and militarism.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
August 20, 2021
Whyte’s book is an ‘investigation of the historical and conceptual relations between human rights and Neoliberalism’. Whyte delves back into the forties and seeks to explain why these two revivals and reinventions of liberalism took place at the same time and why their trajectories have been so intertwined ever since.
'The Morals of the Market' reconstructs the ways in which major Neoliberal thinkers were not indifferent to human rights, but deeply invested in them, or at least in their own views of such rights. They needed those rights to reflect what that they saw as the morality inherent in a market economy. Whyte’s work examines crucial moments for both human rights and Neoliberalism.
In the first half of the book, she looks at the decades immediately following the Second World War, a period when the understanding of what constituted human rights was contested. In the second half of the book , she turns to the 1970s, the period that would see the emergence of human rights as a major discourse in politics. Whyte’s book shows that despite the differing emphases in this period, and the shift from the declarations of the first period to the death squads of the second, a clear set of normative commitments underpins the theoretical proposals of the thinkers and groups who would come to define Neoliberalism.
Refreshing read, especially in my quest to rethink an understanding of the nature of 'Human rights'.
'The Morals of the Market' reconstructs the ways in which major Neoliberal thinkers were not indifferent to human rights, but deeply invested in them, or at least in their own views of such rights. They needed those rights to reflect what that they saw as the morality inherent in a market economy. Whyte’s work examines crucial moments for both human rights and Neoliberalism.
In the first half of the book, she looks at the decades immediately following the Second World War, a period when the understanding of what constituted human rights was contested. In the second half of the book , she turns to the 1970s, the period that would see the emergence of human rights as a major discourse in politics. Whyte’s book shows that despite the differing emphases in this period, and the shift from the declarations of the first period to the death squads of the second, a clear set of normative commitments underpins the theoretical proposals of the thinkers and groups who would come to define Neoliberalism.
Refreshing read, especially in my quest to rethink an understanding of the nature of 'Human rights'.
February 14, 2020
Man. What a great read, I immediately sent copies to three colleagues where I sense potential for conversion to the socialist cause :) (depending on where people stand, I could be the most annoying or most interesting colleague).
This boook ‘The Morals of the Market. Human rights and the rise of neoliberalism’ (VERSO, 2019) should be a must read for fellow international development workers.
This is a very original account (basef on very solid archival research) of how neoliberals constructed human rights as a barricade against political projects based on equality and economic justice.
Anyone working in intl development will be all too familiar with the apolitical and fairly empty ‘rights-based’ discourse and I learned a lot about the actual origins of this. The book sheds light on the evolution and struggle over the human rights language and how it was not only systematically sanitized but ended up where political itself is seen as violent and corrupt and the apolitical ‘civil society’ and ‘the market’ as beacons of progress.
The book rightly embedds the human rights discourse within wider theories of imperialism and shows how human rights and neoliberal ‘poverty management’ have become a means to enforce global standards (WTO etc) to support the old rights of private capital in the ‘third world’. It also shows how this evolved in the post-cold war era where the so-called ‘responsibility to protect’ and the IMF’s reforms are always two sides of the same coin.
In a final argument, with relevance to today, the book shows that the west is now learning what the global south has already learned over the past four decades: that neoliberalism tends to produce authoritarianism.
This boook ‘The Morals of the Market. Human rights and the rise of neoliberalism’ (VERSO, 2019) should be a must read for fellow international development workers.
This is a very original account (basef on very solid archival research) of how neoliberals constructed human rights as a barricade against political projects based on equality and economic justice.
Anyone working in intl development will be all too familiar with the apolitical and fairly empty ‘rights-based’ discourse and I learned a lot about the actual origins of this. The book sheds light on the evolution and struggle over the human rights language and how it was not only systematically sanitized but ended up where political itself is seen as violent and corrupt and the apolitical ‘civil society’ and ‘the market’ as beacons of progress.
The book rightly embedds the human rights discourse within wider theories of imperialism and shows how human rights and neoliberal ‘poverty management’ have become a means to enforce global standards (WTO etc) to support the old rights of private capital in the ‘third world’. It also shows how this evolved in the post-cold war era where the so-called ‘responsibility to protect’ and the IMF’s reforms are always two sides of the same coin.
In a final argument, with relevance to today, the book shows that the west is now learning what the global south has already learned over the past four decades: that neoliberalism tends to produce authoritarianism.
July 28, 2020
one of the most brilliant, most original archival of the history of a very successful belief system i have read in recent times. it had to be a belief constructed, and this belief in turn had to construct ideal subjects and subjectivities that would respond and desire such a system. what is fascinating to note is the marvellous mental gymnastics all these neoliberal economists and humanitarians performed in the face of the repeated (expected) contradictions (to put it mildly) and crises that the subjection of the individual to the effects of the market would expose them to.
many people make the mistake of making neoliberalism sound like just a cold technocratic solution to the contradictions of capital, and it partly was, but what is ignored was that was necessary but not sufficient. for it required a whole host of legal and moral structures that would allow such a system to flourish. there's a wonderful and ironically hope-inducing (for all of us on the Left) quote from a pretty racist fuck (all of them were), Rony Brauman, who was president of both Medicines Sans Frontieres (fuck the French, I'm not adding the accents) and Liberte Sans Frontieres, and believed that even recognizing postcolonial poverty as a consequence of imperialism was a "western guilt complex":
“We realised that our ideas no longer shocked anyone. They had become commonplace. Third-Worldism was dead.’160 Almost twenty years later, in a context of rising concern for the economic equality brought about by decades of neoliberal reforms, Brauman reflected in 2015: ‘I see myself and the small group that I brought together as a kind of symptom of the rise of neoliberalism … We had the conviction that we were a kind of intellectual vanguard, but no’, he laughed, ‘we were just following the rising tendency...”,
to which Jessica Whyte responds:
“I have suggested that this assessment is, if anything, too modest: rather than being a symptom, the humanitarians who founded LSF explicitly mobilised the language of human rights in order to contest the vision of substantive equality that defined the Third Worldist project and the NIEO. They were not powerless companions of the rising neoliberals, but active, enthusiastic and influential fellow-travellers. Their special contribution was to pioneer a distinctly neoliberal human rights discourse, for which a competitive market order accompanied by a liberal institutional structure was truly the last utopia.”
it's a testament to the magical creative powers of language, and historical materialism.
many people make the mistake of making neoliberalism sound like just a cold technocratic solution to the contradictions of capital, and it partly was, but what is ignored was that was necessary but not sufficient. for it required a whole host of legal and moral structures that would allow such a system to flourish. there's a wonderful and ironically hope-inducing (for all of us on the Left) quote from a pretty racist fuck (all of them were), Rony Brauman, who was president of both Medicines Sans Frontieres (fuck the French, I'm not adding the accents) and Liberte Sans Frontieres, and believed that even recognizing postcolonial poverty as a consequence of imperialism was a "western guilt complex":
“We realised that our ideas no longer shocked anyone. They had become commonplace. Third-Worldism was dead.’160 Almost twenty years later, in a context of rising concern for the economic equality brought about by decades of neoliberal reforms, Brauman reflected in 2015: ‘I see myself and the small group that I brought together as a kind of symptom of the rise of neoliberalism … We had the conviction that we were a kind of intellectual vanguard, but no’, he laughed, ‘we were just following the rising tendency...”,
to which Jessica Whyte responds:
“I have suggested that this assessment is, if anything, too modest: rather than being a symptom, the humanitarians who founded LSF explicitly mobilised the language of human rights in order to contest the vision of substantive equality that defined the Third Worldist project and the NIEO. They were not powerless companions of the rising neoliberals, but active, enthusiastic and influential fellow-travellers. Their special contribution was to pioneer a distinctly neoliberal human rights discourse, for which a competitive market order accompanied by a liberal institutional structure was truly the last utopia.”
it's a testament to the magical creative powers of language, and historical materialism.
January 29, 2021
First of all, there are much better reviews of this book on here than I could possibly offer. This was sort of a “that book looks interesting and is on a subject I am relatively unfamiliar with so I should check it out” read.
Well, it is interesting and if you are interested in economics, neoliberalism, socialism and human rights, you might want to check it out too.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about this book is that Whyte offers a well-researched and detailed work that is readable and interesting. There are plenty of footnotes and lots of depth; this is clearly academic. But it is not dry or only for an academic audience. Its good for anyone.
The basic point is that neoliberals throughout the 20th century managed to define and utilize human rights in such a way as to achieve their desires. Whyte argues against the idea that neoliberalism saw the decline of rights. Instead, as she writes on p.228:
“Neoliberals had their own distinctive account of ‘economic rights.’ These were not the rights to food, clothing, housing and education enshrined in the UDHR, which sought to offer some protection from market forces. On the contrary, neoliberal ‘economic rights’ sought to protect the market freedom of private capital.”
She returns to that point again and again, and it is super relevant! If you have ever heard someone argue that government programs to promote equality or to provide food and housing are an attack on your RIGHTS, will this is where that idea comes from. Neoliberals managed to elevate the right of markets and private persons in those markets to make money above any and all other rights. Any effort to redistribute wealth is then seen as potential totalitarianism!
Of course, there’s some racism sprinkled in too: Third World countries are poor because they didn’t work hard enough. What is especially interesting is how Whyte shows that humans rights organizations have accepted this neoliberal definition, so they may criticize a country’s political acts of violence against its own citizens but rarely the economic structures that surround the politics.
For neoliberals, “compatibility with the competitive market was the criterion by which all rights and institutions were to be judged” (240). Every other right bows to and is secondary to the right of markets and competition. To question that, well, you’re a socialist.
I guess I’m a socialist.
I said above I rarely read books like this. I tend to read theology (and fantasy!). What’s interesting to me, from a Christian perspective, working in ministry and being in church, is how anti-Christian this neoliberal view of rights is. Yet, to most Christians in America (I can’t speak for elsewhere) it is just assumed this view of rights and unfettered capitalism is obviously Christian. I am always looking for overlap in what I read, and I think this just reminds me that many of what people think are “Christian” values are certainly not. We who are Christians ought to listen to Christians in rest of the world who may question the neoliberal version of rights. Because, maybe they’re right (see what I did there?).
Anyway, if you’ve read this far, wow! I said there were better reviews than mine. Thanks for reading!
Well, it is interesting and if you are interested in economics, neoliberalism, socialism and human rights, you might want to check it out too.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about this book is that Whyte offers a well-researched and detailed work that is readable and interesting. There are plenty of footnotes and lots of depth; this is clearly academic. But it is not dry or only for an academic audience. Its good for anyone.
The basic point is that neoliberals throughout the 20th century managed to define and utilize human rights in such a way as to achieve their desires. Whyte argues against the idea that neoliberalism saw the decline of rights. Instead, as she writes on p.228:
“Neoliberals had their own distinctive account of ‘economic rights.’ These were not the rights to food, clothing, housing and education enshrined in the UDHR, which sought to offer some protection from market forces. On the contrary, neoliberal ‘economic rights’ sought to protect the market freedom of private capital.”
She returns to that point again and again, and it is super relevant! If you have ever heard someone argue that government programs to promote equality or to provide food and housing are an attack on your RIGHTS, will this is where that idea comes from. Neoliberals managed to elevate the right of markets and private persons in those markets to make money above any and all other rights. Any effort to redistribute wealth is then seen as potential totalitarianism!
Of course, there’s some racism sprinkled in too: Third World countries are poor because they didn’t work hard enough. What is especially interesting is how Whyte shows that humans rights organizations have accepted this neoliberal definition, so they may criticize a country’s political acts of violence against its own citizens but rarely the economic structures that surround the politics.
For neoliberals, “compatibility with the competitive market was the criterion by which all rights and institutions were to be judged” (240). Every other right bows to and is secondary to the right of markets and competition. To question that, well, you’re a socialist.
I guess I’m a socialist.
I said above I rarely read books like this. I tend to read theology (and fantasy!). What’s interesting to me, from a Christian perspective, working in ministry and being in church, is how anti-Christian this neoliberal view of rights is. Yet, to most Christians in America (I can’t speak for elsewhere) it is just assumed this view of rights and unfettered capitalism is obviously Christian. I am always looking for overlap in what I read, and I think this just reminds me that many of what people think are “Christian” values are certainly not. We who are Christians ought to listen to Christians in rest of the world who may question the neoliberal version of rights. Because, maybe they’re right (see what I did there?).
Anyway, if you’ve read this far, wow! I said there were better reviews than mine. Thanks for reading!
June 4, 2026
What if only capitalism and commerce could bring peace and prosperity? What if human rights were just the rights of people and foreign entities to own private property and you being able to purchase things from those private entities? What if the only freedom we were allowed was a modicum of freedom to interact with the market however we please after we become fully subservient to our god the free market. What if collectivism and welfare are actually totalitarianism because they impinge on property rights? What if freedom is actually completely separating politics from the economy?
The neoliberals have some ideas about human rights, and not shockingly they are terrible. In the wake of World War II the UN is working on a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the neoliberals at the Mount Pelerin society were very much not a fan of. However, the evil little neoliberal eggheads do try to cloak their ideas in popular language (because their ideas are not popular) and come up with a bunch of novel ideas. Like idk what if human rights weren’t the right to food water housing freedom and clothing but like human rights were the right to interact with the market? What if human rights were “Mises developed a ‘just war’ argument for postcolonial times: any country that deprived others of access to its natural resources did an injury to all of humanity, he argued, and could legitimately be compelled to trade.86 On these grounds, he praised the Opium Wars that had ‘opened’ China to British trade; ‘no barriers ought to be put in the way even of the trade in poisons’, he argued, it being up to each individual to restrain himself” (33%). What if totalitarianism was just any form of collectivism and it was your human right to be protected from the government taking and spending your money social welfare or redistribution or labor laws being foisted upon you and your society? What if imperialism was just based on national pride and outdated forms of government that existed from pre-capitalist times and had nothing to do with capitalism? What if human rights were the rights of foreign investors to have their private property protected from the will of the people? What if “the will of the people” was the creation point of totalitarianism? What if the maximum amount of freedom that you’re allowed to have is the margin of freedom to interact with the market: “neoliberal freedom is largely indistinguishable from submission to what Mises called ‘the sovereignty of the market’.86 Unlike political sovereignty, the neoliberals saw market sovereignty as compatible with individual freedom. But they also maintained that the sovereign market requires individuals to adjust themselves to its imperatives, which means sacrificing egalitarianism and eschewing the project of collective freedom….Mises contended that such fluctuations ‘penalize disobedience’ and ‘recompense obedience’ to the demands of the labour market. As this penal language makes clear enough, the market subject is not free in any expansive sense. The demands of the sovereign market, Mises states explicitly, ‘submit the individual to a harsh social pressure’ and ‘indirectly limit the individual’s freedom to choose his occupation’.89 But he suggests that this pressure leaves the individual ‘a margin in the limits of which he can choose between what suits him better and what less’.90 It is only within this predetermined margin that the neoliberal individual is ‘free to choose’. She may leave her home to pursue work in another city or stay at home and drive for Uber. She may not join a trade union, let alone struggle against the capitalist exploitation of waged labour. For Mises, ‘this amount of freedom is the maximum of freedom that an individual can enjoy in the framework of the social division of labor’.91 By pathologising mass politics as a threat to individual freedom, neoliberal liberty rights seek to confine human action within what I call the ‘margin of freedom’ offered by a liberal capitalist order. The neoliberal right to liberty is the right to do anything that does not harm the market.” (7%)?
“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’.150 Guzmán’s understanding of rights gave a neoliberal twist to Schmitt’s assertion that ‘there exists no norm that is applicable to chaos’.151 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. Far from renouncing law and rights, Guzmán was central to the adoption of a constitution that locked in the junta’s reforms by emphasising a version of freedom ‘intrinsically connected to private property, free enterprise, and individual rights’.152 Like Hayek’s major work, published two decades earlier, Chile’s constitution was called The Constitution of Liberty. Hayek’s biographer Bruce Caldwell has argued that, although Hayek’s books were in Guzmán’s library, ‘relevant testimonies doubt that Guzmán had read them’.153 Yet, in 1987, Guzmán himself attributed his conversion to neoliberalism to his ‘discovery of Hayek’.154 In Hayek’s work, Pinochet’s crown jurist found proposals for a ‘constitution of liberty’ that would protect the market from (democratic) interference.155 In his late works, Hayek argued that the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market required an appropriate legal regime to insulate it from political intervention.” (46%)
What if capitalism and the free market brought peace? What if “For Mises, in contrast, the refusal of peaceful commerce brought back the threat of war. If resource-rich ‘backward countries’ refuse access to foreign corporations on the market’s terms, he asked rhetorically, ‘can anyone expect that the people of the civilized countries will forever tolerate this state of affairs?’140 Mises warned ominously that the world was returning to a state in which it was not possible to access raw materials without conquest. World peace depends on unrestricted foreign investment, he argued, ‘not on the boy scouts of the United Nations’.” (36%). What if the only available options for the third world are to be conquered by the first world or become an exporter of raw materials (often where the raw material exporter is owned by private investment from the first world and certainly isn’t owned by a third world government or an institution that will allow the proceeds to go to the people in any way)? What if we think one of those two outcomes is good?
The general thrust of the book is that “they too sought to develop a language to pathologise postcolonial sovereignty and transform the postcolonial state into a barrier against the popular aspirations of its people – not a vehicle for their realisation. For the neoliberals, sovereignty had never been the telos of the civilising mission. Quite the opposite, their challenge was always to restrain popular sovereignty, to prevent ‘the masses’ from capturing the state and refusing the discipline imposed by the competitive market order. Freed from its relation to popular sovereignty and economic self-determination, the language of human rights offered them a means to legitimise transformative interventions and subject postcolonial states to universal standards aimed at protecting the international market.” (37%)
One thing this book and other authors like Wendy Brown have brought to light is what neoliberalism actually is. I think a lot of people imagine neoliberalism to be something like whatever Matthew Yglesias does where they cherry pick a bunch of charts that align with what their strong ideological priors or like some sort of like rigorous mathematical modeling that shows why we need to let rich people have all the money and make all the decisions. But ultimately, the founding basis of neoliberalism is like a series of metaphysical beliefs in the way humans are and incentive structures and morality and society and a god like reverence of the free market as like a divine sorter of incentive and rewards.
Couple of hilarious bangers neoliberals said at different fart sniffing conferences:
“‘Today’s “human rights” as formulated by the UN’, Röpke wrote in a 1965 letter, ‘include the sacred right of a state to expropriate a power plant’.” (35%)
“At the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, Mises had cited the Canal as an example of those ‘works of vital importance’ that could only have been achieved by the largest of corporations. Mises did not mention the strict police control exercised by the British over the migrant workers who built the canal, but they played a starring role in Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s speech announcing the nationalisation.156 ‘Egypt undertook to supply labour to dig the Canal by corvée of which 120,000 died without getting paid’, “ (36%)
“Hayekian neoliberalism aimed to fine-tune rules to secure submission to the overall order.157 When asked in 1978 whether his account of spontaneous order inherently biased outcomes ‘in favour of past discriminations or past inequities’, Hayek responded bluntly: ‘It accepts historical accidents.’….Asked about the vigilante killings carried out on behalf of large land-owners seeking to reclaim their expropriated property in the wake of the coup, a Chilean judge showed what was at stake in such respect for ‘historical accidents’. ‘From time immemorial, we sat at the table and the maid didn’t’, he said. ‘People did not want that hierarchy to change.’159 For all his talk of spontaneity, Hayek was convinced that ‘favourable accidents do not just happen. We must prepare for them.’160 In Chile, Hayek saw the miracle of a state that was prepared to use its powers to prepare the terrain for such favourable accidents by constitutionally protecting the market.” (46%)
“Hayek believed that judicial review would be sufficient to prevent government overstepping the margin of freedom provided by the constitution – just as the US Supreme Court had done when, in ‘its most spectacular decision’, it had ‘saved the country from an ill-conceived measure’ by striking down President Roosevelt’s New Deal National Recovery Administration Act.164 In Chile, by contrast, he saw a crisis that could only be averted by a ‘liberal dictator’.165 During the first of his two visits to Chile during the junta’s rule, Hayek spoke with Pinochet about the dangers of ‘unlimited democracy’.166 As Hayek recalls, the general listened carefully, and requested that he send him any materials he had written on the question.167 While the Austrian economist might conceivably have sent a large bundle of his writings, his secretary recalls that he asked her to send the chapter ‘The Model Constitution’ from his three-volume work Law, Legislation and Liberty.168 There, Hayek used the term ‘unlimited democracy’ to refer to the ‘particular form of representative government that now prevails in the Western world’.169 Doubting that a functioning market had ever arisen under such a democracy, he also suggested it was likely that such unlimited democracy would destroy an existing market order.170 ‘The Model Constitution’ also forthrightly defends emergency powers; ‘freedom may have to be temporarily suspended’, Hayek wrote, echoing Carl Schmitt, ‘when those institutions are threatened which are intended to preserve it in the long run’.171 Hayek expanded on these themes in a 1981 interview with the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio. Echoing Schmitt, he argued that, when a government is in a ‘situation of rupture’, it is ‘practically inevitable for someone to have absolute powers’.172 As the market is necessary to preserve freedom, when the market is threatened, society may temporarily be converted into an organisation, and government may rule by decree. He would prefer a ‘liberal dictator’, he told the newspaper, to a ‘democratic government lacking in liberalism’.173 This was not the first time Hayek had expressed sympathy for liberal dictators. In 1978, he singled out Pinochet and the Portuguese dictator Oliveira Salazar as leaders of ‘authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies’. In 1962, he sent Salazar a copy of The Constitution of Liberty with a note expressing his hope that it would help the dictator ‘design a constitution which is proof against the abuses of democracy’. Five years later, Hayek praised the regime of Indonesia’s General Suharto – also brought to power by a CIA-backed anti-communist coup – in similar terms.174 In each case, the threat that democracies would interfere with the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market led him to support brutally violent dictatorships that were prepared to take all necessary measures to preserve existing inequalities. In Chile, Hayek praised the junta for its willingness to run the country ‘without being obsessed with popular commitments or political expectations of any kind’.175 Coercion was justified, he believed, to ‘provide an effective external framework within which self-generating orders can form’.176 The fragile ‘spontaneous order’ of the market required a strong state to protect it from political interference.” (46%)
The neoliberals have some ideas about human rights, and not shockingly they are terrible. In the wake of World War II the UN is working on a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the neoliberals at the Mount Pelerin society were very much not a fan of. However, the evil little neoliberal eggheads do try to cloak their ideas in popular language (because their ideas are not popular) and come up with a bunch of novel ideas. Like idk what if human rights weren’t the right to food water housing freedom and clothing but like human rights were the right to interact with the market? What if human rights were “Mises developed a ‘just war’ argument for postcolonial times: any country that deprived others of access to its natural resources did an injury to all of humanity, he argued, and could legitimately be compelled to trade.86 On these grounds, he praised the Opium Wars that had ‘opened’ China to British trade; ‘no barriers ought to be put in the way even of the trade in poisons’, he argued, it being up to each individual to restrain himself” (33%). What if totalitarianism was just any form of collectivism and it was your human right to be protected from the government taking and spending your money social welfare or redistribution or labor laws being foisted upon you and your society? What if imperialism was just based on national pride and outdated forms of government that existed from pre-capitalist times and had nothing to do with capitalism? What if human rights were the rights of foreign investors to have their private property protected from the will of the people? What if “the will of the people” was the creation point of totalitarianism? What if the maximum amount of freedom that you’re allowed to have is the margin of freedom to interact with the market: “neoliberal freedom is largely indistinguishable from submission to what Mises called ‘the sovereignty of the market’.86 Unlike political sovereignty, the neoliberals saw market sovereignty as compatible with individual freedom. But they also maintained that the sovereign market requires individuals to adjust themselves to its imperatives, which means sacrificing egalitarianism and eschewing the project of collective freedom….Mises contended that such fluctuations ‘penalize disobedience’ and ‘recompense obedience’ to the demands of the labour market. As this penal language makes clear enough, the market subject is not free in any expansive sense. The demands of the sovereign market, Mises states explicitly, ‘submit the individual to a harsh social pressure’ and ‘indirectly limit the individual’s freedom to choose his occupation’.89 But he suggests that this pressure leaves the individual ‘a margin in the limits of which he can choose between what suits him better and what less’.90 It is only within this predetermined margin that the neoliberal individual is ‘free to choose’. She may leave her home to pursue work in another city or stay at home and drive for Uber. She may not join a trade union, let alone struggle against the capitalist exploitation of waged labour. For Mises, ‘this amount of freedom is the maximum of freedom that an individual can enjoy in the framework of the social division of labor’.91 By pathologising mass politics as a threat to individual freedom, neoliberal liberty rights seek to confine human action within what I call the ‘margin of freedom’ offered by a liberal capitalist order. The neoliberal right to liberty is the right to do anything that does not harm the market.” (7%)?
“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’.150 Guzmán’s understanding of rights gave a neoliberal twist to Schmitt’s assertion that ‘there exists no norm that is applicable to chaos’.151 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. Far from renouncing law and rights, Guzmán was central to the adoption of a constitution that locked in the junta’s reforms by emphasising a version of freedom ‘intrinsically connected to private property, free enterprise, and individual rights’.152 Like Hayek’s major work, published two decades earlier, Chile’s constitution was called The Constitution of Liberty. Hayek’s biographer Bruce Caldwell has argued that, although Hayek’s books were in Guzmán’s library, ‘relevant testimonies doubt that Guzmán had read them’.153 Yet, in 1987, Guzmán himself attributed his conversion to neoliberalism to his ‘discovery of Hayek’.154 In Hayek’s work, Pinochet’s crown jurist found proposals for a ‘constitution of liberty’ that would protect the market from (democratic) interference.155 In his late works, Hayek argued that the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market required an appropriate legal regime to insulate it from political intervention.” (46%)
What if capitalism and the free market brought peace? What if “For Mises, in contrast, the refusal of peaceful commerce brought back the threat of war. If resource-rich ‘backward countries’ refuse access to foreign corporations on the market’s terms, he asked rhetorically, ‘can anyone expect that the people of the civilized countries will forever tolerate this state of affairs?’140 Mises warned ominously that the world was returning to a state in which it was not possible to access raw materials without conquest. World peace depends on unrestricted foreign investment, he argued, ‘not on the boy scouts of the United Nations’.” (36%). What if the only available options for the third world are to be conquered by the first world or become an exporter of raw materials (often where the raw material exporter is owned by private investment from the first world and certainly isn’t owned by a third world government or an institution that will allow the proceeds to go to the people in any way)? What if we think one of those two outcomes is good?
The general thrust of the book is that “they too sought to develop a language to pathologise postcolonial sovereignty and transform the postcolonial state into a barrier against the popular aspirations of its people – not a vehicle for their realisation. For the neoliberals, sovereignty had never been the telos of the civilising mission. Quite the opposite, their challenge was always to restrain popular sovereignty, to prevent ‘the masses’ from capturing the state and refusing the discipline imposed by the competitive market order. Freed from its relation to popular sovereignty and economic self-determination, the language of human rights offered them a means to legitimise transformative interventions and subject postcolonial states to universal standards aimed at protecting the international market.” (37%)
One thing this book and other authors like Wendy Brown have brought to light is what neoliberalism actually is. I think a lot of people imagine neoliberalism to be something like whatever Matthew Yglesias does where they cherry pick a bunch of charts that align with what their strong ideological priors or like some sort of like rigorous mathematical modeling that shows why we need to let rich people have all the money and make all the decisions. But ultimately, the founding basis of neoliberalism is like a series of metaphysical beliefs in the way humans are and incentive structures and morality and society and a god like reverence of the free market as like a divine sorter of incentive and rewards.
Couple of hilarious bangers neoliberals said at different fart sniffing conferences:
“‘Today’s “human rights” as formulated by the UN’, Röpke wrote in a 1965 letter, ‘include the sacred right of a state to expropriate a power plant’.” (35%)
“At the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, Mises had cited the Canal as an example of those ‘works of vital importance’ that could only have been achieved by the largest of corporations. Mises did not mention the strict police control exercised by the British over the migrant workers who built the canal, but they played a starring role in Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s speech announcing the nationalisation.156 ‘Egypt undertook to supply labour to dig the Canal by corvée of which 120,000 died without getting paid’, “ (36%)
“Hayekian neoliberalism aimed to fine-tune rules to secure submission to the overall order.157 When asked in 1978 whether his account of spontaneous order inherently biased outcomes ‘in favour of past discriminations or past inequities’, Hayek responded bluntly: ‘It accepts historical accidents.’….Asked about the vigilante killings carried out on behalf of large land-owners seeking to reclaim their expropriated property in the wake of the coup, a Chilean judge showed what was at stake in such respect for ‘historical accidents’. ‘From time immemorial, we sat at the table and the maid didn’t’, he said. ‘People did not want that hierarchy to change.’159 For all his talk of spontaneity, Hayek was convinced that ‘favourable accidents do not just happen. We must prepare for them.’160 In Chile, Hayek saw the miracle of a state that was prepared to use its powers to prepare the terrain for such favourable accidents by constitutionally protecting the market.” (46%)
“Hayek believed that judicial review would be sufficient to prevent government overstepping the margin of freedom provided by the constitution – just as the US Supreme Court had done when, in ‘its most spectacular decision’, it had ‘saved the country from an ill-conceived measure’ by striking down President Roosevelt’s New Deal National Recovery Administration Act.164 In Chile, by contrast, he saw a crisis that could only be averted by a ‘liberal dictator’.165 During the first of his two visits to Chile during the junta’s rule, Hayek spoke with Pinochet about the dangers of ‘unlimited democracy’.166 As Hayek recalls, the general listened carefully, and requested that he send him any materials he had written on the question.167 While the Austrian economist might conceivably have sent a large bundle of his writings, his secretary recalls that he asked her to send the chapter ‘The Model Constitution’ from his three-volume work Law, Legislation and Liberty.168 There, Hayek used the term ‘unlimited democracy’ to refer to the ‘particular form of representative government that now prevails in the Western world’.169 Doubting that a functioning market had ever arisen under such a democracy, he also suggested it was likely that such unlimited democracy would destroy an existing market order.170 ‘The Model Constitution’ also forthrightly defends emergency powers; ‘freedom may have to be temporarily suspended’, Hayek wrote, echoing Carl Schmitt, ‘when those institutions are threatened which are intended to preserve it in the long run’.171 Hayek expanded on these themes in a 1981 interview with the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio. Echoing Schmitt, he argued that, when a government is in a ‘situation of rupture’, it is ‘practically inevitable for someone to have absolute powers’.172 As the market is necessary to preserve freedom, when the market is threatened, society may temporarily be converted into an organisation, and government may rule by decree. He would prefer a ‘liberal dictator’, he told the newspaper, to a ‘democratic government lacking in liberalism’.173 This was not the first time Hayek had expressed sympathy for liberal dictators. In 1978, he singled out Pinochet and the Portuguese dictator Oliveira Salazar as leaders of ‘authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies’. In 1962, he sent Salazar a copy of The Constitution of Liberty with a note expressing his hope that it would help the dictator ‘design a constitution which is proof against the abuses of democracy’. Five years later, Hayek praised the regime of Indonesia’s General Suharto – also brought to power by a CIA-backed anti-communist coup – in similar terms.174 In each case, the threat that democracies would interfere with the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market led him to support brutally violent dictatorships that were prepared to take all necessary measures to preserve existing inequalities. In Chile, Hayek praised the junta for its willingness to run the country ‘without being obsessed with popular commitments or political expectations of any kind’.175 Coercion was justified, he believed, to ‘provide an effective external framework within which self-generating orders can form’.176 The fragile ‘spontaneous order’ of the market required a strong state to protect it from political interference.” (46%)
December 11, 2024
Neoliberalism is usually thought of as an economistic political philosophy which ignores questions of morality and culture. Jessica Whyte disputes this, arguing that the neoliberals were acutely aware of the specific moral, legal, and cultural framework required for capitalism.
Far from eschewing discussion of human rights, the neoliberals talked often of a specific conception of rights tied to the market. Their narrow definition of human rights only included those which were compatible with capitalism. They did not believe that all people were equal. Formal, abstract equality for them was a way to ensure that behavioral differences could be rewarded or punished by the market and historic injustices could not be remedied.
They fought attempts by the UN to create rights to housing, healthcare, and food. They regarded these social and economic rights as a totalitarian imposition on the market. Neoliberals were horrified by anticolonial activists who called for expropriation of foreign corporations. They realized that they could frame this sort of thing as a violation of human rights on par with media censorship, imprisonment, etc.
By treating mass political movements and the states they created as human rights violators, the neoliberals could justify intervention by foreign countries or global institutions to force changes that were amenable to foreign investment. They could even argue that dictatorship was acceptable to protect capitalism. The clearest example of this is the government of Pinochet in Chile, which was supported and advised by thinkers like Hayek.
The state could be used to lay the legal groundwork for markets and insulate them from popular demands. The church could be used to promote the nuclear family, respect for authority, and "Western" institutions. They were principally concerned with creating subjects who would accept market outcomes (and market discipline) and they worked to influence governments and NGOs to achieve this.
A good book which helped me understand how neoliberals could make common cause with the religious right. A bit repetitive at times, but I think this is an important contribution to literature about 20th century liberalism.
Far from eschewing discussion of human rights, the neoliberals talked often of a specific conception of rights tied to the market. Their narrow definition of human rights only included those which were compatible with capitalism. They did not believe that all people were equal. Formal, abstract equality for them was a way to ensure that behavioral differences could be rewarded or punished by the market and historic injustices could not be remedied.
They fought attempts by the UN to create rights to housing, healthcare, and food. They regarded these social and economic rights as a totalitarian imposition on the market. Neoliberals were horrified by anticolonial activists who called for expropriation of foreign corporations. They realized that they could frame this sort of thing as a violation of human rights on par with media censorship, imprisonment, etc.
By treating mass political movements and the states they created as human rights violators, the neoliberals could justify intervention by foreign countries or global institutions to force changes that were amenable to foreign investment. They could even argue that dictatorship was acceptable to protect capitalism. The clearest example of this is the government of Pinochet in Chile, which was supported and advised by thinkers like Hayek.
The state could be used to lay the legal groundwork for markets and insulate them from popular demands. The church could be used to promote the nuclear family, respect for authority, and "Western" institutions. They were principally concerned with creating subjects who would accept market outcomes (and market discipline) and they worked to influence governments and NGOs to achieve this.
A good book which helped me understand how neoliberals could make common cause with the religious right. A bit repetitive at times, but I think this is an important contribution to literature about 20th century liberalism.
April 11, 2020
Fine enough! Whyte has a good hypothesis (that neoliberalism is far from a set of economic controls, but that neoliberalism depends on moralities that its supporters attempt to disperse widely) and finds support for it in the parallel developments of the Mont Pelerin group and the United Nations' development of and support for human rights.
That said, I feel like the book spun its wheels quite a bit, making much out of small episodes when it could have stretched its legs a little more. Perhaps there is half a book of good material here, and the rest fills time but could be tighter. The last chapter was initially published as a standalone article, and there you can feel the tautness of Whyte's argument in a way not otherwise demonstrated across the book as a whole.
That said, I feel like the book spun its wheels quite a bit, making much out of small episodes when it could have stretched its legs a little more. Perhaps there is half a book of good material here, and the rest fills time but could be tighter. The last chapter was initially published as a standalone article, and there you can feel the tautness of Whyte's argument in a way not otherwise demonstrated across the book as a whole.
June 10, 2025
One of my great uncles, one of the few with a high education, gifted me once a Karl Popper book and fighting back a defensive instinct I read it and was appalled at the man's philosophy and how much it aligned with my uncle's. Reading Whyte's clarified a lot of things regarding that moment, and just how much the rot as settled in long before my time.
April 14, 2021
I was pleasantly surprised by this book! While I enjoy learning about economic history, I often find it confusing, but Whyte made complicated concepts accessible & clear. My only hesitation is that I am still not confident in my understanding of whether Whyte is arguing that neoliberalism first cared for liberty and this made it want a free market or if it first cared about a free market and therefore valued liberty, modeling the language of human rights to fit their needs. I do believe Whyte argues one way or the other, but I am unable to distill it completely. Otherwise, Whyte’s argument about the interconnection between neoliberalism and the morality of the market is convincing and cohesive.
January 5, 2021
as they say, GET OUT is actually a documentary. And I can only guess that the same has been said about SORRY TO BOTHER YOU. In which case, this text would be considered snuff, in comparison. In both, the proles are now the precariat, and instead of chains being all they have to lose, now it’s their independent contractor status
November 14, 2020
Excellent read. Whyte untangles logical fallacies so well, it's almost sexy (which is impressive for a work on neoliberalism). This belief system is grounded in a lesser-acknowledged political vision; a competitive market order would best ensure the protection of individuals from state intervention, incentivizing the productivity necessary for human dignity. Distinct from laissez-faire, this new system required a degree of intervention to submit individuals to market forces. Human dignity, however, is predicated upon access to resources, which are distributed unequally within a competitive framework that rides on the coattails of existing racial and gendered hierarchies. Early neoliberals were aware of this minor caveat and devised an intricate network of justifications to ensure market (white) supremacy. Humanitarian groups in the 70s and 80s who lent their support to frameworks of individual rights, withholding any critique of larger structural forces at play, worked to make this view morally palatable. Contemporary inequities can be largely attributed to the consequences of decades of neoliberal reforms, both in the West and in countries the West forcefully assisted in undergoing development projects.
"The challenge for the neoliberals was to overcome the egalitarianism of communal cultures and the assumption that basic welfare was a right, and to instill the morals of the market and a culture for individual rights."
Understanding the motivations behind this history is essential to understanding so much of what we now witness, from the stagnation of the U.S. wages to the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment to the prevalence of authoritarianism in the Global South.
"The challenge for the neoliberals was to overcome the egalitarianism of communal cultures and the assumption that basic welfare was a right, and to instill the morals of the market and a culture for individual rights."
Understanding the motivations behind this history is essential to understanding so much of what we now witness, from the stagnation of the U.S. wages to the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment to the prevalence of authoritarianism in the Global South.
April 26, 2021
WORLD-CLASS AUSSIE TEXT EXPLAINS UNDERPINNINGS OF NEOLIBERAL DISEASE
Not often I would recommend an Australian political philosopher to the world at large. This is a classy and original book, deserving of a wide audience. Written with clarity, but by its very nature of its topic, one to take in gradually.
The main title is the key. If we’ve all read our Piketty books and graphs, we know the neolibs’ crass economic code has been wildly successful, as a prop for nation states to roll back the equality trend and re-enrich the already rich.
Whyte’s interest lies elsewhere. Slicing and dicing the fundamental mid-20th century tenets of key theorists like Hayek, key agencies like Mont Pelerin Society, she drives home that the neolibs were also driven by a stern moralistic code.
Which was strongly white, Christian, and colonial. Which said, in essence, that the global market ought to trump the nation state. The neoliberal upside-down was market equals peace and freedom, the state equals violence and suppression. Sadly, the UN human rights agenda, and famed human rights NGOs, tended to be appeasers or enablers.
Cue in Pinochet’s Chile, as the perfect lab-rat trial for the Chicago neolib zealots.
As Whyte concludes, the US itself shows clearly, that the neolibs have done much more for the wealth of the wealthy, than the “rights” of the rest. She also references China. Whose pervasive marketisation coexists with centralised economic planning and subpar human “rights”. Not quite what the neolibs had in mind either.
Not often I would recommend an Australian political philosopher to the world at large. This is a classy and original book, deserving of a wide audience. Written with clarity, but by its very nature of its topic, one to take in gradually.
The main title is the key. If we’ve all read our Piketty books and graphs, we know the neolibs’ crass economic code has been wildly successful, as a prop for nation states to roll back the equality trend and re-enrich the already rich.
Whyte’s interest lies elsewhere. Slicing and dicing the fundamental mid-20th century tenets of key theorists like Hayek, key agencies like Mont Pelerin Society, she drives home that the neolibs were also driven by a stern moralistic code.
Which was strongly white, Christian, and colonial. Which said, in essence, that the global market ought to trump the nation state. The neoliberal upside-down was market equals peace and freedom, the state equals violence and suppression. Sadly, the UN human rights agenda, and famed human rights NGOs, tended to be appeasers or enablers.
Cue in Pinochet’s Chile, as the perfect lab-rat trial for the Chicago neolib zealots.
As Whyte concludes, the US itself shows clearly, that the neolibs have done much more for the wealth of the wealthy, than the “rights” of the rest. She also references China. Whose pervasive marketisation coexists with centralised economic planning and subpar human “rights”. Not quite what the neolibs had in mind either.
February 13, 2025
Jessica Whyte's Morals of the Market is a must-read—deeply researched, well-cited, and incredibly thought-provoking. It dispelled many of my naïve notions about NGOs and human rights organizations, revealing the unsettling origins of today’s hegemonic Western socio-economic ideology. (UNHR !!! my god)
Whyte masterfully weaves history and analysis, with some super compelling insights into Chile’s political past, Hayek, the Mont Pelerin Society, and neo-colonial justice struggles etc etc. I will read this again low-key !
Whyte masterfully weaves history and analysis, with some super compelling insights into Chile’s political past, Hayek, the Mont Pelerin Society, and neo-colonial justice struggles etc etc. I will read this again low-key !
October 6, 2025
A rich historical account and analytically complex story about neoliberalism and human rights in the 21st century. Fascinating archival detail breathes life into a thoughtful account of how the human rights industry came to serve neoliberal governance, both economic and otherwise. Highlights voices from the south, the peripheries, and the socialist experiments that 20th century histories all too often gloss over. A fantastic resource for anyone interested in understanding how the human rights project can be, at once, futile and hegemonic.
November 21, 2023
The introduction is a model of good writing and clear exposition. The rest of the book is largely a mash of hard-to-follow argumentation and history of ideas with no discernible framework from which to hang the exposition. The very dense text is not helped by the extensive inline quoting, which becomes very repetitive and not informative. The chapter on Pinochet's Chile is fascinating but very limited in terms of history, both the political-economic history and the history of ideas.
March 17, 2022
Read for class. Very good and disturbing. I didn’t know a lot of the stories in here including especially the one about LSF and MSF. I get stuck on what to do about all of this, and the conclusion lacks meaningful alternatives.
May 17, 2020
Excellent research and strong analysis throughout. A fascinating book.
June 10, 2021
A thorough and insightful account of the political project that accompanied the economic project of neoliberalism.
July 26, 2024
A great and informative book.
Want to Read
October 20, 2024JC571 .W428 2019 Memorial Library
August 17, 2025
All I’ll say is- it better get me a first in the diss! lol
February 29, 2020
An excellent read. The book traces the history of human rights and its usurpation by neoliberal policies. Using Chile as a case study enriches the book further. The most important point about this book is that it explains the issues very non academically making it super readable. I enjoyed every bit of the book. It also leaves the reader thinking about the future of human rights in the neoliberal era.
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