Whyte, a political theorist at the University of New South Wales, is not the first scholar to puzzle over this seemingly paradoxical convergence of human rights and neoliberalism. One concerned with human dignity, the other commodifying human life, they appear inimical to each other. Previously, the likes of Wendy Brown, Naomi Klein, and Samuel Moyn have tried to solve this riddle by depicting human rights norms as having obscured the structural transformations of neoliberalism, or as a ‘powerless companion’ unable to check market logic. Whyte, whom Moyn praises as ‘among the most brilliant and implacable younger intellectuals working today’, makes a more compelling claim. Rather than treating neoliberalism and human rights as distinct movements, Whyte shows that neoliberals were responsible for defining the mainstream conceptions of human rights common today. Without recognising these connections, ‘social movements and struggles that wield the language of human rights to contest neoliberalism may instead find that they strengthen its hold’.

Jessica Whyte (photograph via Portnews)

In making this case, Whyte offers a fresh historical reading of twentieth-century neoliberal and human rights ideas. Their convergence is usually dated from the 1970s, but Whyte traces it back to 1947, when a UN commission first met to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and when the neoliberal think tank the Mont Pèlerin Society was founded. Whyte tells the story of how neoliberal thinkers – notably Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman – responded to the rise of human rights. Hostile to the UDHR’s agenda, they modified human rights language for their own ends as moral and legal supports for a liberal market order.

What prompted neoliberals’ interest in human rights? From their earliest writings, neoliberals were engaged in more than an economic program and fought ‘for the survival of “Western civilisation”’. Hayek drew on the social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, which depicted human history as passing through stages from tribal hunter-gatherers to agriculture and, ultimately, to commercial society of civilised property rights and free exchange. Neoliberals presented this market order as a highly evolved, anti-political space of voluntary mutually beneficial relations, which checked power, mitigated conflict, and secured individual liberty and dignity. By contrast, politics was a backward realm of violence and coercion. This racialised account privileged Europe as unique in developing a market order that guaranteed freedom and even peace.

For neoliberals, twentieth-century communism, social democracy, and postcolonial claims for economic sovereignty posed multipronged threats to ‘civilisation’. Conflating these movements as collectivist, ‘totalitarian’ regimes antithetical to a ‘free society’, they castigated democratic demands for redistribution as civilisational regression towards tribalist conflict. Neoliberals investigated the moral foundations of the market to guard against such threats. Rejecting nineteenth-century commitments to laissez-faire and self-regulating markets, they argued state institutions should protect the market by upholding a moral framework – comprising property-owning independence, familial responsibility, and Christian freedom of conscience – that sanctioned wealth accumulation and inequality. Laws and morals would produce subjects submissive to impersonal market processes.

Human rights became central to this defence of civilisation. Neoliberals argued that human rights did not naturally inhere in the human person but were the historical product of an evolved market order. People gained rights when freed to pursue their own ends. Hayek rejected the UDHR’s program for universal rights to housing, food, education, and medicine as meaningless and unenforceable. Instead, he advocated a narrow scheme of civic, property, and contractual rights that secured human dignity by freeing individuals from dependence. As Friedman would later argue, ‘property rights are the basis of all rights’. Equally, rights-talk could inculcate norms of submission and self-reliance that protected the market from egalitarian demands.

Focusing on this nexus between neoliberalism, civilisation, and human rights helps to explain neoliberals’ unrelenting assault on state provision and postcolonial self-determination. Social democracy was demonised not as an economic aberration but as a threat to Western freedom and morality. Welfare cushioned people from their actions, deterred workers from submitting to market signals, and stymied family responsibility. Such fears clearly resonated with Western governments by the 1980s. Similarly, postcolonial economic sovereignty – such as Egyptian control of the Suez Canal – risked a return to a world where raw materials were inaccessible without conquest. Neoliberals mobilised human rights to justify the supervision of postcolonial states by entities such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, which structurally ‘adjusted’ them as markets amenable to global capital.

Engrossing and comprehensively researched, The Morals of the Market sparkles with erudite engagements across modern political theory that contextualises neoliberal thought. A key test for any intellectual history of neoliberalism is its illumination of actually existing neoliberalism today. Whyte is too sophisticated to presuppose any direct correspondence of Hayek on contemporary government. While there are gestures towards Thatcher, Reagan, and recent WTO claims that ‘trade is human rights in practice’, Whyte identifies neoliberals’ treatment of postcolonial states as a more concrete clue to the legacies of neoliberal human rights. Crucially, it was an approach taken up by the emergent human rights NGOs of the 1970s.

Organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Médecins sans Frontières embraced the neoliberal dichotomy between violent politics and peaceful markets. Rejecting UDHR aspirations, NGOs wielded a narrow version of human rights to shame transgressing governments and promote individuals’ participation in market society, even calling on military interventions against ‘despotic’, non-capitalist postcolonial states. Accordingly, NGOs warned of a Third World suffering because it failed to comply with (neoliberal) human rights norms. In an era of welfare retrenchment and widening inequality, Whyte argues, human rights have been a ‘fellow traveller’ with neoliberalism, designed to defend market order rather than to prosecute its inequalities.

Whyte is doubtful that human rights might yet be refurbished to curtail neoliberalism’s civilising mission. It depends on how freedom and equality are understood. Equally ominous are lessons the Global South has long endured: neoliberalism tends to produce its own brand of authoritarianism, as Europe and the United States now attest. For Australian readers this might ring bells. What are sometimes dismissed as culture wars are in fact frontline battles for Australia’s political economy.