Writing in The Times a month later, Conservative Party peer Daniel Finkelstein cited these events as reason to support the Human Rights Act. Comparing Corbyn to the former Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, he argued that this was 'exactly the reason we have human rights protection' – so people can 'secure their individual liberty – in this case their right to property – when the popular will is against them'. For this wealthy lord, human rights were not for Grenfell's survivors, among them undocumented migrants who, as Hannah Arendt noted long ago, should have been the exemplary subjects of human rights. Rather, human rights were necessary to protect a weak minority, Kensington's absent property-owners, from the passions of the masses.

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.

The language of human rights is notoriously slippery, marked by a 'tactical polyvalence' (in Michel Foucault's words) according to which the effect of identical formulations differs 'according to who is speaking, his position of power [and] the institutional context in which he happens to be speaking'. Nonetheless, to recognise that human rights lack a single meaning – that they are contingent political discourses, not unchangeable, metaphysical attributes of human nature – is not enough to explain the ease with which human rights discourses have been mobilised in defence of wealth and power in the period of neoliberal hegemony. Nor does it explain why it was that a distinctive politics of human rights became prevalent in the period of neoliberal ascendancy and flourished alongside the retrenchment of the welfare state. It does not help us explain why, as the neoliberals instituted a closure of the political imagination by insisting that there was no alternative to endless austerity, human rights defenders disparaged revolutionary politics as totalitarian. For some of their most prominent defenders, the role of human rights was 'not to open the gates of paradise, but to bolt the gates of hell' (in the French 'New Philosopher' André Glucksmann's words).

In 1947, the divergences between those who drafted the UDHR and the neoliberals of Mont Pèlerin were more significant than their convergences. While both were concerned with threats to human dignity and liberty in the wake of World War II, their solutions differed markedly: the human rights delegates adopted an extensive list of social and economic rights, while the neoliberals depicted state welfare and planning as totalitarian threats to 'Western civilisation'.

The economic transformations of this period were stark, from the rise of austerity and the retrenchment of state welfare provision to the commodification of public services, the deregulation of the finance sector and growing indebtedness. Consequently, critics of neoliberalism have homed in on its economic agenda. Nonetheless, I contend that we cannot understand why human rights and neoliberalism flourished together if we view neoliberalism as an exclusively economic doctrine.

Neoliberalism is commonly understood as an amoral economic ideology that subordinates all values to an economic rationality. In a powerful instance of this critique, Wendy Brown argues that neoliberalism's 'economization' of life configures the human 'always, only, and everywhere as homo economicus'. Elsewhere she argues that, despite its pragmatic reconciliation with neoconservatism in the United States, neoliberalism is 'expressly amoral at the level of both ends and means'. This form of criticism is not new, and nor is it confined to this neoliberal form of capitalism; it resembles nothing so much as The Communist Manifesto's awe-struck descriptions of the bourgeoisie, which leaves 'no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment"'. Although the argument that capitalism drowns all values in the 'icy water of egotistical calculation' was borrowed from capitalism's earlier conservative critics, Marx and Engels were without nostalgia for feudal bonds cemented by religion and sentimentality. Contemporary critics, while largely agreeing that neoliberalism reduces all values to cash value, have been similarly divided about whether this is cause for celebration or denunciation.

For Brown, who is more attentive to the impact of neoliberalism on politics, the rise of neoliberal economism is a fundamental threat to democracy and rights. Neoliberalism constitutes subjects who are indifferent to democratic political values and positively antagonistic to egalitarianism, she argues. Consequently, political problems are transformed into individual ones with market solutions, while civil liberties, the rule of law and fair elections are 'wholly desacralized'. Paradoxically, she argues, this provides fertile ground for neoconservative attempts to bolster the foundations of family, religion and state, partly through a civilisational discourse that moralises 'a certain imaginary of the West and its values'.

From the perspective of this book, these accounts of the amoral economism of neoliberalism miss the distinctive morality that was central to its rise. What distinguished the neoliberals of the twentieth century from their nineteenth-century precursors, I argue, was not a narrow understanding of the human as homo economicus, but the belief that a functioning competitive market required an adequate moral and legal foundation. As Foucault recognised of the German ordoliberals, neoliberal thinkers aimed to establish (or revive) a set of moral values that would secure social integration in a context of market competition. The founding statement of the Mont Pèlerin Society makes this clear: diagnosing a civilisational crisis characterised by the disappearance of the conditions for ‘human dignity’ and threats to freedom of thought and expression, it states that these developments ‘have been fostered by the growth of a view of history which denies all absolute moral standards’. Rather than an external supplement, or a pragmatic partner, social conservatism, including explicit appeals to family values, Christianity and ‘Western civilisation’, was foundational to the consolidation of organised neoliberalism in the mid twentieth century.

Far from reducing all of life to economics, I show that the neoliberals of the mid twentieth century were deeply suspicious of the very idea of the economy. In his polemical 1944 critique of socialist planning, The Road to Serfdom, the founder of the Mont Pèlerin Society, Friedrich Hayek, complained about his contemporaries’ preoccupation with economic concerns. The values that rank lowest today and are dismissed as nineteenth-century illusions, he argued, are the ‘moral values’ – ‘liberty and independence, truth and intellectual honesty, peace and democracy, and respect for the individual qua man instead of merely as the member of an organized group’. Around the same time, the German ordoliberal Wilhelm Röpke criticised the ‘economism’ that ‘judges everything in relation to the economy and in terms of material productivity, making material and economic interests the center of things’.

Hayek's message was that free enterprise required 'not only moral standards but moral standards of a particular kind'. Like the manufacturers he was addressing, Hayek and his MPS companions had long been convinced that a market order required a conducive moral order. From their perspective, the rise of socialism and social democracy was, first of all, a moral problem. No free society would survive, the Austrian economist told this sympathetic business audience, without a moral climate that instils personal responsibility and regards it as just that people are rewarded materially based on how valuable their services are to their fellows.

Hayek provided a more developed account of the morals of a market society in his late work, Law, Legislation and Liberty. Evoking the fall of Rome – and the thesis of its great historian Edward Gibbon, who attributed that fall to a decline in ancient virtue – Hayek warned that, whether or not Gibbon was correct about Rome, 'there can be no doubt that moral and religious beliefs can destroy a civilization'. For Hayek and those he brought together to form the Mont Pèlerin Society, the demise of the morals that sustained a market order threatened their own civilisation with destruction.

Although Hayek argued there can be no single, absolute system of rules or morals independent of social organisation, he nonetheless contended that only one system of morals could make possible an open or 'humanistic' society in which individuals are valued as such and are relatively free to pursue their own plans.

What Hayek called the 'morals of the market' were a set of individualistic, commercial values that prioritised the pursuit of self-interest above the development of common purposes. A market society required a moral framework that sanctioned wealth accumulation and inequality, promoted individual and familial responsibility, and fostered submission to the impersonal results of the market process at the expense of the deliberate pursuit of collectively formulated ends. It also required that moral obligations are limited to the requirement that we refrain from harming others, and do not require positive obligations to others.

Given that moral rules exist to support the market order, Hayek urged that 'conduciveness to that order be accepted as a standard by which all particular institutions are judged'. This was Hayek's own version of the German ordoliberal conviction that economic policies must be systemgerech, or compatible with the whole economic system. This market-conduciveness, or compatibility, gave the neoliberals a criterion for assessing claims to human rights that was more precise than a simple distinction between civil and political rights and social and economic rights: to the extent rights supported market relations, the neoliberals actively promoted them; when claims for rights interfered with the competitive market, by requiring state intervention and non-market forms of obligation and redistribution, they opposed them as though the fate of civilisation depended on it.

Today, much critical work on human rights is devoted to deflating the notion that human rights are the codification of a moral sense originating in human nature. Such a claim has little critical purchase on neoliberal accounts of human rights. Hayek, for instance, explicitly rejected the view that morals and rules are ‘permanently implanted in an unalterable nature of man’. His mentor Mises had put it in these blunt terms decades earlier: ‘The fact is that Nature grants no rights at all’. Rejecting the dichotomy between natural law and rationally constructed rules, Hayek argued that culture, institutions and morals are ‘neither natural nor artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed’. Morals develop, he argued, through the unconscious selection of the values and institutions that provide those who submit to them with the greatest benefits. The morals of the market initially emerged in urban, commercial centres, Hayek argued, where substantive bonds were weaker and individuals more accustomed to cooler, more distant market relations with others.

Appropriating the work of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson – for whom human history supposedly passed through a sequence of stages, from the hunter to the herdsman to the farmer to the trader – Hayek argued that the evolution from the ‘small band’ to the ‘Great Society’ required the abandonment of feelings of personal loyalty and egalitarian commitments more suitable to tribal existence. It required that the purpose-driven rules of small societies, in which individuals worked together towards shared ends, were replaced by abstract rules applicable to large numbers of strangers – and ultimately to all of humanity. From this perspective, the transition to the market economy was achieved through (deeply resented) breaches of the solidarity that governed earlier social relations. ‘Man’, Hayek contended, ‘has been civilized very much against his wishes.’

In attributing the development of morality to the ‘survival of the successful’, Hayek presented a racialised narrative that took for granted that those Europeans who had developed commercial relations were more successful than others. He saw their success as a result of their adoption of ‘moral conceptions which do not prescribe particular aims but rather general rules limiting the range of permitted actions’. In his contemporaries’ demands for social justice and social and economic rights Hayek saw atavistic attempts on the part of ‘the non-domesticated or un-civilized’ members of society to resurrect the morals of a ‘tribal society’. From such a perspective, socialism and social democracy were not merely economic threats to the productivity and efficiency of economic relations; they were civilisational regressions, the return of ‘suppressed primordial instincts’ that threatened the moral foundations of the competitive market.

One of my key arguments here is that the neoliberal argument for the competitive market was itself moral and political, rather than strictly economic. Early neoliberals attributed to the market a series of anti-political virtues: checking and dispersing power, facilitating social cooperation, pacifying conflict, and securing individual liberty and rights. They presented commercial or 'civil society' as a space of mutually beneficial, voluntary relations that contrasted with the violence, coercion and conflict of the political realm. Market coordination was less a means to enhance productivity and efficiency than a substitute for the violence, coercion and despotism that they argued were endemic to politics – and especially to mass politics. Only the widespread adoption of the morals of the market, Hayek argued, offered 'the distant hope of a universal order of peace'.

In extolling the pacifying virtues of the market, I argue that the neoliberals revived an older political argument for capitalism first identified by Albert Hirschman in his classic 1977 book The Passions and the Interests. There, Hirschman uncovered what he called the 'doux-commerce' ('sweetness of commerce') thesis, which, he argued, was conventional wisdom in the mid eighteenth century. Hirschman's account of the moral virtues of the market began with a sentence in Baron de Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, which he ultimately chose for his own book's epigraph: 'It is fortunate for men to be in a situation where, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked [méchants], they have nevertheless an interest in not being so.' The view that the interests could check the passions, Hirschman argued, was a message of salvation for a world trapped between the violence of the passions and the seeming ineffectiveness of reason. Far from viewing commerce as corrupting, as republican thinkers tended to do, Montesquieu praised it for its 'spirit of frugality, economy, moderation, work, wisdom, tranquility, order and rule'. Commerce, he contended, is a source of gentleness, softness and polish, which 'cures destructive prejudices' and leads to more gentle mores. For Montesquieu, those who pursued their interests through the market stood in a relation of mutual need, and thus the 'natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace'.

Montesquieu wrote at a time when world trade was violent and dangerous, inseparable from colonial conquest and the slave trade. Marx mocked such accounts of the pacifying role of commerce in his writings on the 'primitive accumulation' of capital. After describing in garish detail the history of Dutch colonialism, with its secret prisons, assassinations, bribery and enslavement, he remarked sarcastically, 'That is peaceful [doux] commerce!' Yet, according to Hirschman, it was only when this violence 'came home' – with the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the social dislocation of the industrial revolution – that belief in the sweetness of commerce lost its grip on the European imagination. By the twentieth century, Hirschman concluded, no observer could still subscribe to this hopeful vision of the pacifying market. Its subsequent defenders therefore focused on its economic benefits, borrowing from Adam Smith to valorise the increased productivity and efficiency made possible by the division of labour. For most critics, the neoliberal thinkers exemplified this shift from a political to an economic justification for capitalism.

Unlike Hirschman, I argue that a version of this justification of capitalism was central to neoliberal thought in the inauspicious circumstances of the twentieth century. For Hayek, who described his own project as doing 'for the twentieth century what Montesquieu had done for the eighteenth', and for his neoliberal colleagues, the challenge was to revive the argument that a society coordinated through the competitive market would replace the coercion, conquest and conflict endemic to politics with voluntary, mutually beneficial, harmonious social relations. The tendency to view neoliberalism as the dominance of the economy over all other spheres of life has obscured its distinctive political argument for the competitive market. Throughout the twentieth century, neoliberals argued that the demise of market competition was a threat to individual freedom that augured the rule of a coercive, bureaucratic power. They faulted socialism and social democracy for politicising distribution and replacing consensual market relations between individuals with violent sectional conflicts over ends. In the wars of the twentieth century, they saw the inevitable result of a turn away from the market economy.

Variants of Hirschman's thesis run through Mises's argument that, if not for the greater productivity of the division of labour, there would be no sentiments of sympathy or good will, but only 'endless bloody fighting'. It is central to Hayek's description of the market as a 'catallaxy' – a term derived from the Greek verb katallatein, which meant both to exchange and 'to turn from an enemy into a friend'. It informs Röpke's argument that allowing individuals to pursue their interests through the market leads to harmonious social coordination, while the pursuit of interests through the political process brings 'millions of conflicting interests' into play. And it appears even in the positivist Friedman's argument that the use of 'political channels' strains the 'social cohesion essential for a stable society', while the use of the market reduces tensions by making it unnecessary for individuals to agree on ultimate ends.

For the neoliberals, the competitive market was not simply a more efficient technology for the distribution of goods and services; it was the guarantor of individual freedom and rights, and the necessary condition of social peace. If neoliberal thinkers and human rights activists could find common cause, as I suggest they could, this is largely because the concerns of twentieth-century neoliberals were far less narrowly economic than existing accounts tend to allow.

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'.

However, I show that, despite their horror at the 'collectivism' and 'politicisation' that characterised the human rights process in the United Nations, the neoliberals did not simply turn away from human rights; rather, they developed their own account of human rights as moral and legal supports for a liberal market order.

Coming from a thinker who described the authoritarian regime of Chile's General Pinochet as an economic and political 'miracle', this invocation of human rights appears out of place. After all, human rights NGOs came to prominence in the 1970s precisely for contesting the torture and disappearances that accompanied neoliberal shock treatment in the Southern Cone. According to a prominent critical view, neoliberal emphases on competitive markets and austerity were 'inherently inimical to the protection of human rights', resting on completely different normative foundations. As a recent primer on human rights puts it, 'neoliberalism is one logic in the world today; human rights is the other'.

But Friedman's account deserves to be taken seriously, even if it illuminates the time in which he was speaking more than it does the mid twentieth century. While one scholar has noted that human and political rights were 'notably absent' from the 1947 MPS statement of aims, at that time human rights were not yet an obvious aspect of a liberal tradition. The phrase 'human rights' is similarly absent from the Oxford Manifesto, issued that same year by representatives from nineteen liberal parties as a statement of principles of the 'Liberal International'. The discourse of human rights was still under construction, and there was no consensus even among liberals on the relationship between the newer language of human rights and earlier affirmations of the 'rights of man', 'fundamental rights', humanitarianism, or individual freedom under the rule of law. The neoliberals were active participants in that process of construction. Human rights played a significant and overlooked role in neoliberals' mid-century efforts to challenge socialism, social democracy and state planning, and neoliberal thinkers contributed more than has been acknowledged to the version of human rights that came to prominence decades later. By 1992, when Friedman spoke, the neoliberal argument that only a liberal market economy could foster human rights was taken as self-evident by many major international human rights NGOs.

The neoliberals saw human rights and competitive markets as mutually constitutive. In his bestselling polemic The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argued that all claims made on behalf of individuals could be attributed to the rise of the 'commercial spirit'. ' "The ideas of 1789" – liberty, equality, fraternity – are characteristically commercial ideals which have no other purpose but to secure certain advantages to individuals', he wrote. For the author of The Road to Serfdom and his fellow neoliberals, the competitive market made individual rights possible, but the market's functioning also depended on the rule of law and the 'recognition of the inalienable rights of the individual, inviolable rights of man'. Hayek's account of the rights of man owed much to his more utilitarian mentor Mises, whose 1922 study of socialism argued that individual rights had emerged 'hand in hand with the development of capitalism'. Once 'men' gained economic freedom, Mises argued, they soon desired it elsewhere, and sought 'legal recognition of the subjective rights of citizens'. Rights, according to this perspective, do not inhere naturally in the human person; rather, they arise only when the capitalist division of labour allows individuals to pursue their own interests and values, freeing them from the arbitrary power of others. It was only capitalism, Mises argues, that made human relationships material and calculable, and brought freedom from the heavens down to earth: 'Such freedom is no natural right.'

In his early text, 'On the Jewish Question', Marx argued that the rights to equality, liberty, security and property enshrined in the eighteenth-century declarations amount to protections for the egoistic individual of civil society. In an article that challenges recent Marxist critiques of the complicity between human rights and neoliberalism, Samuel Moyn notes that the target of the young Marx's criticisms was the abstraction of political emancipation within the nation-state, not the transnational, NGO-driven, legalistic human rights dominant today. When human rights came to prominence in the 1970s, Moyn argues, they broke fundamentally with the statist paradigm of the revolutionary rights of man that Marx criticised. This transnational politics of human rights may have come to prominence at the same time as neoliberalism, he argues, but human rights NGOs were merely 'powerless companions' of neoliberalism. Elsewhere, Moyn suggests that, while 'the notion that individuals have basic rights was shaped by the political economy that always affects so much else in moral ideals and social relations', this shaping was never complete, as human rights never reverted to their nineteenth-century role as protections of private property and freedom of contract.

I argue that human rights were not simply shaped by an underlying economic reality; they were a central component of the neoliberal attempt to inculcate the morals of the market. This does not mean that contemporary human rights are reducible to protections of private property and contract. Clearly, they are not. But, just as human rights are distinct from the rights of man, neoliberalism is not the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century, and it is not reducible to a defence of property and contract either. One of the clearest and most succinct descriptions of the distinctiveness of neoliberalism comes from a 1951 paper by Friedman entitled ‘Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects’. The ‘basic error’ of nineteenth-century liberalism, the young Chicago School economist argued, was to confine the role of the state to the maintenance of order and enforcement of contracts. Friedman framed neoliberalism as a reaction to this basic error: ‘Neoliberalism would accept the nineteenth-century liberal emphasis on the fundamental importance of the individual’, he wrote, ‘but it would substitute for the nineteenth-century goal of laissez-faire as a means to this end, the goal of the competitive order’. This entailed much more scope for state intervention to create the conditions for competition than nineteenth-century laissez-faire had countenanced.

For all their undoubted diversity, the neoliberals of the early Mont Pèlerin Society were largely united around the programme outlined in Friedman’s short paper. At the inaugural MPS meeting, Hayek argued that, while it is known that a functioning market relies on the ‘protection of certain rights, such as property and the enforcement of contracts’, it was only once this was accepted that ‘the real problem begins’. In The Road to Serfdom, he faulted previous liberals for neglecting the fact that a competitive market requires an ‘appropriate legal system’, and stressed that it was ‘by no means sufficient that the law should recognise the principle of private property and freedom of contract’. Human rights played an important role in the neoliberal attempt to develop an appropriate legal system and moral framework for a global capitalist market. The rights they formulated were not the rights of man that Marx had criticised. The correlate of seeing the competitive market as the sine qua non of peace, freedom and rights is that that neoliberal human rights exist not so much to protect the individual – even the egoistic individual – as to preserve the market order.

In ‘On the Jewish Question’, Marx characterised the right to liberty as the right to do anything that does not harm others, and therefore as ‘the right of separation’ of a restricted individual. Liberty, or freedom, is the one value that neoliberal human rights would be expected to serve; but, examined closely, neoliberal freedom is largely indistinguishable from submission to what Mises called ‘the sovereignty of the market’. 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. They believed that adjustment to the demands of the market was primarily secured by price fluctuations – that is, by what Marx called the ‘silent compulsion of economic relations’.

Writing about wages in an unregulated market, 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’. 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’. 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’. 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.

The right to security, according to Marx, was manifested in the police, who secured the universal egoism of civil society. With the global extension of capitalist social relations, neoliberal thinkers were met with the challenge of globalising this policing function. They believed that promoting a regime of rights would support the extension of the world market. 'People without rights', Mises warned, 'are always a menace to social order'. They gave the state the role of protecting the competitive market from those who are unable to adjust themselves to its demands. Mises was typically clear about the role of the state in a 'peaceful' liberal market order: noting that the market itself is free of coercion and the state must not interfere with it, he wrote that, in a liberal order, the state 'employs its power to beat people into submission solely for the prevention of actions destructive to the preservation and the smooth operation of the market economy'. A central function of neoliberal human rights has been to globalise this function, legitimising state violence aimed at the global dissemination of capitalist social relations. The neoliberal right to security is a right for states to beat into submission those who threaten the market order.

The right to property, which Marx described as the foundation of the whole system, was, in his view, a right to self-interest. For earlier liberals, such as John Locke, property was justified as a means to 'improvement'. God meant the earth to be cultivated, and so gave it to the 'industrious and rational'. Consistent with this justification, Mises bemoaned that much of the world's mineral wealth was located in areas 'whose inhabitants are too ignorant, too inert, or too dull to take advantage of the riches nature has bestowed upon them'. As in the vision of earlier neoliberals, the right to private property ensured wealth was put in the hands of those most capable of utilising it. But they went further than this, stressing the institutional conditions in which such rights would be secure. If the governments of areas rich in resources prevented 'aliens' from exploiting this wealth, or their arbitrary conduct of public affairs threatened foreign investments, serious harm would result to all as a consequence. Preventing such harm required the 'right to keep foreign investments safe and to move capital freely across borders'. A neoliberal right to property is the right to impose 'good governance' and the institutional structures that private investment requires across the globe.

The liberal political theorist Michael Ignatieff expressed this vision clearly in 2001 when he argued that the civil and political rights of a 'capitalist rights tradition' are 'the most we can hope for'. And Hayek's student, the international trade lawyer Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, defended it most emphatically when he argued for the interdependence of human rights and international trade law. Eight years before the WTO embraced the idea of a mutual relation between human rights and competitive markets, Petersmann argued that the globalisation of human rights relies on the open markets, prohibition of economic discrimination and 'welfare-enhancing division of labour' enforced by the WTO, while human rights promote economic integration by 'protecting personal autonomy, legal and social security, peaceful change, individual savings, investments, production and mutually beneficial transactions across frontiers'.

In his major biography of the 'International Human Rights Movement', Aryeh Neier, the former head of Human Rights Watch, suggests that the rise of human rights coincided with a shift of Cold War rhetoric, from a focus on economic competition between communism and capitalism to one on the political conflict of 'repression, or totalitarianism, versus liberty, or human rights'. I argue that major international human rights and humanitarian NGOs embraced the central neoliberal dichotomy between commercial or 'civil society' – understood as a realm of freedom, voluntary interaction and distributed, private power that checked the centralised power of the state – on the one hand, and politics, understood as violent, coercive and conflictual on the other.

The methodology of many human rights NGOs, as Kenneth Roth, the director of the US-based Human Rights Watch notes, consists in the ability 'to investigate, expose, and shame', which involves identifying a particular violation, a specific violator, and a clear remedy. This has made these NGOs both reluctant and unsuited to challenge the structural and impersonal effects of market processes. Nevertheless, while supposedly eschewing coercion, major human rights NGOs, including Roth's, have been quite prepared to call on the military might of the most powerful states to intervene in the name of securing human rights and universalising a distinctive moral order. In the process, they often aligned with the neoliberal embrace of a 'strong security state, stripped of its social capacity' so as to protect the market and enforce the morals of the market across the globe.

Then, as today, the content of human rights was a product of political struggle. Human rights are not given by nature, and there has never been a single human rights movement capable of securing general agreement about a list of rights and their order of priority, let alone realising these rights for all. But to stop at pointing out that 'human rights' lacks a unitary meaning, as Susan Marks notes in a related context, is 'silently to signal that these phenomena are isolated problems, unrelated to wider processes, tendencies and dynamics at work in the world'. By leaving unexamined the tendencies and dynamics that bring such transformations about, as Marks notes, we occlude an understanding of what would be necessary to achieve genuine change. Such 'false contingency' neglects the ways in which political possibilities are framed by systemic constraints. Specifically, the belief that human rights are endlessly polyvalent treats them as free-floating, disconnected form the structures of contemporary capitalism, unmoored from the historical conditions and defeats that brought them into being. It obscures the fact that not all figures of the human and of community are equally capable of 'signifying within the text of human rights'.

This book begins in the late 1940s, with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society. The early parts of the book explore those strands of neoliberal thought that were particularly focused on the requirements of a 'civilisation' that early neoliberals depicted as indistinguishably moral, racial and economic. In the first three chapters, I focus predominantly on early neoliberalism, and on the leading figures associated with the Austrian School of economics and the ordoliberalism of the German Freiburg School. The central characters of these first chapters are Austrian School figures Mises and Hayek, British economist Lionel Robbins, German ordoliberals Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow, Swiss diplomat and economist William Rappard, and French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel – though many others make cameo appearances. While not without their significant disagreements with one another, these figures were united by a concern with world order (as Quinn Slobodian has highlighted), and by the conviction that international economic integration presupposed what Röpke called 'extra-economic integration (social-political-moral-institutional-legal integration)'.

I show that, while anticolonialists succeeded in ridding the UDHR of the language of 'civilisation', the neoliberals constructed a new standard of civilisation that would secure submission to the international market.

I argue that, in promoting a dichotomy between the market as a realm of mutually beneficial, free, peaceful exchange, and politics as violent, coercive and militaristic, the neoliberals sought to inculcate the morals of the market and pathologise those political struggles which threatened the assigned places of postcolonial societies in the international division of labour.

I show that the neoliberals rejected mid-century welfarism, which they argued confused society with a household and was therefore 'totalitarian'. Nonetheless, I also argue that, in defining social and economic rights as flexible standards that did not imply binding obligations on states, the drafters of the UDHR developed an account of social and economic rights that was ultimately compatible with a privatised, neoliberal approach to the management of poverty.

The problem, I argue, was not that the human rights NGOs allowed the neoliberals to obscure the relation between their economic shock and the political violence necessary to impose it, as is often suggested. Rather, in conceptualising the problem as politics and the solution as law, the human rights NGOs bolstered the neoliberal dichotomy between violent politics and peaceful markets, secured by constitutional restrictions.

Without coming to terms with that influence, social movements and struggles that wield the language of human rights to contest neoliberalism may instead find that they strengthen its hold.

In his opening address at the society's inaugural meeting, Friedrich Hayek said that the experience of the 'actual decay of civilization' had taught European thinkers lessons not yet learnt in the UK and the United States.

In a foreword to the 1956 American edition of The Road to Serfdom the Austrian economist explained that the book aimed to show that state economic controls and public monopolies could destroy the market economy and 'gradually smother the creative powers of a free civilization'. This threat, Hayek believed, long preceded the outbreak of World War II; everywhere, liberal ideals and free markets were threatened by the rise of collectivist mass politics, and only those who could remember the period before World War I knew what a liberal world was like.

The early neoliberals saw themselves as fighting for more than an economic programme; at stake, they believed, was the survival of 'Western civilization'. Faced with widespread demands for socialism, state welfare provision and economic planning, they turned their attention to the moral values and subjective qualities underpinning a competitive market order. 'Self-discipline, a sense of justice, honesty, fairness, chivalry, moderation, public spirit, respect for human dignity, firm ethical norms – all of these are things which people must possess before they go to market and compete with each other', wrote the German ordoliberal, Wilhelm Röpke.

The neoliberals portrayed these moral and subjective qualities as the products of a civilisation whose foundations were in Greece, Rome and Christianity, and whose 'basic individualism' was the inheritance of Erasmus, Montaigne, Cicero, Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides. This construction of Western civilisation was deeply anachronistic. Neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans understood themselves as part of 'the West', and nor were their various conceptions of the self and the subject compatible with neoliberal individualism. Yet the claim to speak on behalf of Western civilisation allowed the neoliberals to recast their adversaries not merely as representative of rival political and economic movements but as threats to civilisation and the freedoms and rights it provides.

All this was laid out clearly in the MPS’s original statement of aims, which condemned central economic direction because it conflicts with the ‘right of each individual to plan his own life’. Like the preamble of the UDHR, the neoliberal statement stressed freedom of speech, thought and expression, and restraint of arbitrary power. Rejecting now-outdated nineteenth-century laissez-faire, it framed the competitive market as the product of an appropriate institutional framework and a rule of law. It also noted that the trends leading towards ‘totalitarianism’ were not confined to the economic realm but had also emerged in morality, philosophy and the interpretation of history. Conflating communism, fascism and social democracy, the neoliberals argued that all systems that organise social efforts towards a single goal ‘are totalitarian in the true sense of this new word which we have adopted to describe the unexpected but nevertheless inseparable manifestations of what in theory we call collectivism’.

The Chicago School economist and virtue ethicist Deirdre McCloskey is one of the most explicit contemporary defenders of the thesis that commerce is sweet and civilising; she argues that, in making it necessary to negotiate mutually beneficial market exchanges, 'as a civilized people must', capitalism instils a series of 'bourgeois virtues': prudence, temperance, justice, courage, love, faith and hope.

Faced with the rise of collectivist mass politics, mid-twentieth-century neoliberalism was a defensive liberalism. Breaking with the optimism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the early neoliberals believed the survival of the competitive market required the re-establishment of its moral foundations. It was through this lens that they viewed human rights. Redefined to exclude social protections, human rights, they believed, could protect the market order by securing property and private investment and fostering the morals of the market. From the neoliberal perspective, the UN human rights process, with its expansion of membership beyond the bounds of the 'civilised' family of nations, and its challenges to racial hierarchies, threatened the continuity of civilisation. But the neoliberals saw the potential for the language of human rights to provide that 'generally observed and undisputed code of moral norms and principles of behavior' which, the German ordoliberal Wilhelm Röpke argued, was the precondition of economic integration. Human rights, from this perspective, were not a product of international consensus. They were a product of 'Western civilisation', and their role was to support the extension of capitalist social relations by fostering the legal security, morals and forms of subjectivity conducive to an international market order.

During the early drafting of the UDHR, the Soviet delegate, Vladimir Koretsky, rebuked the great French jurist René Cassin for his use of the phrase 'civilised nations'. Framing civilisational hierarchies as an anachronism from the age of the tsars, Koretksy argued the phrase had 'no meaning at the present time'. Noting that the UK's draft declaration also referred to 'civilised nations', the future judge at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) asked that the committee 'not follow old documents too blindly but find a new track for itself'.

A conservative critic of the French Revolution, Lorimer considered free trade to be the 'only novel and fruitful application of the principle of fraternity', and he saw the division of society into classes as central to material progress. Economic and racial categorisations blurred in this presentation; Lorimer argued that a state's wealth might furnish the 'only means available for international purposes of estimating the moral and intellectual qualities of citizens', and he regularly compared the domestic poor to 'barbarians'. Sanctifying wealth by treating it as evidence of superiority, Lorimer argued that, even if the same means of culture could be placed within the reach of all, 'men's powers of availing themselves of it differ so widely, that, relatively at least, the barbarian, like "the poor", we shall "have with us always"'.

The United States, which was both less invested than the UK and France in the old order of European colonialism and more anxious about allowing the Soviets to monopolise the language of progress, worked to construct a civilisational discourse adequate to a new era of universal rights. Eleanor Roosevelt told the delegates that while there were 'peoples of different levels of development in various parts of the world', this did not mean they were naturally inferior, but that they had not had the same opportunities for development. Such arguments would become central to the neoliberal civilising missions of the later twentieth century.

In his opening address at the inaugural MPS Conference, the Swiss economist and diplomat William Rappard depicted his colleagues as the inheritors of both Adam Smith's economic science and his liberal politics. What Smith did not realise, this well-travelled diplomat argued, was that the 'economic man' underpinning his science was 'like Smith himself, a Scotchman who preferred to work and to save rather than idly to enjoy idleness'. Rappard contrasted this 'Scotch brand of homo economicus', for whom work was a virtue and saving a characteristic trait, with the Algerian Arabs he had witnessed in Algiers five years earlier, shunning work and enjoying themselves by sitting idly on the pavements. Had Smith been 'reared among the sun-baked race of Arabs who prefer leisure to work' and equality to liberty, he speculated, 'would his semi-tropical economic man not have led him quite consistently to preach a very different doctrine?' Smith's liberal economics, Rappard believed, could only thrive in conditions inhabited by a very distinctive subject.

Rappard was deeply involved in both the practical administration of mandate territories and the development of neoliberalism. He was a close friend of Hayek, who wrote to him in the wake of the success of The Road to Serfdom that 'there are still many more people who feel on the whole as we do than I had ever dared hope'. As the co-founder of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Rappard provided a wartime institutional home to a group of neoliberal thinkers that included Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke and Luigi Einaudi.

Rappard provided a bridge between the 'civilising' work of the mandate system and the neoliberal attempt to save civilisation from the threat of collectivism. He brought an internationalist perspective to neoliberal thinking, and a belief that the international extension of the competitive market required the cultural and subjective transformation of non-capitalist societies.

While the locus of sovereignty in the mandates was a topic of great controversy, mandatory powers were generally not considered to be sovereign. Rather, the mandates were held in trust, and the presupposition of a trust, as the conservative thinker Edmund Burke outlined in his famous indictment of the British East India Company, is that any power set over people must be exercised for their benefit.

The mandates have been described as experimental laboratories for techniques of governance and rule. These experiments, I suggest, deeply influenced the neoliberal attempt to submit sovereignty to rules that support a flourishing market and to inculcate the morals of the market.

In contrast to the monopolist practices of the old trading companies, the mandate system guaranteed 'equal economic opportunity' in the mandates for all League members. Rappard framed this 'Open Door' policy as a recognition that international commerce led to peace. We have seen that this sweetness-of-commerce thesis can be traced back to the eighteenth century, but Rappard credited it to the 'great trade emancipator and peacemaker' Richard Cobden. In 1842 (at the height of his campaign against the Corn Laws), Cobden argued that the 'colonial system, with all its dazzling appeals to the passions of the people, can never be got rid of except by the indirect processes of Free Trade'. In contrast, as a typical neoliberal, Rappard was not prepared to leave the fortunes of commerce to laissez-faire.

The curse was starkly outlined by Rappard's colleague on the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC), Lord Lugard: without a sovereign state to guarantee investments and secure contracts in the mandates, this former East Africa Company employee and then British colonial official argued, private investors lacked confidence to invest. From this perspective, the mandates lacked key determinants of 'civilisation': the capacity to enter into binding contracts, and to protect property rights and investments. Rappard took the problem very seriously, arguing that it was no good to respond that, in deterring capitalists, the mandate system had protected its beneficiaries from exploitation. Although coming from 'the home of Rousseau', the Swiss diplomat added, 'I shall refrain from denouncing the evils of civilisation and singing the praises of the state of nature!' Civilisation, Rappard made clear, was synonymous with economic development, and required an attractive climate for private capital investment.

Rappard's solution would have significant consequences for the development of the mandates and for later neoliberal responses to decolonisation. He successfully proposed that the League make clear it would not approve any cessation or transfer of the mandate (including in the event of eventual independence) without advance assurance that the new government would 'accept responsibility for the fulfilment of the financial obligations regularly assumed by the former Mandatory Power', and respect 'all rights regularly acquired' under its administration. The people of the mandates would not be considered ready to 'stand by themselves' until they guaranteed the rights of private capital and respected contracts made without their consent.

The PMC, which Rappard headed, broke with a naturalistic faith in markets in order to develop a body of rules to foster investment and capital accumulation. Its experiment in the use of transnational bodies to bind states in the interests of capital influenced neoliberal techniques of government. It inspired not only the Bretton-Woods institutions and the WTO, but also the European Union (EU), which much later used similar techniques – and similar racialised accusations of laziness and absent entrepreneurialism – to impose austerity on 'backward' southern European nations. In Rappard's description, the PMC was an 'umpire' ensuring that the game was played fairly, which must be clearly independent of governments. Otherwise 'the game would be up, because no one could be expected to play the game if the umpire was suspected of having been unduly influenced'. A central lesson of the mandate system, and one that the neoliberals would often insist on, was that the needs of capital would be best served by a transnational body of rules overseen by 'impartial' umpires imposing rules on all players. It is fitting, then, that the Centre William Rappard in Geneva is now home to the WTO.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the mandates were also a laboratory for the transnational monitoring of human rights. In a 1946 article, 'Human Rights in Mandated Territories', Rappard noted the strangeness of the UN Charter's claim to protect human rights. Refusing the 'deplorable cynicism' of dismissing this new language as pious wishes, he sought to distil a conception of human rights from the work of the PMC. Human rights were best understood as the individual's 'general freedom from oppression', he argued, which meant that, in protecting freedom of conscience and religion and suppressing the slave trade, the mandate system had always been serving human rights. Rappard's key lesson, however, concerned the means of promoting human rights. The PMC comprised diplomats and former colonial officials with no coercive powers, he wrote; its only resource was its 'moral authority', which enabled it to shame governments in front of their own citizens. Such impartiality and independence, he wrote in another essay of the same year, allowed the PMC to function as 'an international or rather a super-national moral authority'.

It was because he believed that the mandate system had at least partially succeeded in this task that Rappard saw it as a model for the UN's new human rights project. In the subsequent years, as the drafting of the UDHR commenced, Rappard's lessons seemed to have been ignored by delegates who clashed over political and economic questions and challenged the civilisational hierarchies that motivated the mandate system. His model of the transnational moral authority of impartial experts from the Global North would have to wait several decades to be revived as the dominant model of international human rights activism. When a new generation of human rights NGOs emerged that wielded moral authority and expertise in the public sphere, they flourished alongside concerted attempts to bind postcolonial states to the interests of private capital.

The UN human rights process of the 1940s, which gave each sovereign state an equal vote, broke starkly with the elite moral authority Rappard distilled from the mandate system. The involvement of non-European states and representatives of the Soviet bloc in the drafting process seemed to the neoliberals to be a reflection of the crisis of civilisation, not a solution to it. During the drafting of the UDHR, delegates from China and Saudi Arabia, among others, sought to relativise 'Western civilisation' and remind the European powers that a declaration of human rights could not be based on a single cultural tradition. The presence of delegates who had once been excluded from 'civilised' law-making bodies changed the terms of the debate.

Dr Chang was a pluralist and held forth in charming fashion on the proposition that there is more than one kind of ultimate reality. The Declaration, he said, should reflect more than simply Western ideas and Dr Humphrey would have to be eclectic in his approach. His remark, though addressed to Dr Humphrey, was really directed at Dr Malik, from whom it drew a prompt retort as he expounded at some length the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Dr Humphrey joined enthusiastically in the discussion, and I remember that at one point Dr Chang suggested that the Secretariat might well spend a few months studying the fundamentals of Confucianism!

Chang, who earned a PhD in the United States studying with the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, was committed to ensuring the declaration avoided metaphysical presuppositions and reflected both the diversity and the interpenetration of cultures and traditions. In a drafting meeting in June 1948, he drew attention to the influence of Chinese thought on Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Quesnay and Diderot, who had embraced China as a model of a moral order without superstition. Resisting the idea that 'European civilisation' was hermetically sealed, he told the drafters that 'Chinese ideas had been intermingled with European thought and sentiment on human rights at the time when that subject had first been speculated upon in modern Europe.'

The Saudi Arabian delegate, Jamil Baroody, criticised Chang's ecumenical position, arguing that the UDHR was 'based largely on Western patterns of culture, which were frequently at variance with the patterns of culture of Eastern states'. Today, the argument that human rights are a 'Western construct with limited applicability' to the non-Western world (as a highly influential article put it), is often depicted as a product of the turn towards autocracy in postcolonial states. In the 1940s, however, Baroody and others already suspected that the new human rights language could become a means for coercive interventions into non-Western societies.

It was challenges from outside Europe, more than the often-cited post-war loss of faith among Europeans in their own civilisation, that helped rid the UDHR of the language of civilisation. It is commonly argued that wartime atrocities made legal distinctions between civilised and uncivilised societies anachronistic. From this perspective, the UDHR's affirmations of human equality indicated that chastened European powers had renounced racial and civilisational hierarchies in favour of universal humanism. But the view that the horrors of the war destabilised the distinction between the civilised and the uncivilised tacitly accepts that only atrocities committed against Europeans, and not colonial genocide, massacre and slavery, were sufficient to render European claims to civilisational superiority suspect. Two years after the adoption of the UDHR, the Martiniquian poet and politician Aimé Césaire argued that 'the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois' is unable to forgive the Nazis not for the 'crime against man' as such, but rather for 'the crime against the white man … and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa'.

For the neoliberals, the very attempt to find an international, cross-cultural consensus on a list of human rights was a profound mistake. In contrast to the model of elite moral authority mobilised by the League of Nations' mandate process, they viewed the UN as a false bureaucratic unity at odds with the spiritual unity of Europe. Europe, Röpke argued, is 'more than catch-words, rhetoric and an empty excuse for conferences'; its 'spiritual heritage' of Greek culture, Christianity, individual freedom and economic freedom made it 'the home of humanity, tolerance, reason and religion veneration'. For the neoliberals, the horrors of World War II were not a product of Western civilisation, but the results of the collectivist challenge to the liberalism that had previously defined it. They depicted civilisation as the product of the spread of commerce and the division of labour and a moral order that facilitated the pursuit of individual interest and trade. This meant that any restriction of trade was a civilisational regression – a return from the morals of the market to the egalitarianism and shared purposes of what Hayek described as a tribal morality.

In March 1938, the Gestapo ransacked the apartment of the leading Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises, confiscating twenty-one boxes of papers and sealing the apartment behind them. Two years later, Mises, who had initially left Vienna for Rappard’s Institute for International Affairs, fled Europe altogether for the United States. He wrote to Hayek that he was reluctantly saying 'adieu to a Europe about to disappear forever'. A decade earlier, Mises had been cautiously optimistic that fascist movements had saved Europe from the crisis of Bolshevism. 'It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization', he wrote – adding that the 'merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history'. Although he warned that fascism was no more than an 'emergency makeshift', he stressed that it emerged not among 'barbarians', as had Bolshevism, but in Europe, where 'the intellectual and moral heritage of some thousands of years of civilization cannot be destroyed at one blow'. Fascist movements would therefore always remain under the influence of liberalism, he predicted and, once the indignation at Bolshevik 'murders and atrocities' had passed, fascism would become more 'moderate'.

For the Austrian milieu that nourished Mises and Hayek, the entire twentieth century was marked by decline. Mises came of age in Vienna under the multi-ethnic and supranational Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1871, when the economist Carl Menger wrote what became the founding text of the Austrian School of economics, Principles of Economics, only 4 per cent of the population of Vienna were eligible to vote. They used their voting power to support liberal reforms, including freedoms of speech, assembly, religion and faith, as well as academic freedom.

Like his contemporaries Raphael Lemkin (1900-59), who initiated the Genocide Convention, and Hersch Lauterpacht (1897-1960), who pioneered the legal concepts of the 'crime against humanity' and transnational human rights, Mises grew up in Lemberg (today the major Ukrainian city of Lviv/Lwów), on the border of the Russian Empire. Mises came from a modernising assimilated Jewish family, and strongly identified with what he saw as the civilising influence of the Habsburg Empire's German elite, whose culture was often depicted as 'fertilizer for an otherwise barren east'.

Writing in the immediate wake of World War I, he noted that, until the mid nineteenth century, Germans in the Habsburg Empire had taken their cultural superiority and dominance for granted; 'Whoever rose became German', he wrote. When the Empire's other nationalities rejected this civilising path and demanded national independence, it was a painful realisation for the liberal German milieu. From this point on, they threw their support behind the monarchy, Mises recounted, and rejected demands for national autonomy and democratisation, which would have subjected Germans to the rule of Slavic majorities.

Although Mises criticised the metaphysical ideas of constant progress, he identified a form of compulsion at work in the division of labour. It was always in the interests of the most 'advanced' societies to draw others into the web of social cooperation, both in the interests of greater productivity and because such cooperation fostered peace, he argued.

For Mises and his fellow Austrian School members, the restraint most essential to civilisation was submission to the demands of the market. They believed that, in creating a web of mutually beneficial relations, commerce was civilising, and that the most civilised peoples were therefore those with the most extensive division of labour. … The outbreak of World War I brutally shattered 'the dream of an ecumenical society' that Mises had believed was heralded by the 'opening up of the backward regions of the Near and Far East, of Africa and America' and the extension of the world market.

In conceptualising a civilised society as a market society with a highly developed division of labour, Mises drew on the thought of Adam Smith, whom he credited with the discovery of the eternal law of social evolution that every civilisation must follow if it is not to fall back into barbarism. … The idea that commerce was civilising gave impetus to the dichotomy later expressed under the oppositions 'civilised-uncivilised', 'advanced-backward', and 'developed-undeveloped'.

In appropriating this tradition, Mises portrayed civilisation as inextricably economic and racial. While he rejected the biological racism of the French eugenicist Arthur de Gobineau, Mises sought to rescue its 'germ' for a 'modern' race theory that ascribed racial hierarchies to an evolutionary process that gave certain races 'so long a lead that members of other races could not overtake them within a limited time'.

In the course of the twentieth century, Mises and his neoliberal colleagues cast state planning, medical and employment insurance, protective tariffs and welfare states not simply as economic threats, but as threats to individual rights – and ultimately to civilisation itself. Like his Scottish predecessor Adam Ferguson, Mises believed that while the 'most remarkable races of men … have been rude before they were polished', the 'polished' nations might nonetheless slide back along the evolutionary scale. While Ferguson warned that a people might be corrupted by its commercial success, Mises believed it was socialism that was hastening the decline of civilisation. In Asia, he warned, antagonists of European civilisation were gathered under the banner of socialism. And if they were allowed to destroy the division of labour, 'nomad tribes from the Eastern steppes would again raid and pillage Europe, sweeping across it with swift cavalry'.

The key distinction between East and West, according to Mises, is that the East was 'foreign to the Western spirit that has created capitalism'. As a result, he contended that, 'if the Asiatics and Africans really enter into the orbit of Western civilisation, they will have to adopt the market economy without reservation'. Adopting the market did not merely mean adopting a technical means of allocating goods; it required a profound cultural, moral and subjective transformation. Market peoples are peace loving, Mises warned, but would fight to the death against anyone who interfered with this division of labour, and 'repel the barbarian aggressors whatever their numbers may be'. Earlier, he had suggested that, if only some nations became socialist, the cause would not be lost. The remaining capitalist ones – driven by the 'fundamental social law' to extend the global division of labour – would 'impose culture upon the backward nations or destroy them if they resisted'. Conversion or destruction were the only options available to those who sought to exist outside the world market.

Freiburg economist and early MPS member Walter Eucken was typical of early neoliberalism in his belief that nineteenth-century liberalism had failed. This failure, Eucken wrote to his fellow German neoliberal Alexandre Rüstow, was not due to its religious and metaphysical foundations. Rather, when liberalism 'lost its religious and metaphysical content, it decayed'. Eucken, one of the founders of Germany's postwar social-market economy, shared the dominant MPS view that securing a competitive market order could not be left to the invisible hand. The experience of the political polarisation and crisis of Weimar Germany had alerted the German liberals to the moral, institutional and legal conditions for a competitive market order. Whatever their differences, the early neoliberals largely accepted that the survival of civilisation required state action to produce the conditions for a competitive market, including by promoting a conducive moral climate. Even the Chicago School's Milton Friedman – who would later describe the invisible hand as Smith's 'great achievement' – argued in 1951 that the collec-tivist faith in the state was 'an understandable reaction to a basic error of nineteenth-century individualist philosophy' and its embrace of laissez-faire.

Few were as vocal in their rejection of laissez-faire as the German ordoliberals Röpke and Rüstow. During the war, both men lived in Istanbul, where President Kemal Atatürk's attempt to secularise and modernise Turkey prompted them to focus on the moral and religious foundations of a competitive market economy. Rüstow criticised the call to laissez-faire as both a 'summons to honour God and an adjuration not to allow short-sighted human anxieties to interfere in the eternal wisdom of the natural law'. He believed it had led previous liberals into an overly 'care-free' faith that, left alone, the market would improve 'moral standards'. The ordoliberals accepted that, by promoting mutual dependence, 'the division of labour can be conceived as one of the most potent civilizing factors'. But theirs was not a straightforward 'sweetness of commerce' thesis; they regarded competition as morally dangerous and believed that, left alone, the market would not produce the necessary 'lubricant of morals, sentiments and institutions'. Röpke derided the invisible hand as a ' "philosopher's stone" that turned the base metal of callous business sentiments into the pure gold of common welfare and solidarity'. A competitive market order, the ordoliberals argued, required an institutional framework and 'a generally observed and undisputed code of moral norms and principles of behavior'.

If economic disintegration was a product of moral disintegration, then a revival of dreams of perpetual peace required the development of moral and legal standards to support the global spread of the competitive market by protecting private property and human dignity. The market economy, Röpke argued, 'belongs essentially to a liberal social structure and one which respects individual rights', while non-market, collectivist coordination is coercive, ignoring such rights. … For the neoliberals, human rights could only play this role if they broke with the rationalism of the French Revolution and fostered submission to the market order. While Christianity could not provide history or the market with a providential guarantee, they believed it could secure the moral foundations of a competitive market order 'truly compatible with human dignity'.

This was clear in Hayek's opening address to the Society's inaugural conference, which deplored the rationalistic liberalism of the French Revolution. Unless the 'breach between true liberalism and religious convictions can be healed', he argued, 'there is no hope for a revival of liberal forces'. The importance of Christianity to the new liberal project was reflected in a session at that conference on 'Liberalism and Christianity', which included twelve speakers drawn from across Europe, the UK and the United States. Although none of the Society's founders were active representatives of the Catholic faith, Röpke noted in 1957, this 'circle of technicians' soon turned its attention to the relation between Christianity and freedom. They became conscious, he suggests, that liberals and Christians, 'concerned for freedom and human dignity', shared common ground they did not share with their collectivist enemy.

The neoliberal embrace of Christianity was not necessarily a product of faith. Hayek was himself agnostic, but he believed that Christianity was essential for cultivating the morals of the market and the willingness to submit to the market order. A 'refusal to submit to anything we cannot understand', he warned in The Road to Serfdom, 'must lead to the destruction of our civilization'.

For the neoliberals, communism was not simply a competing European political movement; communism was 'a pseudo-religion within the shell of the Russian state, a sort of secularized Islam', in Roepke's words, communists were emissaries of an empire bent on world domination. With this 'Communist Pseudo-Islam' there could not be 'one world', but only a mobilisation of Europe against the threat of fanatical hordes from the East. This assimilation of communism, totalitarianism and Islam recurred frequently in the writings of the neoliberals, who drew on orientalist tropes of inassimilable otherness to discredit their adversaries.

Here, too, the neoliberals were close to conservative Christians. Such views were echoed by the Lebanese UN delegate Charles Malik, who drafted the Universal Declaration's preamble with its ringing assertion that the 'inherent dignity of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world'. For Malik, who insisted on the inclusion in the UDHR of 'religious ciphers' such as 'inherent', 'inalienable', 'endowed', it was 'Western civilization' that contained at its core 'the truest reality of human dignity'. In contrast, he argued that 'certain elements in Islam admit of an interpretation that accords with Communism'. Malik singled out the 'blind fatalism of Marx', and called on the West to take action to ensure that the 'alliance between Communism, radical nationalism, anti-Westernism, xenophobia and religious reaction and fanaticism need not be the last word'.

Like Rüstow and Röpke, with whom he shared a conservative Christian fear of the intrusions of politics, Malik took the view that global economic integration required moral transformation; if the 'undeveloped countries' wished to develop their economies, he argued in 1953, they would need to absorb not only Western techniques but also three thousand years of Western scientific tradition and a commitment to 'the inherent dignity of the human person'.

Not only did Malik assume the religious and Christian contours of conscience; he also argued, more controversially, that the right to change one's religion was a necessary aspect of this 'Platonic–Christian tradition'. Malik saw such a right as central to upholding freedom of conscience in the face of two key adversaries: a 'mass' (working-class and communist) politics whose focus on economic welfare threatened to reduce the human to a material, rather than a spiritual, being; and Islam, which, according to Malik's Orientalist depiction, lacked reason and distinction, and fused different orders (God and the universe, man and God, man and animal, and past and future) so that, in Islam, 'man – as to his origin, his powers, his state, and his destiny – is exceedingly ambiguous'.

Baroody, like Malik, was a Lebanese Christian. In opposing the right to change one's religion, he never referred to Islamic law, but instead framed this new right as a right for missionaries. Proselytising Christians had historically become the vanguards of political interventions, he argued, and 'peoples had been drawn into murderous conflict by the missionaries' efforts to convert them'. Baroody depicted Article 18 as a right to open up non-Western societies for trade and exploitation. Such concerns resonated with Chang, who responded: 'For the countries of the Far East, the nineteenth century, with its expansion of Western industrialism, had not always been very kind', and missionaries had not always limited themselves to their religious missions.

Trade, even when forced upon a country by gunboats, was a vehicle for spreading the word of the gospels and promoting universal brotherhood. 'Those who denied their people access to truth, and to the manufactures of the West', in contrast, 'were infringing on an inherent human right'.

When the Second Opium War ended with the 1858 Treaties of Tianjin, traders were granted almost unlimited access to China's territory, and missionaries were guaranteed the freedom to evangelise their faith. The status of missionaries had long played an important role in European attempts to determine which states were sufficiently 'civilised' to enter the family of nations, and the forcible imposition of unequal treaties was a consequence of falling short of this standard in European eyes. The imposition of this standard meant the coercive transformation of China's legal, political and economic systems to make its territory safe for commerce, conversion and capital accumulation.

Yet the AUB was not just an island of religious tolerance; it was also evidence of the tight bond between commerce and Christianity. The university was established using the fortunes of the Dodge family, whose mining interests in the United States had given them a particular interest in the 'civilising' of indigenous peoples, upon whose un-ceded land they built mines. Those who built the Dodge fortune also committed themselves to the 'assimilation and uplift' of African-Americans in the South during Reconstruction – but only after the failure of their preferred option of resettlement in Liberia.

For the churches, the right to religious freedom necessarily included the right to hear the gospel, and thus required freedom of proselytism, especially in the face of the strictures of Islamic law.

It would nonetheless be mistaken to portray the debates over this right as a 'clash of civilisations' between Christianity and Islam. Such a position not only ignores a history of mutual borrowing and interactions among Christians, Jews and Muslims, but, as Asad writes, it attributes to a people an identity (European, Islamic) that 'depends on the definition of a selective civilizational heritage of which most of the people to whom it is attributed are in fact almost completely ignorant'. Moreover, delegates from countries with Muslim majorities were split on the right to change religion. Pakistan's representative and foreign minister, Sir Mohammed Zafrullah Khan, actively embraced the missionary implications Baroody saw in Article 18, arguing that, as Islam was also a proselytising religion, Muslims must insist that conscience is free and able to change its judgment. In support of this position, he cited the Koran: 'Let he who chooses to believe, believe, and he who chooses to disbelieve, disbelieve.'

While Baroody framed his opposition to Article 18 as a rejection of what Makau Mutua calls 'proselytism, coupled with force and power', there was nonetheless an irony to his advocacy of non-intervention. Whatever his own personal commitments, which were largely Arabist in tenor, Baroody represented a kingdom whose participation in the inaugural UN conference was funded by the US Oil Company Aramco, and which owed its existence as an independent state largely to these same US oil interests. 'The transformation of the landscape that became Saudi Arabia', as the political scientist Robert Vitalis writes, 'was wrought in great part by foreigners, arriving in increasing numbers in the 1940s and 1950s, financed by foreign investment, foreign private and public aid, and large loans secured by future oil royalties.'

By drawing attention to the violence of previous attempts at conversion, Baroody worked to challenge the legitimacy of European civilizing missions. In this sense, it is accurate to depict his argument as a 'relatively mild' foretaste of the anti-imperialism that later became prominent in UN forums. In response, the neoliberals would draw the missionary and interventionist implications of the new human rights language, which framed human rights as a means to enforce global standards to support the old rights of private capital.

In post-war Europe and the United States, the neoliberals watched with horror as faith in the market was increasingly displaced by concerns with the welfare and economic security of the working classes. … Malik likewise criticised the West for its wrong turn, and demanded its repentance for having offered the East only the 'false Gods of modern Western civilization: nationalism, materialism, Communism'. To Malik's despair, these 'false Gods' were embraced by many of his fellow diplomats during the drafting of the Declaration.

In the wake of the war, 'civilisation' was retooled in a social-democratic direction, and even liberals increasingly recognised that competing with the temptations on the left and the right required them to recognise the social and economic needs of the working classes. … 'To be civilized, in the old liberal sense', the historian Mark Mazower notes, 'was not necessarily to be modern'. … On the contrary, it was to prioritise a set of civil liberties and property rights that increasingly appeared antiquated. … For the neoliberals, too, these developments threatened to subject the whole world to totalitarianism. … The threat to the central values of civilisation, identified in the MPS statement of aims, was, first of all, a threat to market competition in the face of the 'revolt of the masses'.

In a searing 1966 critique, Friedrich Hayek described the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an incoherent attempt 'to fuse the rights of the Western liberal tradition with an altogether different conception derived from the Marxist Russian Revolution'. Hayek praised the document's first twenty-one articles for following the eighteenth century precedent and enshrining the 'classical civil rights'. But he heavily criticised the remaining articles, which laid out a long list of social and economic rights, including rights to social security, work, rest and leisure, food, clothing, housing, medical care, social security and education, and to form and join trade unions. Hayek believed such guarantees fundamentally misunderstood the nature of rights. Not only were they too vague for a court to enforce, he argued; they were ultimately meaningless, as no declaration of rights could actually guarantee anyone a certain standard of material welfare. In scathing terms, he wrote that the 'conception of a "universal right" which assures to the peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the Abominable Snowman, "periodic holidays with pay" shows the absurdity of the whole thing'.

There is no such thing as a 'society' with a duty to care for its members, he argued, anticipating Margaret Thatcher. Hayek contended that 'society' is simply a 'spontaneous order' that emerges as individuals and families pursue their welfare on the market. In social and economic rights, he saw the influence of a conflicting social philosophy, which viewed 'society' as a 'deliberately made organization'. Hayek gave law and rights a central role in his own account of a free society predicated on the division of labour. Far from dismissing human rights, he criticised the drafters for weakening the concept of 'right' and destroying all respect for it. A declaration of rights should do no more than the 'time-honoured political and civil rights' have always done, he argued: 'delimit individual domains' in which private initiative, entrepreneurialism, and personal responsibility can flourish.

That year, two legally binding human rights covenants were adopted by the United Nations. Unable to replicate the compromises that had led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in a document destined to become binding international law, the drafters produced both an International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and an International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Among those that refused to sign on to the latter was the United States, where it was often viewed with suspicion as a 'Covenant on Uneconomic, Socialist and Collective Rights'. Nor did its social and economic rights attract any significant domestic support in the United States, 'even from within the human rights community, which has … always been assumed to be its natural constituency'.

When a new generation of international human rights NGOs came to prominence in the late 1970s, they largely pursued a narrow agenda of protecting what Hayek termed 'classical civil rights', rather than promoting social and economic rights. Aryeh Neier, the former head of the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), noted with displeasure that, in enshrining a list of social and economic rights, the UDHR marked a 'radical break with its predecessors'. 'Not everybody can have everything', Neier contended in 2006, and the role of human rights should be to specify those few things to which everyone is entitled. Even as major human rights NGOs, including HRW, have gradually shifted their attention to social and economic rights, they have largely restricted their focus to discrimination in the provision of welfare, where it is possible, as HRW's current director Kenneth Roth explained, to identify specific violators and perpetrators. Human rights NGOs flourished in a period of neoliberal ascendancy, in which Hayek's contention that it was meaningless to declare that 'everyone' was entitled to food, housing, clothing and medical care had begun to seem self-evident.

In stark contrast, in the late 1940s, delegates charged with drafting an international bill of rights depicted social and economic rights as evidence of the social progress won by workers' movements. Rights to work, leisure, social security and a 'decent standard of living', as the Ecuadorian delegate put it, were the 'real triumph of the twentieth century'. China's P. C. Chang warned that neglecting 'freedom from want' would produce a document that would 'ill accord with the times'. Chile's Hernán Santa Cruz, a tireless advocate of social and economic rights, argued for adjusting production and distribution to secure general welfare, in order to transform 'the political democracy of the nineteenth century into an economic democracy'.

Meeting in the wake of the Great Depression, they were deeply aware of what the republican political theorist Hannah Arendt termed 'the terrifying predicament of mass poverty'. The previous decades had made clear that individual effort and personal responsibility were painfully inadequate in the face of mass unemployment and social dislocation – and that state inaction risked fostering rebellion. The rise of socialism and communism had placed 'the social question' on the international political agenda – including at the United Nations.

Drawing on the experience of the New Deal, the US delegation sought a compromise that would transform political demands for redistribution into flexible standards, adjustable in line with policy considerations, and thus never on the same level as civil and political rights.

Today the word ‘totalitarianism’ evokes images of gulags and death camps. For the neoliberals who helped to pioneer the concept, its semantic sphere was much broader, encompassing all ‘collectivist’ interventions into the market order. ‘The common features of all collectivist systems’, Hayek wrote, ‘may be described, in a phrase ever-dear to socialists of all schools, as the deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal.’ The various collectivisms differed in the goals towards which they wished to direct society, he acknowledged; but they all differed from liberalism in refusing the supremacy of individual ends, and were therefore ‘totalitarian in the true sense of this new word which we have adopted to describe the unexpected but nevertheless inseparable manifestations of what in theory we call collectivism’.

Much confusion had been caused by the use of the same word to refer to two distinct phenomena, he argued: on the one hand, ‘economy’ referred to the deliberate arrangement of resources in the pursuit of a unitary hierarchy of ends, as in a household, an organisation or an enterprise; on the other, it referred to the overall structure produced by the interrelation of these households, organisations and enterprises, which we often call ‘a social, or national, or world “economy” and often also simply an “economy”’. According to Hayek, the use of the term ‘economy’ to refer to the overall market order smuggled in the idea that society as a whole should be organised on the model of the household in order to provide for people’s needs. This confusion, he argued, had brought about a profound transformation in both law and morals; while a spontaneous order requires abstract, universal rules that enable each individual to preserve ‘his’ own ‘protected domain’, the rules of an organisation are directed to the achievement of specific ends.

In seeking to confine the term ‘economy’ to organisations such as the family and the enterprise, Hayek drew on its ancient Greek origins in the word oikonomia, which signified the management of a household – an oikos. The multiple economic relations that defined the ancient oikos – those between masters and slaves, fathers and children, husbands and wives – were governed to ensure the household’s well-ordered functioning. The freedom that characterised Greek political life, for that minority of the population who could participate in it, relied on the labour of slaves and women, who were confined to the oikos. The household was devoted not to freedom but to the necessities of biological life, and was ruled by a household head with ‘uncontested, despotic powers’. Against this household model, Hayek borrowed the term ‘catallaxy’ to refer to the extended market order. Derived from the Greek verb katallatein, which meant both to exchange and ‘to turn from an enemy into a friend’, catallaxy embodied the neoliberal belief that the market was a peaceful realm of voluntary relations grounded in mutual interest. It served to distinguish a market society from the coercion and despotism the neoliberals took to be intrinsic to the political pursuit of shared ends.

Hayek’s critique of the household model of the economy was not original. The nineteenth-century political philosopher John Stuart Mill was the first to criticise the belief that political economy ‘is to the state, what domestic economy is to the family.’ The management of a household is not a science but an art, Mill contended in 1844; it is, in Aristotle’s terms, a form of phronesis or practical wisdom, governed by maxims of prudence, and aimed at securing the greatest physical comfort or enjoyment with a given means. Political economy, in contrast, was not a governmental paradigm, but a scientific one; not the art of household management writ large, but a science with its own laws and truths.

A decade before Hayek, in 1958, Hannah Arendt had drawn on Myrdal to criticise the modern tendency to model ‘the people’ on the family and entrust their care to ‘a gigantic nation-wide administration of housekeeping’. For both Myrdal and Arendt, the collective establishment of ends was necessarily political, and could not be determined on the despotic model of the household head. For Hayek and the neoliberals, in contrast, the critique of the household model served to discredit all politics and to privilege the market as resource-allocator. For them, there were only two options: the simple conditions in which ‘the father can supervise the entire economic management’, as Mises put it, or a system of monetary calculation and market prices in which decisions on the allocation of resources are removed entirely from political oversight.

Here, their analysis was close to that of Arendt, who depicted the French Revolution's turn towards economic equality as the eruption of the concerns of the household into the political sphere. Arendt argued that, just as for pre-moderns, the distinction between rich and poor was natural and unavoidable; the French revolutionaries asserted the rights of the people against 'tyranny and oppression, not against exploitation and poverty'. In the transformation of the rights of man into the 'rights of the Sans-Culottes' (rights to 'dress, food and the reproduction of the species'), Arendt saw the turning point of all subsequent revolutions.

In returning to the French Revolution in the immediate wake of World War II, Jouvenel sought a 'usable history' with which to challenge his contemporaries' 'attacks on those same individual rights which in 1789 had had their sacredness proclaimed'. For this man of the right, whose sympathies lay with the Vichy regime, the primary threat to individual rights was not fascism, but the promise of a 'larger social welfare'. It was US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he believed, who embodied the sacrifice of individual rights for social rights. Jouvenel criticised those narratives that were so common during the drafting of the UDHR, for which social and economic rights were a progressive extension of the older civil and political rights. 'The new rights of man are given out as coming to complete those already proclaimed in the eighteenth-century', he wrote. But instead, 'they contradict and abrogate them'. While the old rights decreed liberty and made individuals responsible, he argued, the new social rights replaced this adult responsibility with tutelage. The old liberty was thereby sacrificed for a new security, he argued; the new promises 'close the cycle which was opened by the declarations of earlier days'.

Neoliberalism was never a narrowly economic doctrine. The early neoliberals were wary of the very idea of the economy, and horrified by what Hayek described as the reinterpretation in economic terms of the old political ideals of liberty, equality and security. Repeatedly, they singled out President Roosevelt's 1941 'Four Freedoms' speech – which added 'freedom from want', and 'freedom from fear' to the more traditional freedoms of speech and worship – as evidence of the contemporary confusion of the market and household. Roosevelt ended his speech by declaring that freedom 'means the supremacy of human rights everywhere'. For the neoliberals, in contrast, Roosevelt's speech marked the demise of all human rights. Hayek argued that Roosevelt had transformed an 'older liberal tradition of human rights', entailing limits to the power wielded over individuals, into positive claims for benefits. These new rights, Hayek argued, could not be legally enforced without destroying the liberal order that the old civil rights aimed to secure. Social and economic rights would only be possible, he argued – speaking specifically of the UDHR – if 'the whole of society were converted into a single organization, that is, made totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word'.

In a 1932 speech in Detroit, where 223,000 people were then unemployed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced a new vision of economic life. From 'the days of the cave man to the days of the automobile, the philosophy of "letting things alone" has resulted in the jungle law of the survival of the so-called fittest', the man who would soon be president told the assembled crowd. Far from being a peaceful realm of mutually beneficial, voluntary relations, the market, Roosevelt said, was governed by the 'jungle law' of free competition and individual responsibility. The stock market crash of 1929 had discredited laissez-faire liberalism, which had launched its fight against the feudal order partly as a critique of state paternalism in the name of individual freedom and rights. Against the 'jungle law' of the free market, Roosevelt outlined a corporatist vision of a reconciled human family, in which government would provide worker's compensation, child support, old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and public health programmes. Roosevelt drew on the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno, which declared it an 'intolerable abuse' for mothers to be forced to work outside the home 'to the neglect of their proper cares and duties'. Noting that the followers of laissez-faire had decried state welfare measures as 'paternalistic', he responded: 'All right, if they are paternalistic, I am a father.'

In declaring himself the father of Detroit's working class, Roosevelt placed himself in a position long occupied by the industrial magnate Henry Ford, who had pioneered a paternalist mode of government predicated on high wages, working-class consumption, women's unpaid labour in the home, intense disciplinary surveillance of working-class households, and brutal suppression of industrial action. As president, Roosevelt's New Deal took over central planks of Henry Ford's model by combining welfare provision with racial segmentation and discrimination, a gendered division of labour, state paternalism and social pacification. He established a racialised compact that mediated the struggle between state, labour and business, and positioned a 'white working class' in jobs that were more secure and better paid than those of non-white workers.

The same year he made his Detroit speech, local police and security personnel from the Ford Motor Company opened fire with machine-guns on a 'hunger march' of unemployed workers. The workers were bound for Ford's River Rouge Plant to present a list of demands, which included not only the rehiring of the unemployed and fuel to tide them over through winter, but also an end to racial discrimination and the right to unionise. In this climate of radical political agitation and violence (the attack on the march had killed five and injured more than twenty others), Roosevelt sought to depoliticise economic welfare. 'I am afraid that some of you people today in Detroit have been talking politics', he told his audience. 'Well, I am not going to. I want to talk to you about Government. That is a very different thing.'

Roosevelt may have sought to distinguish government from politics, but, for the neoliberals, any challenge to the role of the market in distributing resources was a political threat to an open society. If the neoliberals were vehement opponents of the New Deal (and of the post-war welfare state), this was certainly not because they wanted to 'talk politics', or because they objected to the perpetuation of a sexual division of labour and racial segmentation. Rather, they believed that state-welfarism cushioned people from the consequences of their actions, and thereby undermined 'the moral and social health of the nations'. … Those, like himself, who were concerned with the foundations of liberal civilisation, he argued, held up 'the ideal of the well-ordered house – security through individual effort supplemented by mutual aid'. On the other side was a philosophy of collectivism, massification and family breakdown, which was embraced by demagogues and used to manipulate the masses. Holding up Roosevelt as the paradigmatic figure of such demagoguery, Röpke put the point in blunt terms: all talk of 'freedom from want' kills genuine freedom.

Cooper follows the pioneering approach of Wendy Brown, whose American Nightmare' explains the compatibility of the 'fierce moral-political rationality' of neoconservatism with 'market-political rationality' as a product of the neoliberal weakening of democratic values, which enables the 'moralism, statism, and authoritarianism' of neoconservatism – even as the latter aims to compensate for some of the former's effects.

But neoliberalism, as scholars like Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plewhe remind us, is not simply a North American phenomenon. Rather, it was a transnational movement from the beginning. Social conservatism was not an external supplement to the development of neoliberalism. Conservative moralism, including an explicit defence of religion and family values, was foundational to the neoliberal attempt to reinvent the liberal project beyond laissez-faire.

Wary that the Rockefeller Foundation's proposal to establish a central observatory to gather and coordinate economic data would result in an unnecessary bureaucracy and economic interventionism, the participants decided instead to fund several research projects, including one by Röpke on protectionism. Eschewing a narrow economic analysis, Röpke argued that the rise of the masses threatened the economic integration enabled by nineteenth-century liberalism and its standards of civilisation. Drawing on Ortega y Gasset's work, he coined the term Vermassung ('enmassment') to define the levelling process he believed threatened the survival of the world economy and Western civilisation.

For Hayek, the revolt of the masses represented the failure of the 'taming of the savage'. For Röpke, newly proletarianised peasants from the countryside were a culturally alien force and a threat to a civilised society. In language that has since become all too familiar on today's anti-immigrant right, he complained that 'the country of Goethe, the Humboldts and even of Nietzsche' had been 'swamped by countless millions which came too quickly and in too great numbers to be absorbed culturally'; a 'nation', Röpke warned, 'may beget its own barbarian invaders'.

At stake in this emancipatory language was an attempt to mobilise the republican valorisation of freedom and independence against a welfare system that was implicitly racialised and aligned with slavery, blackness and dependence. But the centrality of this myth of independence to neoliberal attacks on welfare goes back much further than Reagan, as does the association of state welfare provision with moral hazard and family breakdown. For Röpke, the most serious symptom of the revolt of the masses was the decline of the family. As the family is 'the natural sphere of the woman, the proper environment for raising children and indeed the parent cell of the community', the German neoliberal argued that women were the real victims of a welfare state that prevented them fulfilling their 'vital functions'.

Röpke regularly cited the remark of the nineteenth-century French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835 text Democracy in America warned that, in a democracy, individuals would entrust their private needs to an 'immense tutelary power' that would reduce them to 'a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd'. Writing a decade after World War I, Röpke argued this threat had been realised by the welfare state, which 'takes care of the sort of comfortable stall-feeding of the domesticated masses'. Röpke sought the measure of 'respect for human personality' in the masses' responsibility for their own welfare, remarking that it is hardly progress to treat increasing numbers of people as 'economic minors' under the 'tutelage of the state'.

A year earlier, Rappard had given his own twist to the idea of the welfare state as a strictly gendered household. In the midst of the mass unemployment and desperate poverty of the Great Depression, he argued, quite extraordinarily, that the individual in all the countries that experienced modern revolutions now resembled a 'pampered old bachelor who has a very faithful cook' and has come to depend on her. Singling out the United States of the New Deal, Rappard argued that the individual had 'jeopardised his possession of that freedom for which his ancestors fought and bled'.

The neoliberal argument against state welfare was not confined to the economic threat it posed to a free-enterprise system. Rather, neoliberals like Röpke positioned the welfare state as a political threat to a social order founded on the nuclear family and racial hierarchy, and as a moral threat to the values of self-reliance, independence, responsibility and human dignity. From this perspective, while the drafters of the UDHR also dedicated themselves to human dignity, their commitment to social and economic rights would ultimately be its ruin.

From a neoliberal perspective, the UDHR's adoption of social and economic rights seemed evidence of a desire for security, which would enable the state to usurp the traditional role of the family. But many of the UDHR's drafters were concerned to uphold the family as what its Article 16 (initiated by Charles Malik) calls 'the natural and fundamental group and unit of society'. The pacifying, governmental approach of Roosevelt's New Deal deeply informed the social and economic rights in the declaration. Just as Roosevelt sought to avoid 'talking politics', the drafters sought to detach social and economic rights from political challenges to the exploitation of labour, the existing division of labour and the reproductive role of the nuclear family, and transform them into minimalist guarantees for the most needy.

Article 25 reveals the gendered social vision underpinning the declaration's social and economic rights. This social vision resists easy dichotomies between questions of wealth redistribution, on the one hand, and juridical status and subordination on the basis of gender, race and sexuality, on the other. The 'economy' was not an autonomous realm divorced from the gendered and racial regimes in which labour is ordered, and in which wealth (and increasingly debt) are accumulated and handed down from one generation to the next. And the subject of social and economic rights was emphatically not an abstract, universal subject. Rather, race and gender marked the borders of entitlement, and designated this subject as a white, male, heterosexual, 'breadwinner' or head of a family.

The explicitly masculine subject 'himself' appears twice in the declaration, as the subject of social welfare (Article 25) and as the subject of the right to work (Article 23). Previous scholarship has tended to explain away what one historian calls this 'oversight involving a worker and "his family"' as an aberration from the universalist thrust of the declaration, whose social and economic rights could just as easily have been expressed in 'neutral, nonsexist terminology'. Such explanations obscure the delegates' shared commitment to the family as the primary site of welfare and social reproduction. The centrality of unwaged women's labour to the Fordist settlement in the United States was matched by the Soviet Union's dramatic reversal of post-revolutionary policies such as easier divorce, equal rights for women in marriage, and collective cafeterias and childcare centres designed to free women from housework. In stark contrast to the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai's argument that 'communism liberates woman from her domestic slavery and makes her life richer and happier', the Soviet delegates at Lake Success emphasised the 'protection which the State must give the home'.

The pacifying vision of social order expressed in the UDHR did owe much to the ILO’s founding premise that labour conditions involving ‘injustice, hardship and privation to large numbers of people’ would lead to ‘unrest’ and imperil the ‘peace and harmony of the world’. The foundation of the ILO, and its commitment to social justice, were a recognition of the threat that demands for equality and economic rights posed to social peace and to the ‘political integrity of existing empires and states’.

The ILO stressed the benefits of this social model for both state and capital: family allowances would promote the health of the population and ensure social stability, the report argued, as men who supported families at home would be more reliable workers (and presumably less likely to go on strike.)

Speaking as the representative of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt stated that the ILO text was 'both complete and adequate'. Despite her own personal commitment to social welfare, Roosevelt represented a country in which the consensus that underpinned the New Deal was giving way in the face of the anti-communism of the nascent Cold War. … In a memo of March 1948, Roosevelt was informed that Lovett 'felt that if these were expressed they could far better be expressed in terms of 'better standards' rather than a right to a "decent living"'.

In contrast to rights, which are (at least in theory) absolute, standards are relative and variable, and so enable flexibility and compromise. To speak of 'better standards' is to eschew absolutes. … In emphasising minimum standards, the US delegation sought to detach social and economic rights from egalitarianism, reconciling them with a privatised and consumerist conception of welfare.

Prior to the drafting of the UDHR, the ILO and the League of Nations had been sites for conflicts between the standard of living, which was viewed as an 'American obsession' with materialism and individual consumption, and a European focus on a 'manner of life', characterised by non-market concerns with taste, quality and preference. Between 1929 and 1931, the ILO had done extensive work on determining an adequate standard of living, sponsored by the department store magnate Edward Filene and the Ford Corporation, which wanted to pay workers in its European plants wages equivalent to those paid in Detroit to secure what one Ford manager called 'the maximum efficiency of the worker'.

During the drafting of the UDHR, both opponents and supporters of social and economic rights argued that they required more resources than civil and political rights. 'Economic and social rights, in order to be fully realised, require material assistance to be furnished by the state', France's René Cassin argued. This assumption has since been challenged, both on the practical grounds that an effective justice system and political enfranchisement require material resources and state action, and on conceptual grounds, by those – notably Étienne Balibar – who have contested the very split between liberty and equality that underpinned the discourse of 'old' and 'new' rights.

The strongest supporters of social and economic rights contested the flexibility of the ‘standard of living’, arguing that the state should take responsibility for welfare functions that had previously been relegated to the home. The Chinese delegate P. C. Chang and the Soviet delegate Alexei Pavlov fought hardest to ensure that rights to food, clothing, housing and medical care in Article 25 were not subsumed under a right to a standard of living, but were turned into obligations on the state. When the UK delegate objected to these rights, Chang responded that he ‘did not see what possible objection there could be to that phrase when millions of people throughout the world were deprived of food and clothing’.

Among the areas for further study outlined in the inaugural MPS statement of aims was the 'possibility of establishing minimum standards by means not inimical to initiative and the functioning of the market'.

In the wake of the Great Depression, the laissez-faire tenets of an earlier liberalism no longer seemed tenable to any but the most intransigent opponents of state intervention. Ludwig von Mises found himself largely isolated at the inaugural meeting of the MPS when he argued that all public relief should be abolished, as private charity was sufficient to 'prevent the absolute destitution of the very restricted hard core of unemployables'. The majority of the neoliberals, in contrast, sought to avoid what Röpke called the false choice between the 'social Darwinism' of laissez-faire and a 'cradle to the grave' welfare system. The former, they believed, had neglected the conditions necessary to sustain a labour force and created a backlash against the competitive market. Against the latter, they revived a series of objections the ILO had canvassed back in the 1920s: the welfare state was a 'foretaste of communism' that would undermine the responsibility of workers to provide for their families, remove the incentive for wage labour, increase bureaucracy, and (in a Malthusian vein) increase the profligacy of the poor and the growth of the population. Rather than rejecting all state assistance, however, the neoliberals focused on the forms of welfare that would be compatible with a market economy.

The form that a distinctly liberal approach to poverty should take had preoccupied neoliberal circles since the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium. There, Rougier had posed the opening question: 'can economic liberalism meet the social demands of the masses?' The neoliberals worried that it was the planned economy's promise to guarantee a 'vital minimum' that 'attracts the masses to the totalitarian states'. In The Good Society, Lippmann himself had argued that what the classical economists dismissed as 'frictions and disturbances' in the market order were, in the eyes of their victims, 'cruel injustices, misery, defeat and frustration'. The success of the competitive market, he argued, required a social policy that would assist people to adapt themselves to the market's demands. There could be no question of 'taking from the rich and giving doles to the poor'; rather, social insurance should help people make choices within the margin of freedom the market allowed, by tiding them over while they learnt the skills for new occupations or moved elsewhere in search of work.

By that time, faced with weakening of the egalitarianism that had sustained the welfare state, the neoliberals had hardened their position. Allowing himself a hint of triumphalism, Hagenbuch noted that, while ten years ago people in Britain had believed everyone should receive a basic income from the state as 'his social birthright', this view had largely been abandoned. The turning point was the 1951 election, which saw the Conservative Party return to power, partly by mobilising middle-class women in 'Housewives' Committees' that protested 'the hardships that are being imposed on them' – notably shortages of luxury goods, high taxes, and what one middle-class housewife called the gradual disappearance of 'the things that made life gracious in the past'. In this climate, the neoliberals were in no mood for compromise.

Röpke argued that the central contribution of 'bourgeois' liberal philosophy was to teach that 'there is nothing shameful in the self-reliance and self-assertion of the individual taking care of himself and his family' without which our civilisation is unthinkable.

What really mattered was ensuring that the provision of a vital minimum did not interfere with the moral and subjective qualities underpinning a competitive market order. In his contribution to the Princeton MPS panel, Röpke told his colleagues that, if they did not want to leave the individual entirely alone to face the 'vicissitudes of life', they must develop rules, principles and distinctions to ensure that concessions to state provision did not legitimise the welfare state, which 'we are all convinced, is the ruin of a free and prosperous society and of the dignity of the self-respecting individual'. A compatible policy had to avoid the weakening of the family, individual responsibility and the will to work for a living.

Grede, who was invited to the Princeton MPS meeting in an attempt to build stronger links between its members and US business, was representative of a broader convergence between free enterprise and right-wing religious conservatism. Grede argued that the superior economic development of the United States was due to its moral and religious foundations and its Bill of Rights, which protected individual freedom from government and, more importantly, from the masses. In contrast, he argued that cradle-to-grave welfare usurped individual responsibility and weakened the 'moral fibre' of a free society. By freedom, he clarified, he did not mean licence; on the contrary, a free society relied on the 'moral pressures of people with deep religious convictions'. Grede charged the welfare state with weakening such pressure; 'with loose morality comes loose law enforcement', he argued, and consequently the breakdown of freedom.

The neoliberals believed that a market-conforming social policy must not stifle the system of risks and incentives that produced familial responsibility and submission to the market. Concretely, this meant that any government payments must be minimalist (sufficient to prevent destitution, but no more) and targeted at the poorest citizens through strict means-testing. There could be no universal provision, no expectation of social insurance 'as of right', and certainly no use of welfare to redistribute wealth in the interest of greater equality.

In a relatively wealthy society, Hayek acknowledged, 'some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and capacity to work, can be assured to everybody'; but security against 'undeserved loss' can never be. Although we may sympathise with someone who finds all his hopes disappointed through no fault of his own, he argued, we cannot remedy his situation without destroying the competitive market order. The risk of such loss was necessary to discipline individuals to submit to the market order and adapt themselves to its imperatives. To compensate those whose risks do not pay off would interfere with the feedback mechanism through which the market directs our activities where they are most needed. Hayek contended that the discipline of the market could only be escaped by a retreat to the security of the barracks.

Early neoliberalism was deeply sceptical about the statistical and standardising practices embraced by the ILO. They saw the attempt to 'tame chance' by using statistics and social surveys to calculate and insure against risks at the level of the population as hubristic.

In so doing, he challenged not only socialist planning but also the positivism of neoclassical economics, telling both, in Michel Foucault's words, 'you cannot [act] because you do not know'. In his most influential article, The Role of Knowledge in Society (1945), Hayek distinguished between scientific knowledge of general laws and contextual knowledge of time and place, arguing that the specific knowledge possessed by individuals cannot be adequately aggregated or expressed in statistical form.

Mises took this line of thought further in his major work Human Action, where he claimed that the very idea of a 'physiological minimum of subsistence' was an invention of 'demagogues'. The claim that 'a definite quantity of calories is needed to keep a man healthy and progenitive, and a further definite quantity to replace the energy expended in working', was untenable, he argued. In the attempt to determine human needs, Mises saw an attempt to make humans the material of a despotic system of 'breeding and feeding' that deprived them of their margin of freedom.

The German ordoliberals similarly criticised what Rüstow called the 'idolisation of the standard of living'. They rejected the materialism of what Röpke dismissively dubbed 'standard-of-life-ism', and the attempt to fight the Cold War on the terrain of economic productivity. Both men saw consumerism as a key marker of a materialistic mass society, and they bemoaned the fact that, in West Germany, social status was increasingly measured in 'radiograms, television sets, refrigerators'.

Responding to the Labour Party's demand that the poverty line and welfare payments should rise to give welfare recipients a share in rising prosperity, Hagenbuch similarly retorted: 'In a society of millionaires, the purpose of the Welfare State would be to ensure that the sick, the unemployed and the aged were millionaires also.'

With typical nostalgia, he argued that, in 'the old days', public assistance was intended as a temporary substitute for self-provision, and was therefore 'meant to safeguard only a certain minimum'. Now, in contrast, public services were becoming the rule, 'often with the hardly veiled intention of meeting maximal, or indeed, luxury standards'. Posing what was then a 'heretical question', Röpke wondered if it would be better if the welfare state were abolished, 'except for an indispensable minimum', and the money saved directed to nongovernmental social services.

By treating the family as an economic unit for the purposes of determining eligibility, the means-test undermined unemployed men's status in the family, forcing them to depend on the wages of their wives or, more commonly, their children. By putting white working-class men in a position of dependence long reserved for women and children, the family means-test was widely interpreted as a crisis of both masculinity and the working-class family.

The neoliberals sought to return to the time prior to the British economist William Beveridge's proposal, which influenced the introduction of the welfare state, to provide social insurance 'as of right and without means test'. The neoliberals harked back to the household means-test, which was one of the most hated aspects of the poverty-relief of the 1930s. Like the Ford Company's intrusive paternalism, the family means-test had subjected relief recipients to invasive and humiliating investigations of their finances and savings. Continuing a history of deterrence that had characterised poor relief since the Poor Law of 1834, the means-test treated accepting relief as a matter of social disgrace.

It has often been noted that a liberal revival that came to prominence as a critique of the paternalism of the welfare state ended up expanding state involvement in the welfare system. Neoliberal welfarism, critics note, enlists the state to coerce welfare recipients into the worst, lowest-paid jobs and subjects them to invasive supervision and income-management. Such 'neoliberal paternalism' is often understood as the product of a tactical alliance between free-market neoliberals and family-values social conservatives who found common cause in opposition to the 'ungovernability' of the social movements of the 1960s. But the social conservatism of a figure like Lawrence Mead, whose 'new paternalism' inspired US workfare policies, was prefigured decades earlier by European neoliberals. Mead's 1986 exhortation that the state must demand 'acceptance of the verdict of the market place' was central to neoliberal discussions of welfare from the 1930s.

At the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, Hayek had laid out two models of relief: one gives the unemployed worker a dole at the level of his former wage; 'the other is designed on the model of the poor law in England'. The former threatened to trespass on the margins of neoliberal freedom, making workers unwilling to submit to the market and move for work. Only the deterrence of the latter could reconcile relief with a market-pricing mechanism. For all their criticisms of the paternalism of the welfare state, the neoliberals believed that those destitute few who were eligible for state relief had forfeited their independence, their personal responsibility – and possibly their freedom too.

Locke, who is today considered among the great liberals, saw no contradiction between advocating freedom and rights and arguing that children older than three whose families were unable to feed them should be sent to work. The paternalism of contemporary neoliberal welfare systems is rooted in the same contention that those who draw on state assistance forfeit their independence and renounce a freedom that is inseparable from submission to the verdict of the market, and from personal responsibility for risk. The Chicago School's Milton Friedman inherited aspects of this earlier neoliberal tradition. 'Freedom is a tenable objective only for responsible individuals', he contended. 'Paternalism is inescapable for those whom we designate as not responsible.'

In the summer of 1940, Hayek was pondering the fate of his own family. Then living in London, the Austrian economist believed it likely that he might soon be killed by enemy bombing. Fearing the worst, he considered a number of offers to place his small children with ‘some unknown family’, who would presumably continue to raise them if he did not survive the war. In the most concrete terms, he considered the relative merits of sending his children to the United States, Argentina or Sweden, on the assumption that their social position in the country would be determined largely by chance. From behind this veil of ignorance, Hayek decided that ‘the very absence in the US of the sharp social distinctions which would favour me in the Old World should make me decide for them in favour of the former’. The absence of aristocratic hierarchies and the relative social equality produced by the New Deal, he recognised, would give his children the best possible chance in life. As if as an afterthought, Hayek then added a bracketed qualifying sentence: ‘(I should perhaps add that this was based on the tacit assumption that my children would there be placed with a white and not with a coloured family.)’ In the midst of an anecdote that Hayek introduced in order to justify the impersonal allocation of social positions through the market, white supremacy appeared between two brackets, as a ‘tacit assumption’ underpinning a narrative of success through hard work and chance. Hayek’s Rawlsian thought experiment thus exemplified Saidiya Hartman’s claim that ‘abstract equality produces white entitlement and black subjection’. The ignorance that Hayek often argued prevents us from altering the distributional outcomes of the market was, patently, what Charles Mills calls ‘white ignorance’, which makes the liberal social contract a ‘racial contract’.

Even in cases in which the unequal starting positions of individuals are ‘determined by earlier unjust acts or institutions’ – as the racial inequality that he tacitly acknowledged in the United States surely was – Hayek argued that it would generally be ‘impracticable’ to correct it. It would be preferable, he suggested, to ‘accept the given position as due to accident and simply from the present onwards to refrain from any measures aiming at benefiting particular individuals or groups’. Hayek acknowledged that, given the centrality of the family in a child’s initial social position, inequalities between families would be perpetuated over time. In fact, he endorsed inherited wealth precisely because such a perpetuation of inequality supposedly created a better elite. Yet he took for granted that, wherever his children were placed, their welfare would be the sole responsibility of their new family. However much his children’s hopes were frustrated by ‘unmerited disappointment’, there was no justification for state action to equalise their chances. In privatising welfare and foreclosing redistribution, the neoliberals entrenched economic inequalities while naturalising gender subordination within the family and sanctioning race as the ‘natural ordering principle of the social’.

In reality, the social and economic rights in the UDHR were hardly as threatening to the market order as Hayek and his comrades seemed to believe. Framed in minimalist terms, and orientated towards securing the racial and gender order of mid-twentieth-century capitalism, these social and economic rights were ultimately far more compatible with a liberal market than the neoliberals initially feared. Far from ushering in a 'social revolution' that overturned hierarchies of status and inequalities of wealth, social and economic rights increasingly came to signify merely the aspiration to realise over time a basic minimum for the most impoverished.

While Hayek attributed the UDHR's social and economic rights to the Marxism of the Russian Revolution, the Soviet delegates shared much of his cynicism about the practical effects of declaring such rights. In a capitalist country, the Soviet bloc delegates argued, there would always be a 'flagrant contradiction' between what was said in the declaration and the reality. The declaration of a right to rest, for instance, 'had a hollow ring in a society in which a small group always rested, while the overwhelming majority worked all the time'.

Let us assume that the United Nations had been established in the year 1600 and that the Indian tribes of North America had been admitted as members of this organization. Then the sovereignty of these Indians would have been recognized as inviolable. They would have been given the right to exclude all aliens from entering their territory and from exploiting its rich natural resources which they themselves did not know how to utilize. Does anybody really believe that any international covenant or charter could have prevented these Europeans from invading these countries?

In 1966, almost twenty years after the United Nations' human rights process began, the UN General Assembly adopted two legally binding human rights covenants – the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). By then, successful anticolonial struggles had almost doubled the UN's membership.

The Mexican delegate's optimism seems to challenge the oft-heard critique of the abstraction of human rights discourse, its indifference to the particularity that it is the stuff of lived experience. On the contrary, it seemed to be precisely because the universal human inscribed in the texts of human rights is abstract that it has proved so capable of expanding to include those who were once excluded. From this perspective, both the subjects and borders of rights are structurally in flux, and so the language of human rights can always be taken up by new excluded subjects to affirm their inclusion in the category of humanity. Such a strategy – what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls 'verifying equality' – entails seizing and taking seriously what is often dismissed as a groundless claim (that all human beings are born free and equal in rights, for instance) and using it to stage a dispute.

The period that separated the adoption of the UDHR in 1948 from the adoption of the human rights covenants in 1966 seems at first to have been a period of just such cascading rights claims. Victorious anti-colonial movements drastically changed both the composition of the UN and the terms of human rights debates. In 1955, delegates from twenty-nine African and Asian countries gathered at Bandung in Indonesia, and declared that the right of peoples and nations to self-determination is 'a pre-requisite for the full enjoyment of all fundamental Human Rights'. Two years later, in 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to win its independence; in 1960, dubbed the 'Year of Africa', it was followed by seventeen more African nations, including Nigeria, whose delegate was so proud to participate in the drafting of the human rights covenants.

Neocolonialism emerged, as Upendra Baxi has noted, just as struggles for independence appeared to succeed. The struggle against neocolonialism took the form of new demands for economic rights, including rights to development and to 'Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources'.

Summing up the shared neoliberal perspective, Wilhelm Röpke complained that imperialism was one of the 'sad results of the politicization of the economy into which we lapse the more we increasingly abandon the principles of the market economy'. Against postcolonial demands for economic self-determination, the neoliberals mobilised their dichotomy between the market as a realm of mutually beneficial, free, peaceful exchange, and politics as violent, coercive and militaristic. Separating political sovereignty from economic ownership, they argued, would enable all parties to purchase the raw materials of former colonies on the open market, rendering colonisation and conquest unnecessary.

For the neoliberals, this attempt to politicise the postcolonial economic order was a threat to the world market and international peace. They argued that this postcolonial economic project was the inheritance of mid-century colonialism, which had abandoned the free-trade policies of the earlier British Empire in favour of economic planning. Faced with rising anticolonialism, the neoliberals sought to change the terms of the debate over imperialism and colonialism. They argued that imperialism was not the 'highest stage of capitalism', as Vladimir Lenin had argued, but the result of the politicisation of the economy.

At the 1957 meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, the Stanford agricultural economist Karl Brandt drew on the myth of the market as a catallaxy that transforms enemies into friends to lay out a neoliberal approach to decolonisation. The problem for an 'enlightened liberalism', he argued, was not 'how to rid the colonial areas of the white people'; rather, it was 'how to create, as soon as possible, conditions in the colonial areas under which the white people not only can stay but where more of them can enter the areas as welcome partners and friends'.

In 1947, the Labour government that built the UK's welfare state sent its delegate to Lake Success with instructions to ensure the new human rights declaration contained no social and economic rights. Charles Dukes, the retired trade unionist representing the UK, presented his country as a bastion of freedom, social justice and equality. At the same time, he was tasked with deflecting challenges to Britain's colonial empire, which then comprised thirty-eight territories with a combined population of 60 million people. The Colonial Office viewed the drafting of an international human rights document as a serious threat. Wary of the Foreign Office's enthusiasm for the Cold War potential of human rights, a 1947 Colonial Office memo warned that the UK should not commit to a conception of human rights based too closely on the political and social conditions of 'advanced Europeanized countries'; if such a conception were accepted, the memo warned, '(attractive as this might be for "having a go at the totalitarians") we shall expose our colonial flank'.

Dukes was instructed in the Colonial Office position: 'colonial status is not a cause of backwardness; it is a remedy'. The Colonial Office stipulated five prerequisites for self-government: a healthy and vigorous people; adequate technical skill and knowledge; adequate production; a commodity for export; and, finally, honest and efficient administration and governance. This represented a turn away from the free trade of the nineteenth-century British Empire, as the state took on direct responsibility for economic development.

Less than a decade after the UDHR's adoption, the Swedish social democrat Gunnar Myrdal proclaimed that the welfare state, which was becoming a reality in all 'advanced nations', should be transformed into a 'welfare world'. This dream was undercut by the reality of colonial exploitation. The same year that the UDHR was adopted, the UK's minister of economic affairs, Sir Stafford Cripps, contended that Britain's very survival depended on 'a quick and extensive development of our African resources'. The demand to increase production in the colonies made the UK very wary of extending economic rights. For anticolonialists, who were accustomed to the gap between universal pronouncements and colonial realities, the seeming contradiction between welfarism at home and the denial of economic rights at an international level provided a lens through which to illuminate the post-war economic order.

Nkrumah argued that substituting free trade with welfare states exported class struggle to the international stage and made colonial exploitation newly central to the stability of capitalism. The colonies were not simply latecomers to the welfare world. If there was no 'rights cascade' when it came to social and economic rights, this was, not least, because the exploitation of the colonies made these rights possible in the metropolis.

Despite the arguments of the UK Treasury, which warned against creating a colonial 'dole', the Colonial Office successfully won passage of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1940), which enabled metropolitan spending on water, health, housing and education in the colonies. The act was predicated on a social theory that assumed improved standards of living and social services would succeed in 'cooling colonial anger and restoring imperial honour'. This gave a progressive gloss to colonial rule, as state supervision and planning were portrayed as necessary to protect the people of the colonies from market fluctuations. The reality, in the context of the war, was starkly different: real wages in African cities were plummeting, and colonial governments were more focused on lifting productivity than on raising the living standards of the people they governed.

By 1947, when the drafting of the UDHR began, the UK Labour government had begun what the Labour Party's Tribune newspaper called 'Fabianising the Empire'. Established in 1884 with the goal of reconstructing British society to secure 'the general welfare and happiness', by the twentieth century the Fabians had turned their attention from 'civilising' the British working class to developing the Empire.

Hayek, who taught at the Fabian-founded London School of Economics, reflected that his Fabian colleague Harold Laski was 'frightfully offended' by The Road to Serfdom, which he believed was written specifically against him. Laski was not entirely mistaken. Hayek wrote the book with one clear purpose, he recalled later: to persuade his 'Fabian colleagues that they were wrong'. In the book itself, he criticised the imperialism of the Fabians, arguing that their enthusiasm for planning went along with a veneration of large states and a 'glorification of power' that was akin to that of the Nazis.

Much later, neoliberal development economists would look back on this period and argue that, at independence, post-colonial leaders were 'handed a system of close economic controls which placed the bulk of the population at their mercy'. In the British government's embrace of economic planning, the neoliberals discerned the origins of postcolonial 'totalitarianism'.

For the Fabians, colonial development was too important to be left to the market; the benevolent hand of the state was necessary to secure order and prepare colonial subjects for the demands of an efficient modern economy. For the neoliberals, in contrast, mid-twentieth-century colonial policy represented a dangerous step away from the liberalism and free trade of the earlier British Empire. In the Fabian commitment to economic planning, they saw the politicisation of the economy and a cause of international friction and imperialist conflict.

As ILO officials believed 'the disruption of family life' threatened stability, they promoted the phasing out of children's employment and the regulation of the employment of women, and advised that employers of migratory workers take account of 'their normal family needs'.

A founding premise of the ILO was that the failure of any one country to adopt 'accepted international minimum standards' was an obstacle to the promotion of such standards in all other countries. As an 'avant-garde of global governance', the ILO helped to shape a moral discourse and a vision of global order to be administered from Europe. It aimed to stabilise the colonies and normalise wage labour through the extension of minimum standards of welfare and labour regulation.

In drawing on the metaphorics of slavery, Creech Jones portrayed Africans as shackled by their own customs and ignorance, and colonial rule as a force of emancipation.

At the ILO’s 1947 Convention, the Indian workers’ delegate, Shanta Mukherjee, noted the almost total absence of workers from the colonies. ‘Can any policy which has not freedom as its declared objective secure the well-being and happiness of dependent peoples?’, she asked. By updating older civilisational and racial hierarchies for new welfarist times, the ‘progressive’ colonial policy of the period sought to forestall such questions. … ‘British socialists are not so concerned with ideals like independence and self-government, but with the idea of social justice.’ By taking the emphasis off the political question of independence, the Fabians portrayed colonial rule as necessary to protect colonial subjects from market fluctuations.

The 1900 pamphlet, ‘Fabianism and the Empire’, edited by George Bernard Shaw, embraced this imperialist role, arguing that a ‘Great Power’ like the United Kingdom, must ‘govern in the interests of civilization as a whole’. … In contrast to the neoliberals, the Fabians measured civilisation not by the extent of the division of labour, but by labour regulations and living standards; ‘no flag that does not carry a reasonable standard of life with it shall be the flag of a Great Power’, Shaw wrote. … For the neoliberals, the support of the Fabians for the Boer War was evidence that socialism and imperialism shared what Röpke called a ‘common ideological breeding ground’.

Comparing the colonised to children, Mill had argued that different civilisations required different institutions, just as children of different ages required different lessons. This pedagogical conception continued to inform British colonial policy into the 1940s. 'The colonial system', a UK Colonial Office official told a UN committee in 1947, 'was a practical illustration of democracy under tuition.'

The Fabians in the Labour government were the inheritors of the utilitarianism and paternalism of the nineteenth-century liberal J. S. Mill, who famously declared that despotism was legitimate in governing those he termed 'barbarians' – 'provided the end be their improvement'.

The Fabians also inherited Mill's scepticism about the universalist belief that political institutions suitable for England or France are 'the only fit form of government for Bedouins and Malays'. In 1901, Shaw noted that the British Empire was no longer 'a Commonwealth of white men and baptised Christians', and argued against extending democratic institutions to subjects who were 'black, brown, or yellow', and whose creed was 'Mahometan, Buddhist or Hindu'.

Following in the utilitarian tradition of Jeremy Bentham, for whom natural rights were 'nonsense upon stilts', Mill argued that rights are simply claims that a society should protect in the interests of general utility. In the colonies, there was little utility in granting rights to those who lacked the pre-requisite for liberty: the capacity to improve themselves through reasoned discussion. Rather, he believed it was in the interest of all humanity that the Empire guide the colonised to civilisation, just as a parent guides a child into adulthood. He therefore demarcated those who were ready for rights from those who required a 'vigorous despotism' to lead them to a higher level of civilisation.

Hayek, in contrast, set himself against Mill’s belief that, until people were capable of being guided by conviction or persuasion, ‘there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate to find one’. In Hayek’s view, the assumption that people must be morally autonomous before they can be free reversed the order of priority between morality and freedom; only in a free society could people act on their own moral convictions, he argued. … What they objected to most in social democratic colonialism was not the colonialism but the social democracy. Mill was responsible for the idea of social justice, Hayek argued, and and his influence had consequently 'done a great deal of harm, In Mises's estimation, Mill was 'the great advocate of socialism' in comparison with whom 'all other socialist writers - even Marx, Engels, and Lassalle - are scarcely of any importance.'

In 1927 Ludwig von Mises published a scathing attack on European colonialism, which he described as antithetical to all the principles of liberalism. Mises traced modern imperialism to the 1870s, when the industrial countries had abandoned free trade in order to compete for colonial markets in Africa and Asia. … Mises flatly rejected such arguments. The basic idea of colonial policy in this period, he argued, was to take advantage of the superior weaponry of the ‘white race’ to subjugate, rob and enslave weaker peoples. But, even as he criticised colonial imperialism, Mises argued that the British Empire was different; she pursued ‘grand commercial objectives’, he argued, and her free-trade policies benefited her colonial subjects and the whole world.

Writing with a nervous eye on rising anticolonial movements from India to the Philippines, Mises warned that, if independence damaged the integration of the colonies in global circuits of trade, it would be 'an economic catastrophe of hitherto unprecedented proportion'. Despite his liberal scruples about coercive rule, he believed that political independence was of minor significance compared to the future of an international market civilisation. 'European officials, troops, and police must remain in these areas', he wrote, as far as their presence is necessary in order to maintain the legal and political conditions required to insure the participation of the colonial territories in international trade.

Writing during World War II, Mises predicted that the establishment of a United Nations would lead to autonomy for the people of Africa and Asia, but insisted that 'there are today no such things as internal affairs of a country which do not concern the rest of mankind'. If anti-imperialism in the colonies developed into anti-capitalism, Mises and his fellow neoliberals believed, it would be a catastrophe for all of humanity.

Their aim was to refute the contention, made popular by J. A. Hobson's influential 1902 text Imperialism: A Study, that imperialism was a product of market capitalism. Hobson had attributed imperialism, which he distinguished from the establishment of settler-colonies, to manufacturers, investors and financiers engaged in a 'cut-throat struggle' for new markets and investments. … Hobson attributed the imbalance between production and consumption that drove the imperialist competition for new markets to the weak consuming power of the working classes of the imperialist countries. Imperialism, in this picture, was the fruit of unequal economic distribution at home, and would only be overcome by domestic social reform to lift the living standards of the poor.

If imperialism was the result of the 'selfish interests of certain industrial, financial and professional classes', he asked, then why did it garner such broad support? His answer was that imperialists attached themselves to those movements that portrayed themselves as doing good in the world, and represented their own motives in humanitarian terms. … Hobson did not question the sincerity of what he framed as these 'disinterested' aims, but did argue that imperialists latch onto these elevated sentiments in order to create a 'moral justification' for their actions. The combination of strong interested forces with weak disinterested ones, he wrote, 'is the homage which imperialism pays to humanity'.

Writing in 1916, Lenin described imperialism as a phenomenon of monopoly capitalism, with its territorial division of the world between financial and industrial cartels and competing imperial blocs. Lenin indicted monopoly and violence as the reality lurking behind the myth of peaceful, mutually beneficial exchange. As capitalism developed, he argued, the concentration of production and capital led to the transformation of free competition into monopoly. Far from creating peaceful international relations of mutual understanding and benefit, the Bolshevik theoretician contended, war and Great Power rivalry were endemic to capitalism.

The neoliberals sought to rescue capitalism from the charge that it led to war and violence. Imperialism, they argued, was a product of politics and the pursuit of national glory, not of capitalism. As early as 1919, the Austrian School economist Joseph Schumpeter (a participant in Mises's private seminar) rejected Marxist arguments, defining imperialism as an atavistic remnant of absolutist autocracy. Inverting the sweetness-of-commerce thesis, Schumpeter argued that the beneficial effects of capitalism had been inhibited by the persistence of pre-capitalist institutions and attitudes. Capitalism, Schumpeter argued, directs the productive energies once spent on wars of conquest into productive labour, and a 'purely capitalist world therefore can offer no fertile soil to imperialist impulses'. The more capitalist social relations penetrated the economy and the mind, he argued, the more anti-imperialism and pacifism would thrive. The problem was not capitalism itself, but the fact that it had not been strong enough to alter decisively the social structure or mentality of the pre-capitalist age, with its 'disaster-bound addiction to heroic antics'.

Just as figures like the Baron de Montesquieu and James Steuart had argued that commerce was sweet and pacifying – in an age when the slave trade was at its peak, and when 'trade in general was still a hazardous, adventurous and often violent business' – the neoliberals of the twentieth century sought to sanitise the capitalism of their time. An unrestricted competitive market, they argued, would replace violent conflicts over territory and resources with peaceful and mutually beneficial commerce. The cause of conflict, they argued, lay elsewhere – in the politicisation of the economy and the confusion between political sovereignty and the ownership of a territory's natural resources.

This argument was made with the greatest force by the British economist Lionel Robbins, in a series of lectures at William Rappard’s Geneva Institute of Graduate Studies. In 1939, as another war broke out in Europe, Robbins challenged Lenin’s argument that the previous Great War was an imperialist war – ‘an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder’ for the division of the world and ‘the partition and repartition of colonies’. Robbins depicted war as inimical to a ‘Great Society’ based on private property and the division of labour, and finance capital as a pawn of government, not a prime mover. In geopolitical matters, he argued, bankers are a ‘pacific influence’. If war was contrary to the interests of capital, Robbins argued its cause lay elsewhere – in politics, and especially in the existence of independent sovereign states. ‘Not capitalism’, Robbins argued, ‘but the anarchic political organization of the world is the root disease of our civilization.’ Imperialism, from this perspective, was a result of the abandonment of free trade, and of liberalism’s ‘strict distinctions between territory and property’.

Röpke, who was in the audience during Robbin’s lecture and enjoyed it ‘tremendously’, borrowed terms from Roman law to define this vision of liberal peace. A liberal economy, he argued, separates imperium from dominium, ownership from sovereignty, and therefore prevents conflicts over resources. Referring back to the liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith, he described the (old) liberal principle as that of the ‘thorough separation between the spheres of the government and of economy, between sovereignty and the apparatus which provides material goods, between the Imperium and the Dominium, between the political power and the economic power’. It was a central article of faith for the neoliberal thinkers that a state that rules an area rich in natural resources does not own those materials, which are owned by private individuals who may enter into mutually beneficial relations for their sale. Multilateral relations of trade allow industrial nations to obtain raw materials by running their export chains through several countries, neutralising state borders and making the political rule of regions rich in resources unnecessary, Röpke argued. The goal, as Quinn Slobodian puts it in his striking account of neoliberal ‘globalism’, was a liberal world in which ‘nobody would mistake the lines on the map for meaningful marks in the world of dominium’.

For the neoliberals, it was the confusion of sovereignty with ownership that made territorial control the precondition of economic exploitation and led to international conflict. Once states take over the ownership of the materials within their border, Robbins argued, ‘the distinction between territorial jurisdiction and property disappears and, for that very reason, the fact of geographical inequality becomes a permanent cause of disharmony’. He once again contrasted this situation with the free trade of the old British Empire, in which, for ‘cultivated Britons’, the ‘dominions of the empire’ were a ‘ceremonial fiction’, not a concrete reality; in a free-trade economy based on the principle of the open door, any private investor can buy a country’s raw materials on the market on equal terms, he argued, and so has no need to resort to conquest.

In depicting the British Empire as peaceful, Robbins obscured not only the great naval force that ensured its supremacy over its rivals, but also the genocidal violence wielded against indigenous and First Nations peoples in the process of establishing its distinctive white-settler colonies. Also absent from his narrative was what Mike Davis refers to as the 'late Victorian holocausts' by which British exploitation and commitment to Malthusian doctrines and free trade dramatically exacerbated the effects of climate to produce extraordinary famines, notably in India. In praising the peaceful trade of the British Empire, he engaged in an imperial politics of 'deflection' that turned attention away from empire's violence by insisting on its fundamental liberality.

Mises was more explicit about the brutal state violence necessary to uphold 'peaceful' commerce. He justified the wars waged by England to expand her empire by arguing that, had India and China not been forcefully opened to trade, not only 'each Chinese and each Hindu, but also each European and each American would be considerably worse off'. Depicting the extension of the international division of labour as being in the interests of all of humanity, he argued that developed nations could not remain indifferent to those who wished to maintain their independence at a lower level of civilisation. 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.

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. The unequal and extraterritorial treaties imposed on China established a precursor for neoliberal forms of empire 'predicated on legally protected freedom of trade without formal territorial control'. In a different context, the challenge for the neoliberals was to conceptualise the institutional and legal conditions that would compel postcolonial states to offer their resources on the market's terms.

Although the neoliberals harked back to an earlier era of free trade, they also broke with the laissez-faire anti-imperialism of nineteenth-century liberalism and its assumption that free trade would naturally lead to harmony. Writing during World War II, Mises argued that, while earlier liberals had correctly recognised that there could be no conflicts between correctly understood interests, they had drastically overestimated the ability of the masses to understand their own interests. In typically aristocratic mode, he argued that liberalism had failed because 'most men are too dull to follow complex chains of reasoning'. … Mises contended that the success of a liberal market relied on an institutional and legal order that would shape liberal subjects. 'The essential feature of the advanced West was not its technique', he wrote (in terms that resonated with Charles Malik's arguments at Lake Success), 'but its moral atmosphere'; a competitive market would thrive only in a society that encouraged saving, entrepreneurship, and peaceful competition.

The question for the neoliberals was how to secure a legal and institutional structure that would foster the moral environment on which an international division of labour depended. In seeking to answer this, they drew on the experiments in international governance and supervision pursued by Rappard and the Permanent Mandates Commission, and by the earlier British Empire, which Mises depicted as a 'mandatory of European Civilization'. … Faced with growing anticolonial movements, the neoliberals sought to ensure that political self-determination did not enable the people of the former colonies to claim their natural resources as their own property or subject them to political control.

While states were necessary to enforce labour discipline and security, and create the conditions for market competition, they had to be shielded from the demands of their own people and prevented from interfering with the market. As Hayek put it, the 'taming of the savage' must be followed by the 'taming of the state'. What was necessary was 'a set of rules which define what a state may do, and an authority capable of enforcing these rules'. It was essential that the post-war period avoid a return to 'unfettered sovereignty' – especially in former colonies. Here, the neoliberals were broadly in agreement, but they were still grappling with the question of what those rules would look like, and how they would be enforced. They were nonetheless clear that the problem of securing a liberal economy was not a technical one, and that the new order would need to amount to more than economic rules. Mises contended that the preconditions of an international economy were 'social, legal, constitutional and political'. Röpke stipulated that a truly international economic order must be based on 'fundamental liberty and equality of rights'. Against economic autarky, the neoliberals sought to develop a moral order for all humanity. 'No human cooperation and no lasting peace are conceivable', Mises concluded, 'if men put loyalty to any particular group above loyalty to humanity, moral law, and the principle of every individual's moral responsibility and autonomy.'

During the drafting of the UDHR, representatives of the colonial powers had fought hard against the inclusion of this guarantee, even arguing that it was discriminatory to mention colonial subjects specifically as subjects of human rights. Back then, delegates representing colonial powers had spoken forcefully against what the UK delegate called the 'apparent discrimination' of 'especially mentioning the trust and non-self-governing territories'. To specify that colonial subjects were subjects of human rights, they argued then, would be to call into question the universality of the category 'everyone'. Now, faced with drafting a legally binding covenant, delegates of these same states proposed colonial exclusion clauses to prevent the automatic application of the covenants in the territories they controlled.

Cassin, a key drafter of the UDHR, is regularly celebrated as a great universalist, but his universalism coexisted with a deep belief in the civilising role of colonial rule, and the legitimacy of violence in sustaining it. As the French state jailed nationalist electoral candidates in Algeria and Britain waged violent counterinsurgencies in Palestine and Malaya, both delegations argued for colonial clauses to take account for the fact that the territories under their administration were 'constantly progressing along the road to self-government and independence', as the UK delegate put it. Cassin too relied on an idea of measured progress to argue that applying covenants automatically to non-self-governing territories would 'result in a general alignment at the level of the most backward people', as France could not impose progressive measures that her subjects were unable to understand 'on account of their attachment to their own traditions'.

Cassin was committed to the view that the rights of man were a Judeo-Christian inheritance, and he saw the status of women as both 'a marker of a society's capacity to value and enact human rights and, concurrently, a basis for denying the universal application of human rights in culturally differentiated communities'. Transforming the rights of the family, which might take several months in metropolitan France, he argued, would take a long time in the overseas territories, and might 'endanger public order, since the peoples would not be ready for such changes'.

At this point, the anticolonialists were the universalists, and they too spoke in the name of humanity. Rejecting the relevance of cultural difference, they argued that, while colonial clauses may be acceptable in agreements on 'road traffic, customs duties or narcotic drugs', they were out of place in a covenant devoted to human rights. Women, including women representing countries with Muslim majorities, played a particularly significant role in undercutting Cassin's paternalistic arguments. Iraq's delegate, Bedia Afnan, wondered how 'the degree of evolution of a people could prevent it from enjoying rights' that Cassin himself had acknowledged were 'inherent in human nature'. Women had been granted equal rights in Syria, Iraq and Egypt, where 'the tradition of Islam was allied with political freedom', she argued, but not in the dependent territories, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya. For opponents of the colonial clause, it was colonialism, not cultural or religious difference, that was the barrier to the universal extension of human rights.

Although opponents of the colonial clause rejected Cassin's advocacy of 'the instrument of progress, the colonial clause', they too relied on narratives of progress to depict human rights as civilising technologies. Reversing colonial arguments that civilisation was the prerequisite for human rights, they argued that dependent peoples needed human rights in order to progress from what the Belorussian delegate called their 'backward condition'. The 'fact that certain countries were backward in comparison with others', the Ethiopian delegate agreed, was not grounds for denying their human rights. Rather, 'the reason for their backward condition was that their population had for so long been denied the opportunity to enjoy fundamental freedoms'. The delegate of the Philippines contested Cassin's arguments, contending that the 'right to progress could not be withheld from such peoples just because of their primitive evolution'. The Chilean delegate also argued that the 'low level of civilization' of a people did not justify the denial of human rights; 'civilization was not learnt from books' he stressed. Rather, 'it could only be learnt by personal experience and … the enjoyment of human rights was the best teacher of the subject'.

In arguing that human rights were prerequisites for civilisation, they accepted the directional account of progress that underpinned colonial civilising claims. … In doing so, they unwittingly prefigured the later repurposing of human rights; in a changed geopolitical context, the civilising mission of human rights would license coercive interventions to remake societies, subjectivities and economies in the interests of global capitalism.

As implied by the Czech delegate's jest about jet-propelled planes, opponents of the colonial clause sought to accelerate the process of modernisation. In arguing that human rights were prerequisites for civilisation, they accepted the directional account of progress that underpinned colonial civilising claims. On the one hand, they challenged metropolitan arguments that the culture of the colonised constituted an insuperable barrier to the exercise of human rights, and contested the metropolitan prerogative to determine when 'native' culture had been sufficiently reformed. On the other hand, they largely accepted the necessity of such reform, and depicted the exercise of human rights as a civilising practice that would promote the modernisation of 'backward' or 'primitive' peoples. Faced with the cultural-relativist arguments of the colonial powers, most opponents of the colonial clause now distanced themselves from the Saudi delegate Jamil Baroody's earlier warnings that the UDHR was based primarily on Western philosophies and cultural patterns. They accepted, at least rhetorically, the superiority of the self-possessed, modern individual of human rights over the 'primitive' native condition. In doing so, they unwittingly prefigured the later repurposing of human rights; in a changed geopolitical context, the civilising mission of human rights would license coercive interventions to remake societies, subjectivities and economies in the interests of global capitalism.

Held in the mountainous West Javan capital, Bandung, in Indonesia, the Asian-African conference was sponsored by the prime ministers of Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, Indonesia and Pakistan, all of which had gained their independence during the previous decade. Representatives of twenty-nine countries, representing half the world's population, travelled to Bandung to build political and economic cooperation. The conference's final communiqué condemned the racial discrimination and 'denial of the fundamental rights of man' in the existing colonies, and declared colonialism in all its manifestations 'an evil which should speedily be brought to an end'. At the same time, it stressed the urgency of economic development, including through foreign capital investment.

At the 1956 meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, devoted to 'The Challenge of Communism and the Response of Liberty', the German ordoliberal Alexander Rüstow praised the 'tremendous, epoch-making importance' of the previous year's Bandung conference.

Despite the prevalence of the language of anticolonial solidarity, Cold War splits were already evident, and delegates from South Vietnam, Pakistan and Ceylon argued that Soviet colonialism was a greater threat than the European variant. The Iraqi delegate also warned of the danger of jumping 'from the pan into the fire', declaring the new imperialism of the Soviet Union to be 'much deadlier than the old one'. The Pakistani delegate argued against being 'misled into opening our doors to a new and more insidious form of imperialism that masquerades in the guise of liberation'.

Ultimately, this argument was resolved through what Malik considered a 'very satisfactory' compromise: the final communiqué 'took note' of the UDHR, while condemning colonialism 'in all its forms', leaving delegates to interpret this as they wished.

Obiora Chinedu Okafor has suggested that 'the tension between the universality and relativity of human rights (in almost all its shades) was present at Bandung, however subtly.' It is nonetheless important to note that, while delegates argued over the legitimacy of the UDHR's claim to be a 'common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations', those who resisted endorsing it largely avoided the language of cultural relativism later made prominent in the so-called 'Asian-Values Debate'. Instead, they followed the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, who pointed out that his country (like many others) had been excluded from the drafting of this 'universal' declaration and from the UN (China's UN seat having been given to Taiwan in the wake of China's 1949 Communist Revolution).

Rüstow was distinctive among neoliberal thinkers in the period of decolonisation in his conviction that colonialism was 'a bloody stain on the historic record of humanity, an endless chain of gravest crime against humanitarianism'. Along with his pragmatic concerns about the propaganda value the Soviets were drawing from European colonialism, he grounded his critique in natural law, which he depicted as 'the legal armory of the struggle for freedom and human rights'. Singling out the cruelty of the Spanish conquistadores, he denounced the sharp contrast between their 'unrestrained bestiality' and their 'professions of Christianity and the values of their Western civilization'. Challenging the rhetoric of the civilising mission, he denounced the colonial powers for trampling on the 'human dignity of the colonial peoples', and labelled their claims to be carrying out the 'white man's burden' pure hypocrisy.

In the great period of decolonisation, the neoliberal majority was preoccupied with the danger that independent postcolonial states would refuse to submit to their existing positions in the international division of labour. They had become increasingly anxious that a 'dangerous liaison' between supporters of planning in developed and developing countries threatened the market system. Emerging agendas of industrialisation, import substitution and economic planning threatened to recapitulate the 'totalitarian' Fabian model, while demands for economic self-determination politicised the economy and eroded the separation of dominium and imperium.

Although Rüstow, and his closest neoliberal colleague Röpke, are generally – and rightly – understood to have been more concerned than many of their fellow MPS members with the negative impacts of competitive markets on social integration, when it came to imperialism these 'sociological liberals' were great exponents of the 'sweetness of commerce'. Echoing earlier arguments that the virtue of commerce lay in checking the violent passions, Röpke portrayed war as a matter of 'instincts, feelings and passions', while the 'atmosphere created by free market economics, i.e. the principle of economic organisation inherent in "capitalism", serve[d] rather to curb and suppress atavistic, bellicose emotions than to stir them up'.

While Rüstow attributed colonial imperialism to the 'warlike spirit' of states, his real concern was not with the state per se, which he believed needed to be strong in order to depoliticise civil society. Rather, he traced the 'cult of the great Leviathan' not to Thomas Hobbes, but to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the tradition of revolutionary popular sovereignty. As anticolonialists struggling for self-determination were drawn to Rousseau's theorisation of the 'will of the people', Rüstow, in common with much neoliberal opposition to popular sovereignty, positioned the Swiss philosopher at the origin of modern totalitarianism.

Rüstow prefigured this later anti-totalitarian politics of human rights in another way also – by articulating a human rights discourse that broke decisively with the defences of self-determination as a human right that echoed in the speeches at Bandung. In his paper 'Human Rights or Human Duties?', presented at the 1960 MPS meeting, Rüstow laid out a human rights–based duty to bring freedom to the world. In contrast to the common assumption that neoliberal human rights are individualistic, he argued that freedom is social, and that human rights therefore presuppose social relations mediated by the competitive market. What Rüstow elsewhere described as the 'manly fight for human rights' generated a robust duty to defend capitalism. Rüstow's position was universalist, and, by extension, interventionist: we live in 'one world', he argued, and therefore have a duty to realise a vision of freedom for all humanity. The endpoint of this vision was a radically federalist global arrangement in which political options were limited by human rights, 'ethics and legal standards'. In Rüstow's neoliberal 'anti-colonialism', we see the emerging outlines of a world whose dominant human rights ideology entails a duty to enmesh all of humanity in the capitalist division of labour.

In a 1952 lecture at the San Francisco Public Library, Mises singled out the promise of the first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, that private businesses would not be expropriated in the ten years following independence. ‘You can’t expect people to invest if you tell them you will expropriate them at some time in the future’, Mises retorted. Describing Nehru’s Fabian-inspired socialism as a step backwards even from late British rule, Mises broke starkly with what Gunnar Myrdal was then praising as India’s ‘heroic attempt’ at grand-scale planning. For Myrdal, this attempt was the only alternative to ‘continued acquiescence in economic and cultural stagnation or regression’. 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?’ 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’. … Realising the neoliberals’ worst fears, delegates from recently independent states increasingly pursued an agenda of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, which sought to secure the ‘inalienable right’ of sovereign states to dispose of the resources located in their territories, including by nationalising the foreign companies that had hitherto exploited them.

With decision-making power in the Bretton-Woods international financial institutions weighted towards wealthy states, the UN became the site of what one historian has called ‘a strangely secluded and artificial version of the broader struggle for independence’. This created a new relationship between the human rights project and broader debates about development and the rights of people to sovereignty over their natural resources. In its final form, the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights embodies this new focus. According to its Article 1.2, ‘All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.’ Realising the neoliberals’ worst fears, delegates from recently independent states increasingly pursued an agenda of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, which sought to secure the ‘inalienable right’ of sovereign states to dispose of the resources located in their territories, including by nationalising the foreign companies that had hitherto exploited them. ‘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’.

In a period of US-sponsored military coups and continuing exploitation by former colonial power, postcolonial attempts to secure the societies of newly independent nations from outside intervention were not merely rationales for authoritarianism.

The liberal approach to human rights, which sequestered the world economy from political challenge, was supported by many of the world’s most powerful states, and licensed their interventions on behalf of their corporations. The capacity of human rights to protect individuals across borders was always one-sided: ‘No major Euro-American nation would subject itself to Third World institutional scrutiny and critique of its human rights performance.’

While the West held up both its economic system and its ‘humanist superiority’ for emulation, Fanon urged the people of the colonies to find their own distinctive paths. Upholding a ‘new humanism’, he argued that, if the people of former colonies were to create new political and human possibilities for themselves, they had to stop honouring the ‘notorious “rights” of the occupant’ whose guarantee had been presented as the price for independence.

For more radical anticolonialists of the period, individualistic languages of dignity and liberty were the means by which neocolonialists distracted the people of the colonies from what the Martiniquan psychiatrist and anticolonialist Frantz Fanon called their basic requirements: ‘bread, clothing, shelter’. Fanon’s ‘stretched Marxism’ foregrounded race as the basis for settlers’ entitlement to ‘the material benefits of colonial capitalism’.

Nkrumah similarly argued that, although the African continent harboured extraordinary untapped wealth, this was being used to enrich Europe, not the continent’s people. Embracing the economic policies, if not the racist paternalism, of the Fabians, Nkrumah argued that, in attempting to ‘raise the living standards of its people’, Africa could not industrialise in ‘the haphazard laissez-faire manner of Europe’, but must pursue ‘comprehensive socialist planning’. Going beyond the Fabians, he also argued for political unity to challenge the liberal myth of the market as a free space of mutually beneficial exchange, and alter terms of sale of raw materials.

Noting that ‘decolonisation’ was a word much used by imperialist spokesmen to describe the transfer of political sovereignty, he argued that colonialism still controlled that sovereignty, and former colonies still provided the raw materials for their former rulers’ manufactures. ‘The change in the economic relationship between the new sovereign states and the erstwhile masters is only one of form’, Nkrumah manitained. ‘Colonialism has achieved a new guise.’

Although less than 5 per cent of foreign-owned firms were nationalised at the high-point of decolonisation, some high-profile cases sent shock-waves through business circles, especially in the mineral and petroleum industries, and galvanised opposition to self-determination. Mises singled out the Egyptian nationalisation of the Suez Canal two years earlier, in 1956, as the turning point.

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. 'Egypt undertook to supply labour to dig the Canal by corvée of which 120,000 died without getting paid', he told his audience, as Egyptian troops reclaimed the canal.

The 1957 meeting was the occasion of the first MPS discussion of a topic dear to the heart of the Swiss diplomat, who had devoted so much of his life to the liberal civilising mission: 'Liberalism and Colonialism'. … That night, he had a stroke. He would die the following April. At the same time, his neoliberal colleagues would increasingly despair at the failure of the liberal teleology underpinning Rappard's life's work. As newly independent nations demanded sovereignty over their natural resources, the neoliberals meeting in the mountains turned their minds to saving the international division of labour from a resurgence of 'tribal' morals.

In an unintegrated world, it would be all very well to leave those who refused Western pedagogy alone. But, given the commercial relations developed over centuries, granting self-determination to colonial subjects 'would dry up the sources of tropical raw materials, oil and many things the rapidly progressing western world cannot do without'.

The rise of anticolonialism made neoliberals increasingly defensive of European colonialism and its supposed civilising role. Their problem, as the Dutch philosopher-economist Justus Meyer put it, reprising late colonial stereotypes, was that the colonised 'wards' had proved far less rational and amenable to civilisation than the liberal colonialists assumed; they clung to their own customs, they lacked the IQs to embrace education, and (like those Algerians who William Rappard had viewed as a challenge to Adam Smith's economics), they were generally 'not inclined to work more than necessary' to provide their accustomed standard of living. Faced with such intransigence, Meyer claimed that 'liberalistic colonialism is at its wits' ends'. In an unintegrated world, it would be all very well to leave those who refused Western pedagogy alone. But, given the commercial relations developed over centuries, granting self-determination to colonial subjects 'would dry up the sources of tropical raw materials, oil and many things the rapidly progressing western world cannot do without'. … Against the normative principles of liberal humanitarianism, which he believed had failed in practice, Meyer held up as an 'elementary law of self-preservation' that the 'historically grown relations between colonial powers and their colonies not be broken off abruptly without something sensible to take the place of historical patterns interwoven with the economic system of the Western world'. The question for the neoliberals was what 'sensible' arrangement would confine former colonies to their allotted roles in the global division of labour as providers of raw materials and cheap labour, while shaping market subjects.

Rüstow's fellow panellists at the 1957 'Liberalism and Colonialism' session reacted violently to his critique of European colonialism. Yet 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.

The freedom that mattered most to the neoliberals was the freedom to trade across borders on non-discriminatory terms, which they represented as the necessary foundation of all freedoms and rights. 'The institution of a free market, of competition among enterprises, freedom of entry and freedom of exit to professions and any sort of business are the safeguards and anchors of freedom and justice for the people in underdeveloped areas', Brandt made clear. While he looked forward to the 'gradual abolition of the privileged status of the white people', this move towards equality was predicated on newly independent states accepting market discipline. Self-government was conditional on newly independent countries submitting to the demands of the market and respecting the rights of foreign traders. The neoliberals envisioned what B. S. Chimni calls a 'borderless global space' in which the role of Third World nation-states is to 'facilitate the expansion of global capitalism through promoting free trade, lifting constraints on movements of capital, and ensuring infrastructure development'. Creating such a space could not be left to laissez-faire; it required enforceable international standards – and the right to intervene when they were flouted.

Here, he and his frequent antagonist Rüstow agreed: while Rüstow worried that the social dislocation that would follow the imposition of Western civilisation on 'natives' who were still living in the 'Stone Age' would provide an opening for communism, he nonetheless argued that as 'long as the present structure of these countries continues, we might as well convert any investment of ours into roubles'. For the neoliberals, a conducive climate for foreign investment required a profound social transformation, or conversion, and the adoption of the morals of the market. Exporting capital meant exporting capitalist social relations and a morality that fostered capital accumulation.

Mises attributed mass penury in Asia to the absence of 'a legal and constitutional system which would have provided the opportunity for large-scale capital accumulation'. Mises identified the fundamental problem as that of an egalitarian moral economy, which had licensed the confiscation of private property. China lacked the morals of the market he suggested, and without a transformation of mentality and morality, aid and industrialisation would be followed only by expropriation and the consolidation of centralised state structures.

By 1990, the previously human rights-averse World Bank began to argue that, through its lending programme, it had always been promoting human rights. Its post-Washington-consensus focus consolidated this shift; as the bank moved from 'market fundamentalism to governance fundamentalism', it focused on public administration, the rule of law, accountability and transparency, and identified a lack of human rights as evidence of bad governance. Rather than breaking with neoliberalism, the World Bank increasingly concentrated on legal and governance structures that 'put international property rights centre-stage and included "human" rights as an integral component of [an] international risk-governance mechanism' that increasingly incorporated ' "civil society" actors' into economic governance.

At the 1958 MPS meeting, the Mexican law professor Gustavo Velasco argued that such politicisation in his country was the consequence of underdevelopment. The harmful effects of inflation in Mexico had been primarily psychological, he argued. 'Mexico has had and still has inflation because it has lived beyond its means.' Velasco attributed the underlying causes of inflation to three factors: the welfare state, the desire for economic betterment, and the desire for economic development. Inflation, he argued, resulted from access to subsidised goods and services (provided by a government that acted as a 'third-dimensional Santa Claus'), upward pressure on wages as a result of trade union action, and over-investment by the government.

Velasco was pessimistic about the possibility of reversing these trends. High popular expectations and the politicisation of economic life made it impossible to keep inflation under control. By 1958, Velasco had not countenanced what would be necessary to lower these expectations and depoliticise the economy. It would take another decade and a half before the neoliberals found their solution in Chile.

For you to be a Communist or a Socialist is to be totalitarian. For me, not so. I believe man is free when he has an economic position that guarantees him work, food, housing, health, rest and recreation. I am the founder of the Socialist Party and I must tell you that I am not totalitarian, and I think Socialism frees man. … Don't confuse totalitarianism with authoritarianism. I don't know of any totalitarian governments in Latin America. The only one was Chile under Allende. Chile is now a great success. The world shall come to regard the recovery of Chile as one of the great economic miracles of our time.

In late 1977 – as the Chilean military junta extended the state of siege in place since its 1973 coup and formally dissolved all political parties – Friedrich Hayek wrote a letter to a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, to protest what he depicted as unfair international criticism of the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. When his article was rejected, he wrote to the editor expressing disappointment that the newspaper lacked the 'civil courage' to resist popular anti-Pinochet sentiment. Hayek singled out the human rights organisation Amnesty International – which had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize earlier that year – for turning 'slander [into] a weapon of international politics'. After accepting an invitation to lecture in Chile, he complained, he was inundated with phone calls, letters and anti-Pinochet material by 'well-intentioned people I did not know but also from organizations like "Amnesty International"', who asked him to cancel his visit. Amnesty's materials on Chile from this period detail the Junta's widespread use of arbitrary imprisonment, execution, systematic torture and the 'disappearance' of political detainees, 1,500 of whom then remained unaccounted for. In a style Amnesty helped pioneer, its 1977 report on Chilean political prisoners combined legal analysis with moving accounts of missing individuals. To take only one example, it recounted that José Baeza Cruces, a trader from Santiago, had been arrested in his shop in July 1974 by personnel of the Air Force Intelligence Service. Cruces was taken to a basement in the Ministry of Defence and later to the Air Force Academy of War, where, according to witnesses, he was tortured every day for at least six months. After that the witnesses were transferred and contact with Cruces was lost.

This combination of vivid description of individual cases with legal analysis would ultimately become central to a new wave of international NGO-led human rights activism that looked dramatically different to postcolonial demands for self-determination and economic sovereignty. This new human rights activism had little impact on Hayek, who travelled to Chile and declared the dictatorial regime 'an example at the global level'. Hayek's fellow Mont Pèlerin Society member, the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman, later echoed this assessment, describing Chile as an economic and political 'miracle'. Neither Hayek nor Friedman were detached observers of this 'miracle'. Both men gave advice to Pinochet, and both had disciples in his authoritarian regime – Friedman among the Chicago-trained técnicos (or 'Chicago Boys'), who formulated the regime's economic 'shock' programme, and Hayek among the conservative Catholic gremialistas, who produced an institutional order to protect the economy from political challenge. These two civilian elite factions were to define the economic and political orientation of Pinochet's regime.

Given Hayek's support for Pinochet's regime and his criticisms of Amnesty International, it seems surprising that some have criticised the new politics of human rights for helping to sanitise neoliberalism. Focusing on the role of Friedman and the 'Chicago Boys' in guiding the junta's economic reforms, Naomi Klein, for instance, criticises Amnesty International for obscuring the relationship between neoliberal 'shock therapy' and political violence. Noting that the Southern Cone was a 'laboratory' for both neoliberalism and grassroots human rights activism, she argues that, in its commitment to impartiality, Amnesty occluded the reasons for the torture and killing, and thereby 'helped the Chicago School ideology to escape from its first bloody laboratory virtually unscathed'. Samuel Moyn, on the other hand, contests the claim that the human rights movement was complicit in the rise of neoliberalism, deeming Klein's account 'exaggerated and implausible'. The success of the human rights movement, he argues, is at least partly due to 'the left's own failure either to escape savage repression' or to bring about coalitions to denounce dictatorship with as much success.

Viewed from another angle, Moyn's comment raises the question of why, in the period of neoliberal ascendancy, international human rights organisations flourished, largely escaping the repression that was pursued so furiously against leftists, trade unionists, rural organisers and indigenous people in countries such as Chile. As Pinochet's regime engaged in a systematic campaign to eradicate the Chilean left, it allowed overseas human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, and Americas Watch (a precursor to Human Rights Watch) to enter the country, and gave them extensive freedom of movement. While the CIA-trained National Intelligence Directorate had instructions to carry out the 'total extermination of Marxism', the junta, anxious to present Chile as a modern, Western, Catholic and 'civilised' nation, did not disavow the language of human rights, even at the height of the repression. Moreover, despite Hayek's displeasure at Amnesty's anti-Pinochet activism, the neoliberals did not eschew the language of human rights; on the contrary, they argued that their own proposals were necessary in order to secure freedom, human dignity and human rights.

Rather than simply dismissing this claim, we should look more closely at the neoliberal idea of freedom, and the place of rights and law within it. This means departing from the standard story, according to which the neoliberals in Chile focused on their area of technical economic expertise while turning a blind eye to the repression necessary to implement their economic agenda. On the contrary, not even the most technical of the Chicago economists justified their work in Chile simply on economic grounds. Rather, they argued that the junta had saved Chile from a totalitarian regime, reversing a history of planning and state intervention and making possible individual freedom and human rights.

In framing their human rights agenda as apolitical, and without implications for economic arrangements, NGOs such as Amnesty International sought to avoid the violent political conflicts between rival economic and political visions that marked Allende's rule. But, in accepting the dichotomy between violent politics and pacific civil society, they further discredited political challenges to the inequalities and impersonal domination of market society. The human rights politics consolidated in Chile followed only one of the paths laid down decades earlier by the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), who also sought to render visible the heavy costs of economic deprivation and the compulsion exerted by hunger and want.

For Harberger, who had spent decades overseeing the training of economics students from Latin America, this relationship between political and economic freedom was a 'dilemma'. Latin Americans, he told the symposium, were beset by a 'predilection to romanticism', a 'tremendous, incredible vulnerability to demagogy' and a collective tendency towards 'self-pity'. Military governments, he contended, were 'best at leading them to think their way out of that, but it is a terrible dilemma for us as freedom-loving individuals'. If romanticism was a barrier to economic freedom, Harberger wondered, was it legitimate to use political repression to shatter it?

Harberger was responding to a paper by the Uruguayan economist Ramón Díaz, who argued that 'Latin American democracy has sought its inspiration very much in Rousseau, and very little in Locke' – that is, it has prioritised popular sovereignty over property and individual rights. It was this culture of romanticism and popular political mobilisation that Harberger saw as the source of Chilean socialism.

Harberger oversaw a US government–sponsored partnership between the Catholic University of Chile and the University of Chicago, which, he reflected, spawned more than a dozen key ministers, Central Bank presidents and budget directors. The Chile Project stretched back to the era of import-substitution industrialization of the 1950s – a time, he reflected, when the watchwords across Latin America were 'interventionism, paternalism, nationalism, and socialism'. The Chicago Boys' opposition to the politicisation of the economy preceded Allende's victory by decades; but his socialist government's economic planning, Keynesian demand-stimulation and wealth redistribution provided their ideal adversary, and brought them to the attention of Chile's business elites. From the Chicago-inspired perspective of these técnicos, Allende's proposals amounted to an ignorant violation of the laws of the economy and the destruction of a free society.

Allende’s first speech as president, in November 1970, exemplified the ‘romanticism’ Harberger believed blighted Chile’s economy. Allende urged his fellow Chileans to rebuild their country ‘according to our dreams’ – to rebuild a country in which ‘all children begin life equally, with equal medical care, education and nutrition’. His government sought to ameliorate existing inequalities in wealth and power by displacing the market as the key allocator of basic commodities. It significantly expanded spending on health, education and housing, distributed free powdered milk to young children, heavily subsidised public transport, mandated pay rises, introduced price controls, and established popular resorts (balnearios populares) devoted to socialised leisure.

More disturbing to neoliberals was the government’s move to nationalise Chile’s largest US-owned copper mines. US law required ‘adequate, prompt and effective compensation’ for expropriated US companies. As the campaign for Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources discussed in Chapter 3 intensified, Allende received a standing ovation in the United Nations General Assembly when he explained that his government would deduct ‘excess profits’ amounting to US$774 million from the compensation it paid the two biggest US mining companies, leaving them with a debt to the Chilean government. What Allende termed Chile’s ‘reasoned rebellion’ challenged the inequalities of the global economy, giving substance to the demand for economic self-determination.

In an address to delegates of sixty-three nations at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Santiago one year before the coup, Allende stressed the need to rectify an unfair international division of labour based on ‘age-old exploitation’ and a ‘dehumanized concept of mankind’. Chile’s delegate to the UNCTAD conference was Hernán Santa Cruz, who had struggled decades earlier to secure the social and economic rights in the UDHR. At the UNCTAD conference, Santa Cruz stressed that the realisation of the UDHR’s social, economic and cultural rights required a just international economic order.

To Harberger and the Chicago Boys, Santa Cruz’s emphasis on social and economic rights reflected the influence of ‘nationalist, protectionist, distributive mythologies’, notably the dependency theory of the Argentinean economist Raúl Prebisch, executive secretary of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). Prebisch’s account of unequal trade between the centre and the periphery challenged the neoclassical assumption that market relations are free, voluntary and mutually beneficial. In opposition to the myth of the sweetness of commerce, Prebisch highlighted the centrality of domination to the operations of the world economy. To Harberger, this stress on the external determinants of economic development – the international economic system, commodity prices, multinational corporations, and what Allende termed ‘neo-colonial exploitation’ – elevated the Latin American tendency to assume that ‘somebody else did it to them’ to the level of theory.

The US government, guided by the Monroe Doctrine, and alarmed both by Chile's domestic policies and by the threat they offered to US regional hegemony, devoted substantial funding and efforts to sabotaging Allende's progress in 'establishing a totalitarian Marxist state in Chile'. … The US Treasury secretary, John Connally, argued that preventing a snowballing trend of expropriations across Latin America and the Caribbean required that Chile be made an example.

Chile's transformation into an exemplary laboratory of neoliberalism owed much to Harberger's Chicago Boys. On 12 September 1973, the morning after the coup, their 189-page economic programme, El Ladrillo ('The Brick') was on the desk of every major figure in the new regime. It called for trade liberalisation and tariff reductions; widespread privatisation, including of social security; and a regressive value-added tax. In 1993, Harberger noted with satisfaction that this vision was now overwhelmingly accepted by all of Chile's major parties, while, at the time, the Chicago programme was 'too market-oriented, too open-economy, and too technocratic' even for the traditional Chilean right. In 1975, Friedman met with Pinochet to convince him that Chile's economy required 'shock treatment', primarily in the form of a drastic reduction in public spending. The general, Friedman noted, 'was sympathetically attracted to the idea of a shock treatment but was clearly distressed at the possible temporary unemployment that might be caused'. In the wake of his visit, Friedman wrote to Pinochet to stiffen his resolve: 'There is no way to end the inflation that will not involve a temporary transitional period of severe difficulties, including unemployment'.

It is also true that Friedman continued to profess his support for human rights. Two years later, he summarised his own political message as follows: 'Property rights are not in conflict with human rights. On the contrary, they are themselves the most basic of human rights and an essential foundation for other human rights.' On closer examination, however, it is clear that Friedman's argument in Chile was not that political freedom and economic freedom were 'entirely unrelated', as Letelier and Klein both argue. Rather, he argued that they were intimately related: property rights are the essential foundation of all other human rights, he contended, and a free market is necessary for realising the 'equal right to freedom'.

His major work, Capitalism and Freedom, explicitly contested the 'delusion' that political freedom could be combined with a socialist economy. Historically, political freedom came into being along with the free market and the emergence of capitalism, he argued, while social planning and welfarism had required 'trampling rough-shod on treasured private rights'.

Although Letelier recognised this aspect of Friedman’s argument, he argued that, in Chile, ‘when the economic theories he advocates coincide with an absolute restriction of every type of democratic freedom’, Friedman had instead disentangled economics and politics. In rendering Friedman’s argument, Letelier, perhaps unconsciously, distorted it. The central argument of Capitalism and Freedom is not that economic liberalism is necessary for political democracy, but that it is necessary for political freedom – defined as the absence of coercion by one’s ‘fellow men’. Although it seems obvious that Pinochet’s torturous regime fundamentally violated this condition, the coercion that most concerned Friedman took the form of political interference with the market. By ‘removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority’, he argued, ‘the market eliminates the source of coercive power’.

Just as Mises had argued that economic autarky was a just cause for war, the argument that a functioning market was the necessary condition for domestic peace licensed state violence ‘to crush the onslaught of peace-breakers’.

Despite their apolitical presentation, the Chicago Boys followed Friedman in attributing a series of what I have called ‘(anti)-political virtues’ to a competitive market order, among them the absence of coercion, impersonal rule, non-discrimination, and, pre-eminently, individual freedom. Their advocacy of free-market reform was predicated on a stark dichotomy between politics (defined by coercion and conflict) and the market (which enabled non-coercive, mutually beneficial, voluntary social interchange). Pablo Baraona, a Chicago graduate who later became minister of the economy, outlined this dichotomy in the starkest terms. Chile’s problems, he argued, were all attributable to politics – ‘the quest for power for its own sake and increasing unrestrained demagoguery’. In contrast, the market was ‘the economic manifestation of freedom and the impersonality of authority’. The leading ‘Chicago Boy’, Sergio de Castro, who served as both minister of economy and minister of finance under Pinochet, believed that (economic) freedom was best secured by ‘authoritarian’ government with its ‘impersonal’ mode of exercising power.

Long before Friedman, Mises described the market order as the real basis of all the declarations of rights and charters of liberties, which remained a ‘dead letter’ without economic freedom. The freedom of a market society, as we have seen, operated within strict margins; there is no freedom to challenge the market as the key allocator of goods and social positions, to ameliorate the inequalities it produces, or to establish ends collectively. Rather, individual freedom is subject to the ‘harsh social pressure’ of the sovereign market, and the pursuit of individual values through consumption is limited by personal finances. … Mises spelled out the necessary relation between market freedom and political repression most clearly: there is ‘in the operation of the market no compulsion or coercion’, he argued. Therefore, the state ‘employs its power to beat people into submission solely for the prevention of actions destructive to the preservation and the smooth operation of the market economy’. The neoliberals knew all too well that their vision of freedom was indistinguishable from the violence that secured submission to the market.

In the Chilean case, what is most striking about the relation between the economists and the junta’s repression is not that they ignored it, but how willingly they embraced it. Friedman wrote to Pinochet to assure him that Allende’s regime represented the ‘terrible climax’ of a trend towards socialism, and that the general had been ‘extremely wise in adopting the many measures you have already taken to reverse this trend’. In 1977, the Chicago human capital theorist, Gary Becker, wrote of his pride in his Chilean students, whose ‘willingness to work for a cruel dictator and start a different economic approach was one of the best things that happened to Chile’. … Hayek told the right-wing Chilean newspaper El Mercurio that, while he did not support permanent dictatorship, he saw Pinochet’s ‘transitional dictatorship’ as a ‘means of establishing a stable democracy and liberty, clean of impurities’.

Contra Klein and Letelier, the neoliberals did not treat their technical economic agenda and the junta’s political repression as ‘entirely unrelated’. On the contrary, neoliberalism in Chile, as elsewhere, was always a political (or anti-political) project that found its normative justification in its claim to enhance the form of freedom that only a competitive market could provide. … Pinochet’s dictatorship offered a solution to a seemingly intractable neoliberal problem: how to replace popular sovereignty with the sovereignty of the market. It demonstrated what was necessary, in a context defined by strong collective politics and norms of solidarity, to induce subjects to abandon romanticism and the political contestation of ends, and adopt the morals of the market.

This conception of the market also had its theological lineage, as earlier neoliberals were well aware. Yet, rather than being structurally modelled on the miraculous interventions of a transcendent God, the idea of the market as a natural order had the same systematic structure as a world ordered by an absent God who governed exclusively through natural laws. Neoliberalism was founded on the rejection of this model of the market, which the German ordoliberal Alexander Rüstow disparaged as a reflection of theological faith in the 'eternal wisdom of the natural law'. Wilhelm Röpke mocked the idea that the competitive market was a natural order 'miraculously directed by the "invisible hand" mentioned by Adam Smith, which in reality is nothing but the "divine reason" of deistic philosophy'. The problem with such a belief, according to the neoliberals, was that it led to misplaced optimism about the self-regulating properties of the market, and neglect of the 'non-economic prerequisites' of a market economy, including its moral prerequisites.

On closer examination, however, even at their most technical, the Chicago economists were deeply aware of the non-economic prerequisites for their preferred market order. If romanticism and dema-goguery were the greatest barriers to 'good economics', a working market order required market subjects responsible for their own fates. The Chicago economists were also aware that the market did not create its own virtues. Röpke had argued that invocations of an invisible hand obscured the fact that the 'market economy needs a firm moral, political and institutional framework', including 'well weighed laws appropriate to the economic system'. For Friedman, achieving such a market-compatible framework was the junta's political miracle.

In extolling Chile's political miracle, Friedman argued that a free market, unlike a military structure, is typified by dispersed authority – 'bargaining, not submission to orders, is the watchword'. But submission remained central to his account of the market. Economic pain (like physical torture) was designed to break the political subjectivities that led people to resist the 'fate' doled out by the market. Everyone in this country was 'educated in weakness', minister of the economy Baraona warned; 'to educate them in strength it is necessary to pay the price of temporary unemployment, of bankruptcies'. When asked about the high bankruptcy rate, junta member Admiral Merino concurred: 'Let fall those who must fall', he said. 'Such is the jungle of economic life. A jungle of savage beasts, where he who can kill the one next to him, kills him. That is reality.' Such statements were a long way from the myth of the sweetness of commerce, but they were not far divorced from the tenets of the neoliberal market, for which, as Michel Foucault has stressed, the central principle was not exchange but competition, with its systematic production of winners and losers. Weakening solidarity and creating competitive subjects was central to what Pinochet identified as the junta's ultimate goal: 'not to make Chile a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs'.

Pinochet's Chile was not the only place where Friedman had identified a dual miracle. Two years prior to heralding Chile's miraculous transformation, he and his wife, Rose Director Friedman, declared that the 'story of the United States is the story of an economic miracle and a political miracle'. The Friedmans attributed these earlier miracles to two complementary sets of ideas, both published in 1776. Alongside Smith's account of the market as a realm of voluntary social relations that requires 'no external force, no coercion, no violation of freedom', they placed the US Declaration of Independence's contention that all individuals are 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights', among them 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness'. According to the Friedmans, these two ideas were mutually constitutive. 'Economic freedom', they argued, 'is an essential requisite for political freedom.' The market enables individuals to pursue their own values and ends, while the guarantee that they will be unmolested in doing so fosters economic development. Both Smith and Jefferson, the Friedmans argued, saw concentrated government power as the great danger, and 'protection of the citizen against the tyranny of government as the perpetual need'. The inalienable rights of the American Declaration of Independence, from this perspective, existed not to found a sovereign state, but to ensure that state power was used to foster economic initiative. It would ultimately be towards this same end that the neoliberals would mobilise individual rights in Chile.

The reliance of the immanent laws of the market on extra-economic violence and the imposition of a moral code is clear even in relation to the most technical of areas: the Chicago Boys' remedies for inflation. From the Chicago perspective, inflation is not merely one problem among others; it is a spanner in the well-oiled market machine. For price signals and market sovereignty to replace human direction in shaping human behaviour, price stability is essential.

Friedman depicted Chicago's 'counter-revolution in monetary theory' – which displaced Keynesian attempts to foster economic stability through taxation and public spending – as 'a scientific development that has little ideological or political content'. In his 1976 Nobel Prize lecture, he struck a technocratic tone, arguing that the 'socially destructive inflation' and 'suppression of human freedom' afflicting many countries were not results of 'evil men', nor of 'differences of values among citizens', but of erroneous judgments about the consequences of government actions.

In truth, the realities underpinning inflation were deeply political, as Friedman implicitly recognised. The correlate of the monetarist conviction that inflation is always caused by an increase in the supply of money is that it occurs because governments want to ‘provide “goodies” for their supporters and constituents’ without increasing taxes. … The Chicago economists also saw inflation as a ‘moral crisis’ bound up with heightened expectations and a failure of personal and familial responsibility among the working class in a context of victorious political struggles.

Friedman argued that inflation damaged free societies by strengthening unions, which were more able to win pay rises in inflationary conditions, and by generating pressure for government subsidies and price controls to protect people from rising prices. … Friedman’s fellow panellist, the French philosopher Jacques Reuff, gave an even starker account of the problem: ‘Inflation is a far greater threat to liberty throughout the world today than Marxism’, he told his fellow liberals. Reuff argued that inflation weakened the regulatory role of the price mechanism and discouraged submission to its dictates. … ‘The crucial problem’, which in 1958 remained largely unresolved, was ‘how to get such “restraint”’.

The problem of restraint was all the more difficult because, as Friedman later recognised, some benefited from inflation while others suffered, so ‘society is divided into winners and losers’; the prime winners, he argued, were debtors, as the real value of debt was diminished by increases in prices, and the prime losers were creditors and the entire ‘savings and loan industry’, whose returns on their lending were simultaneously diminished. … If inflation had distributional consequences, including transferring money from creditors to debtors, then the decision to treat combatting inflation as the primary economic goal could not be value-free. … This was clear in Chile, where Allende’s government broke with a long tradition of responding to inflation by cutting social services, especially for the poor. When the opposition blocked new taxes that would have financed social programmes, the UP government accepted inflation as a ‘lesser evil’ than failing to fulfil its election commitments to Chile’s poorest citizens.

The consequent price rises are generally represented, even by sympathetic commentators, as evidence of the government's economic incompetence. It is true that the government was unable to fulfill its earlier Keynesian hopes that higher wages and public spending would stimulate demand without serious inflation. In 1973, a government member of the Central Bank laid out the following options: 'reduce the speed of societal change; detain the redistribution of income; lower the level of employment; reduce the growth rate; decrease the level of capital accumulation – or increase inflation'. By 1972, he noted, the Allende government, 'with much regret, had to opt for sacrificing monetary stability'. Chile's inflation was the consequence not of economic ignorance in the context of a basic unanimity of values, but of a political commitment to Chile's poorest people in dramatically constrained circumstances. The Chicago Boys would make precisely the opposite choice. Pinochet's economic miracle was to preserve monetary stability by sacrificing Chile's poor.

As Friedman had predicted, the junta's 'shock' approach produced 'severe difficulties' – but not for all sections of the Chilean population. As he acknowledged, the immediate effect was 'severe recession', as Chile's GDP fell by 13 per cent per annum. In an open letter to Friedman and Harberger, Andre Gunder Frank denounced 'economic genocide' in Chile. Frank pointed out that the removal of price controls, combined with the destruction of trade union power, had drastically reduced real wages, to the extent that, by December 1975, one hour of work at the official minimum wage purchased 160 grams of bread. From 1975, stark spending cuts and the 'freeing' of prices on two thousand commodities caused purchasing power to fall to 40 per cent of its 1970 level. While the real incomes of the poorest plummeted, the share of national income in the hands of the upper 5 per cent of income receivers rose from 25 per cent to 50 per cent.

What Friedman termed a 'temporary transitional period' and Gunder Frank called 'economic genocide as a calculated policy' was a deliberate attempt to strip Chileans of non-market social reproduction and force them to submit to the judgment of the market. This was what Friedman meant when he said that 'underdeveloped' countries needed 'an atmosphere of freedom, of maximum opportunities for individuals to experiment and of incentives for them to do so in an environment in which there are objective tests of success and failure – in short, a vigorous, free, capitalistic market'. In Chile, the political miracle was that a (transcendent) military regime operating under a state of emergency had secured the central condition for the (immanent) operation of the price mechanism: submission. Once this condition was met, the 'normal' order could be restored. 'The really important thing about the Chile business', Friedman said decades later, 'is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society.' That miracle, however, cannot be attributed to the work of the free market. It was Pinochet's jurists who devised an institutional structure to lock in the junta's economic reforms and prepare for a return to a (limited) democracy.

Amnesty described its mandate as working for adequate treatment of all prisoners, fighting for the rule of law, and seeking the release of those it called 'prisoners of conscience', defined as 'any person who is physically restrained (by imprisonment or otherwise) from expressing (in any form of words or symbols) any opinion which he honestly holds and which does not advocate or condone personal violence'.

The Amnesty team's mandate was strictly limited: 'the revolutionary cause, either before or after the revolution, was none of our business', one team member stressed. … Despite asking, 'Who are the political prisoners? Why are they detained?' the report answered neither question, instead reverting to the universalising platitude that the 'political prisoners have stemmed from all sections of the Chilean population'. … Here, the coup appeared as the 'year zero' that began history anew – a response to a 'social tension' and 'polarization' whose causes remained unintelligible.

Despite the new centrality to which Amnesty elevated the UDHR, this taking up of human rights was distinctly partial, and emphatically did not include social and economic rights. Its 1974 report on Chile made clear that it would exclude from consideration the approximately 200,000 workers 'who lost their employment for political reasons, many of them apparently being reduced to starvation levels'. Not only the 'non-political' economic consequences of the coup, but even the use of starvation as a political weapon, was relegated outside the frame of human rights, giving credence to Klein's account of human rights as 'blinders'. … In striking contrast to the economic concerns that animated Allende's government, and anticolonial human rights activism of the previous decade, poverty and economic inequality were not of concern in their own right. They entered the frame only insofar as they affected advocacy against torture, and the cultivation of sympathy for its victims.

In its early days, however, Amnesty described itself as 'An International Movement for Freedom of Opinion and Religion'. Its focus on the conscience drew on a human rights tradition that, as we have seen, conceptualised the person as a spiritual, not a material, being.

The category of the prisoner of conscience signalled this shift of focus from the political action of the 'political prisoner' towards her 'conscientiously held beliefs'. In the stark context of the violent anticolonial struggles still being waged in South Africa, Palestine and the Portuguese colonies, the new category of the prisoner of conscience marked a prohibition of violence and a new privileging of speech as the legitimate mode of expression. This emphasis on nonviolence, which drew on the Quaker background of important Amnesty founders, generated an attempt to protect the conscience that was often 'ambiguous and discriminatory'. An early test of the prohibition on violence in Amnesty's definition of the prisoner of conscience led to the expulsion of Nelson Mandela from the list of such prisoners, after he justified the African National Congress's decision to establish an armed wing by arguing: 'If war were inevitable, we wanted the fight to be conducted on terms most favourable to our people.'

The main purpose of the new organisation, Benenson contended, was to promote cooperation amongst the world's idealists. Amnesty, he wrote in a private letter, is 'geared to appeal to the young searching for an ideal, and to women past the prime of their life who have been, unfortunately, unable to expend in full their maternal impulses'.

For Benenson, as for Malik, the appropriate response to human rights violations was individual spiritual transformation, not collective political action. … Benenson himself came out of the Catholic NGO Pax Christi, and he took inspiration from the 'wish' of Frank Buchman's anti-communist, Christian 'Moral Re-Armament Movement' (MRA) 'to change people, and especially leading people'. … Amnesty's human rights had little in common with the programme of economic self-determination and violent anti-colonial struggle promoted by diplomats from postcolonial societies in the UN during the same period.

Prior to the coup, a young economics student at the Catholic University wrote a critique of the dominant monetarist perspective of his economics school, whose blindness to social misery, he argued, was an affront to the university's Christian anthropology. The student stressed that 'certain economic structures' could never allow 'man … to live in conditions which are compatible with human dignity'.

His letter would seem to support the argument, made most prominently by Juan Gabriel Valdés – the son of the founder of Chile's Christian Democrats, Gabriel Valdés – that there was 'a permanent and irreconcilable struggle between the ideas promoted by Chicago and the Catholic point of view'. How curious, then, that this same young student, José Piñera, went on to play a major role in Pinochet's 'modernisation' of Chilean society, and is idolised today by the neoliberal right as the architect of the world's first fully privatised national social security system.

In contrast to Friedman's naive rhetoric about natural liberty, these conservative strands of neoliberalism were far more useful to those seeking to bolster the legal foundations of the competitive market. They shared an evolutionary social theory, an attention to the role of morality (and particularly Christianity) in a market order, and a commitment to using law to protect the intermediate institutions of civil society from political interference.

Piñera was central to the 'Seven Modernizations', which launched in 1979 to fundamentally recast political expectations by reconstituting social reproduction as a private responsibility.

Although the means differed, the goal of this modernisation process remained the same as that embraced by the Chicago Boys: depoliticising Chilean society, destroying non-market sources of social reproduction, and producing responsible, entrepreneurial subjects.

Modernisation also entailed the 'improvement' and capitalisation of the land. Pinochet promulgated decrees expropriating the Mapuche nation's collective ownership of land and incorporating 'vast areas of "undeveloped" native forests in southern Chile into the global economic market'. Rather than laissez-faire, the consolidation of land-ownership in the hands of forestry giants and large land-owners was fostered by tax incentives and subsidies to logging companies.

The reconciliation of neoliberalism with Christianity that underpinned this agenda was promoted in the right-wing journal PEC (Politics, Economics, Culture), which published Röpke’s essays on the topic and was responsible for introducing the term ‘neo-liberalismo’ into Chile.

Against both the ‘doctrinaire ideology of modern democracy’ and laissez-faire, Röpke upheld an idea of freedom that ‘guarantees the rights of the person, limits the action of the State’ and secures the rights of families, minorities and religious groups. A précis for liberalism, he argues, could be written drawing only on the writings of the Roman statesman Cicero and the medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas, in whom we find the ‘venerable patrimony of the personalist philosophy’ that was crystallised in the political philosophy of the Catholic Church. The social goal of the Church, Röpke argued, was to dissipate class struggle and rescue the economy from ‘an omnivorous collectivism’ – which was ‘exactly what the representatives of neo-liberalism hold’.

Hayek’s own approach to religion was pragmatic; he believed ‘most people need it’ because religion fosters submission to the principles and traditions on which civilisation depends. This focus on securing submission provided a bridge between neoliberal defences of the market and Catholic anti-totalitarianism.

Jaime Guzmán, who drafted the junta's 1974 Declaration of Principles, had been interested in using law to depoliticise Chilean society since his early days as president of the Catholic University Law School's Student Union. As a student, Guzmán led the ultraconservative Catholic gremialista student group, which united with the Chicago Boys in 1967 to oppose a student revolt demanding democratic selection of the university hierarchy. Guzmán – then a devotee of the fascist corporatism of Franco's Spanish dictatorship and the reactionary anti-liberal Catholic tradition of Juan Donoso Cortés and Joseph de Maistre – was never a friend of democracy. In Chile, that tradition was represented by Jaime Eyzaguirre and Osvaldo Lira, the latter of whom was an early disciple of Jacques Maritain, who contributed to the early stages of the UDHR, and who Lira described as 'one of the greatest neo-Scholastic figures'. For this conservative corporatist tradition, the person was enmeshed in intermediate institutions that were threatened by the intrusions of those Lira termed the 'ignorant, uncultivated and unintelligent' masses. Guzmán's Declaration of Principles reflected this tradition by defining the role of social power as 'securing the independence and depoliticisation of all intermediate societies between individuals and the state'. It was this goal, and a common 'totalitarian' adversary, that facilitated Guzmán's reconciliation of conservative Catholicism with neoliberalism. The ultimate outcome was Chile's 1980 'Constitution of Liberty'.

If these men were struggling for human rights – and it is worth temporarily suspending disbelief – this was a distinctive notion of human rights for which preserving human dignity required protecting the person (and the market) from the political revolt of the masses. Guzmán, as his biographer Renato Cristi correctly notes, was more than Pinochet's 'crown jurist': 'When it came to constitutional matters, Guzmán wore the crown.' The story of human rights and neoliberalism in Chile is not simply a story of the massive human rights violations that accompanied market reforms, or of the new human rights NGOs that contested the Junta's violence. It is also the story of the institutionalisation of the conservative vision of neoliberal human rights, whose development I have traced in the previous chapters. Chile was the testing ground for a model of individual rights that aimed to depoliticise civil society and preserve the inequalities of a market order by protecting the market from the intrusions of 'the masses'.

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.

In his late works, Hayek argued that the 'spontaneous order' of the market required an appropriate legal regime to insulate it from political intervention. While he argued that the rules governing individual conduct themselves evolve through a process of selection, he believed it was at least possible that the rules on which a spontaneous order rests may be designed. Rather than a doctrine of laissez-faire that precludes all constructivism, Hayekian neoliberalism aimed to fine-tune rules to secure submission to the overall order. … 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.' … For all his talk of spontaneity, Hayek was convinced that 'favourable accidents do not just happen. We must prepare for them.' 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.

In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek identified constitutionalism ('the principle of legal limitation of power by higher principles to Parliament itself') as the key US contribution to politics. This principle of constitutionally limited government, he argued, used 'inviolable individual rights' to bind temporary majorities. While the United States was founded on a British tradition of liberty, he remarked elsewhere, South America was rooted in the French Revolution and 'overly influenced by the totalitarian type of ideologies' of popular sovereignty.

In a normal situation, 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. In Chile, by contrast, he saw a crisis that could only be averted by a 'liberal dictator'.

'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'.

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. 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.

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'. 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'.

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'. Coercion was justified, he believed, to 'provide an effective external framework within which self-generating orders can form'. The fragile 'spontaneous order' of the market required a strong state to protect it from political interference. … James Buchanan struck a similar note in his paper 'Limited or Unlimited Democracy', presented at the regional Mont Pèlerin Society meeting in Viña del Mar, the Chilean seaside town where the coup was plotted. The Virginia School neoliberal criticised the 'totalitarian thrust of unlimited democracy', and stressed that any government (whether a democracy or a 'junta') must be strictly limited for the sake of 'insuring and protecting individual liberties'. … The single proactive role of the state, he contended, would be 'to enforce market discipline on society'. In Chile, constitutionally enshrined rights, including human rights, became tools for enforcing such market discipline.

The junta's blend of conservative Catholicism and neoliberalism found its definitive expression in the country's 1980 constitution, which combined a Catholic stress on dignity, freedom of conscience, the protected status of the Church and the centrality of the family as 'the basic core of society', with commitments to private enterprise, 'choice', market competition and human rights. Incongruously for a constitution introduced by a torturous dictatorship, its first article was: 'Men are born free and equal, in dignity and rights.' … Approved in a plebiscite that was officially described as 'free, secret and informed', but which was held in a climate of intense repression in which no electoral rolls existed and a blank vote was counted as 'yes', the constitution provided the blueprint for the junta's 'protected democracy'. … Americas Watch – formed as an off-shoot of what became Human Rights Watch to head off claims that the organisation was a US Cold War front – concluded it was 'not in a position to determine' what the result would have been under fair voting procedures. Even 'Pinochet's critics', it suggested, 'have acknowledged that in 1980 the government had an unusually high degree of support in part because the economy was doing very well'. Americas Watch recounted that many had pointed to 'the trauma of the 1970–73 period as having helped General Pinochet secure approval for the constitution'.

The claim that the economy was ‘doing very well’ at the time of the plebiscite tells us more about the class politics of this US-based human rights organisation than about Chile’s economy. Gallup polls prior to the plebiscite showed very high levels of satisfaction with Pinochet’s regime among the upper class, 58.8 per cent of whom (as against only 33.2 per cent of the middle class) described the worst possible outcome of a no vote as a ‘return to the year 1973’. In 1980, real wages were still only 88.5 per cent of their 1970 level, and unemployment and inequality had both spiralled. Those for whom the economy was ‘doing very well’ were a small, wealthy minority.

If, in 2016, Chile still shared with Mexico the dubious honour of being the most unequal country in the world, this was in no small part a product of the success of the Pinochet regime in consolidating its economic agenda through constitutional means. It is through this lens that we should view debates about the status of the human rights defined in the constitution. Defenders of the constitution note that it enshrined more rights than the constitution it replaced, while critics have tended to dismiss these rights as window-dressing that entrenched the arbitrary power of Pinochet and the military. For Americas Watch, the move to establish a new constitution that limited sovereignty by ‘respect for the essential rights originating from human nature’ (Article 5) was a flawed but positive step. From the perspective this book has advanced, human rights were not mere window-dressing. Rather, the Pinochet constitution embodied the realisation, which the neoliberals had achieved as early as the 1940s, that the institutionalisation of human rights could prevent political interference with the inequalities of the competitive market, and depoliticise civil society.

This is most obviously true of Article 24, which proclaims the ‘right of ownership in its diverse aspects over all classes of corporeal and incorporeal property’, including ‘rights of private citizens over waters’; or Article 22, which outlaws discrimination in favour of state companies. On closer inspection, even what first appear to be social and economic rights (to health, education and social security) are actually rights of private enterprise to compete in offering relevant services on the same terms as the state. The right to education, for instance, gives parents the ‘preferential right and duty to educate their children’, and private companies free rein in establishing education providers. The result of these education rights, as their architect Piñera celebrates on his website today, has been the ‘prevalence of private education’ in Chile. Such rights were based on a blend of neoliberal market ideology with the Catholic principle of ‘subsidiarity, which entailed that the state would fulfil only those functions that could not be fulfilled by intermediate institutions or the private sector. Consequently, the constitution stipulated that educational and other intermediate institutions should be free of politics, and introduced penalties for those who violated this stricture. Going further, it declared it unconstitutional to use or incite political violence or ‘advocate the establishment of a totalitarian system’.

While key figures in Pinochet's regime described Marxism as a cancer, human rights, stripped of all relation to political violence, redistribution and revolutionary aspiration, became part of the Christian 'Western' heritage within which they wished to position Chile – thus the repeated references in the 1980 constitution to dignity, 'freedom of conscience' and human rights.

In Chile, Amnesty's impartiality and refusal of violence gave it a legitimacy that enabled it to travel the country and speak out against torture and disappearance. But it simultaneously contributed to normalising a closure of the political imagination and delegitimising other emancipatory visions. … Chile has been transformed from a 'society in which political mobilisation was the characteristic route to recognition into one where individual access to the market is the preferred means of advancement' – a development fostered by the extension of credit, which has made consumption available to the poor at the cost of entwining them in a disciplinary relation of indebtedness.

One might have expected that the end of the junta and the election of a democratic government coalition, La Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, would mark a break with the ‘limited’ or ‘protected’ democracy instituted by Guzmán and supported by his neoliberal allies. Quite the opposite is true. As Fernando Atria notes: ‘Democratic politics is no longer seen as the best insurance against human rights violations, but as the primary danger.’ As Atria suggests, while in some contexts it may be reasonable to assume that judges should protect individual rights and the constitution from democratic politics, in Chile, whose key problem has been authoritarian anti-democratic tendencies, including in the judiciary, this focus is difficult to justify. It was Pinochet’s 1980 constitution that first gave judges a substantial role in adjudicating matters which, prior to the coup, belonged to the political process. But 2005 amendments to the constitution, after the ‘return to democracy’, dramatically expanded the powers of the constitutional court to determine the constitutionality of legislation, in the name of protecting human rights.

The consequence has been what one Chilean scholar calls an ‘unprecedented willingness by the Constitutional Court to strike down legislation deemed contrary to the constitution’ or to international human rights law. Today, the courts are increasingly involved in adjudicating matters of healthcare, tax policy and sexuality rights. Simultaneously, ‘helped logistically by a dense network of international nongovernmental organisations’, marginalised groups have been encouraged to channel their struggles through the courts on the assumption that, given its ‘rights-oriented’ ethos, the judiciary will be better able to support the marginalised and subaltern than the political process. In reality, the results of this process have been ‘very frustrating’ for the most marginalised groups, notably prisoners and indigenous people, as the courts have been unwilling to challenge widespread abuse in the prison system or the continued use of Pinochet-era counterterror laws against the Mapuche. Today, the neoliberal programme remains in place, while, in the name of human rights, Chile’s constitutional order restrains democracy and closes down the margin of freedom in ways that Guzmán could not have imagined.

In early 1985, the development economist Peter Bauer used a speaking opportunity at a Paris colloquium to reiterate the central tenets of the neoliberal development discourse he had done so much to shape. Bauer, aptly described by the Economist magazine as being to foreign aid what Friedrich Hayek was to socialism, told his audience that the so-called 'Third World' comprised 130 countries with nothing in common other than requesting and receiving help from 'the West'. In a period of neoliberal ascendancy, criticisms of aid and of demands for postcolonial redistribution of wealth were increasingly common. What made this particular speech different was the fact that Bauer was speaking at the inaugural colloquium of a new political foundation, Liberté sans Frontières (LSF), established by the French leadership of the respected humanitarian organisation Médecins sans Frontières.

An examination of Liberté sans Frontières directs attention to the economic questions that the human rights NGOs in Latin America largely disregarded. Far from vacating the economic field and confining itself to criticising violations of civil and political rights, as Amnesty International had done in Chile, LSF mobilised the language of human rights explicitly against Third Worldist demands for postcolonial economic redistribution. Rony Brauman, a former member of the Maoist Gauche Prolétarienne, who was president of MSF and director of LSF, later reflected that he was interested in contesting the idea that 'poverty, misery in the Global South was the by-product of our prosperity in the Global North'. This idea placed the 'blame' for postcolonial poverty on the 'shoulders of the Global North', rather than on those postcolonial leaders he believed bore responsibility for their peoples' plights. LSF went beyond merely criticising the violation of human rights to contest what it depicted as a Western guilt complex over colonialism.

A particular target of LSF's campaign was the demand for postcolonial economic restructuring that found its most important expression in the Non-Aligned Movement-sponsored proposal for a 'New International Economic Order' (NIEO). Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, the NIEO declaration aimed at an international economic order 'which shall correct inequalities and redress existing injustices'. The NIEO consolidated the postcolonial demand for a right to economic self-determination, examined in Chapter 3. Its ambitious programme for reorganising the postcolonial international economic order amounted to a neoliberal nightmare defined by effective control over natural resources, regulation of the activities of multinational corporations, just commodity prices, technology transfers, debt forgiveness and monetary reform.

LSF went further than most, however, in directly entering the economic fray to prosecute an argument against postcolonial economic equality and in favour of a liberal economy. In doing so, it lent its moral prestige to the neoliberal counterattack on the struggle for postcolonial economic justice, and became complicit in the dramatic deepening of inequality that has been its consequence. Moreover, it helped to shape a distinctively neoliberal human rights discourse, in which civil and political rights are essential aspects of the institutional structure necessary to facilitate a liberal market order.

The vision of human rights promoted by figures associated with LSF was far from being what Samuel Moyn calls a 'powerless companion' of ascendant neoliberalism. Rather, LSF's leadership drew on the rejection of structuralist economic analyses and redistribution pioneered by rising neoliberal thinkers, and used the language of human rights to shift responsibility for poverty from international economic arrangements onto Third World states. LSF offers a particularly stark example of a more general phenomenon – the uptake of neoliberal ideas by human rights NGOs in the period of their simultaneous rise.

The influence of Marxism on the French left, as the anti-totalitarian political philosopher Claude Lefort had noted five years earlier, had generated a 'vehement, ironic or "scientific" condemnation of the bourgeois notion of human rights'. Throughout the 1970s, however, this condemnation had increasingly been replaced with a new human rights ideology, spurred in part by the publication of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. As has been well noted, the growing influence of Soviet dissidents helped to discredit revolutionary Marxism, clearing away a major barrier to the widespread acceptance of human rights as a progressive cause. In France, increasingly fervent attacks on Marxism coincided with the rise of what the French 'New Philosopher' André Glucksmann termed a 'humanism of bad news', which aimed to ameliorate the status quo while recasting the promise of emancipatory social transformation as totalitarian.

This moralised human rights discourse, expressed in the claim to be concerned with 'man' and 'human realities' rather than messianic, utopian ideologies, was shared by many human rights activists at the time. But LSF's human rights campaign differed from the moral 'anti-politics' of human rights epitomised by Amnesty International. While the latter NGO shared both LSF's antipathy to politics and its focus on civil and political rights, it attempted to avoid Cold War polarisation by focusing on the 'suffering simply because they are suffering', and adopting prisoners of conscience on either side of the Iron Curtain. LSF fiercely rejected such even-handedness; its leadership joined the Cold War fray, prosecuting an argument for the superiority of liberalism and campaigning against both neutralism and pacifism, which its introductory materials depicted as attempts to 'disarm the democracies and prevent them from defending themselves'.

The figure Allan Bloom called 'the last of the liberals' was a distinctly French liberal, but Aron was also an Atlanticist who played an important role in transatlantic and European liberal networks. He was present at the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium, and at the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society just under a decade later.

Participants at the LSF colloquium depicted civil and political rights as 'categorical imperatives', while making clear that social and economic rights were 'less fundamental, universal, and timelessly important'. This distinction was borrowed from Raymond Aron, whose influence on the men who established LSF was such that the foundation came close to being named the Fondation Raymond Aron pour le Tiers Monde.

Aron and Hayek were friends, and, despite their differences over the possibility of a 'third way' between the free market and economic planning, which ultimately led to Aron's resignation from the MPS in 1955, the two had strikingly similar views about human rights. Both men criticised the drafters of the UDHR for having 'confused incompatible ideas', in Aron's words, by failing to distinguish rights, which constrained the state in the interests of individual freedom, from social and economic objectives that relied on the extension of state power. In terms that were later taken up by participants at the LSF colloquium, Aron distinguished civil and political rights, which he depicted as what Immanuel Kant had termed 'categorical imperatives', or fundamental moral principles, from social objectives that may be 'theoretically desirable' but do not amount to rights. Just as Hayek had criticised the UDHR by arguing that to speak of rights in a socioeconomic context 'debases the word "right"', Aron argued that, when compared to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the UDHR reflected 'the decline of all rights, of the very notion of the rights of man'. The eighteenth-century authors 'did not entrust the state the goal of promoting what we today call "social and economic rights"', he wrote, but were concerned to limit state power. In contrast, the twentieth-century drafters downgraded the right to private property and expanded the powers of the state to provide for the welfare of its population. In this transition, he argued, 'the state is the victor', since rights no longer restrict or condemn it.

The French humanitarians positioned themselves in opposition to both Marxist critiques of the formalism of rights and anticolonial affirmations of self-determination as the foundational human right. This shift in priorities was reflected in the composition of the colloquium: while Third Worldism had stressed the political agency of national liberation movements, no nationals of the countries under discussion spoke at the LSF colloquium. In this respect, LSF emblematised what Kristin Ross suggests is a key legacy of French opposition to Third Worldism: the transformation of the 'colonial or third-world other' from militant and articulate fighter and thinker to passive object of sympathy.

The invitation framed the colloquium as a challenge to publicly accepted notions like 'the rich world's cows eat the soybeans of the poor', or ' "a new international economic order" is the only solution to under-development'. LSF was established, as an article in the Guardian noted, to counter Third Worldism, 'which it accuses of feeding on a European guilt complex that blames all the problems of the Third World on Western economic dominance'. Such an analysis, LSF figures argued, serves to excuse those who should bear responsibility for the problems of former colonies: postcolonial states.

In contesting Western responsibility for Third World poverty, the men of LSF set themselves against an analysis of colonial exploitation that had played a central role in anticolonialism, dependency theory and French tiers-mondisme in the previous decades. Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth epitomised this argument, powerfully insisting that Europe was, quite literally, a product of the Third World. 'The wealth which smothers her was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.'

By the time of the LSF colloquium, earlier critiques of the complicity of wealthy nations in postcolonial poverty were being usurped by new concerns with human rights abuses in the post-colony. LSF argued that the Asian 'miracle' economies of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan had been condemned for failing to conform to Third Worldist tenets, while disastrous programmes – in Mao's China, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam, Julius Nyerere's Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, Fidel Castro's Cuba, and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas – had been presented as models. In stark contrast to the arguments of Fanon and Sartre, this new anti-totalitarian human rights organisation focused on left-wing 'totalitarian' regimes, largely ignoring the lamentable human rights records of both the right-wing authoritarian regimes then terrorising much of Latin America and those dictatorial Asian regimes it celebrated.

LSF played a central role in delegitimising Third Worldist accounts of economic exploitation. Its mission, Brauman explained at the time, was 'to challenge a perception of the problem in which their poverty is a reflection of our wealth, and our liberties are based on the absence of theirs'. In his introduction to the published proceedings of the inaugural LSF colloquium, Brauman situated LSF within a new morality of urgency and an ideology of les droits de l'homme, which makes 'man' the highest value. Nonetheless, his speech overwhelmingly addressed economic matters, and challenged a series of Third Worldist theses: that Europe had trampled its own values in colonial plunder; that this plunder was the source of Europe's opulence; that the world economic system was a neocolonial system that made the rich richer and the poor poorer; that the Third World was the victim of a blind and cynical West; and that its bread basket was held hostage to the economic powers of Western countries. Such structuralist theses, Brauman argued, were a 'game of mirrors' in which Europe only ever saw itself.

Despite these accusations, the LSF figures implicitly recognised that Third Worldism was what Kristin Ross has termed 'an aggressive new way of accusing the capitalist system' and the neo-imperialist relations that had succeeded formal colonialism. LSF constituted a similarly aggressive counterattack. Its disparate group of liberals, humanitarians, Atlanticists and Reaganites found unity in the rejection of 'Western guilt' over colonialism and opposition to Third Worldist demands for restructuring the international economic order. In doing so, they drew on themes developed by the neoliberals over the previous decades.

MSF's leading figures, a news article of the time noted, 'are disgusted by the fashionable current wisdom holding the west responsible for the Third World's destitution and that seeks to make us feel guilty about our standard of living'. This theme of guilt and responsibility was taken up most ferociously by Pascal Bruckner, the French essayist and 'New Philosopher' who today is best known for his vehement attacks on multiculturalism and Islam. Bruckner delivered a key speech, 'Third World, Guilt, Self-Hate', at the inaugural LSF colloquium. In Le Sanglot de l'homme blanc ('Tears of the White Man'), published just before the colloquium, Bruckner had launched an excoriating attack on what he depicted as the Third Worldist guilt complex about colonialism. 'How long will the peoples of Europe continue to be blamed for the atrocities committed by their ancestors?' he asked – just two decades after France's withdrawal from Algeria. For Bruckner and the founders of LSF, Third Worldism was a product of masochism and guilt, which generated a willingness to tolerate Third World repression.

Shenfield feared that the repression necessary to maintain colonialism would be 'bitter enough to poison the West itself and sap its own liberalism'. Justice may be with the French in Algeria, he warned, but the attempt to maintain French rule may ruin France herself.

At this stage, the MPS discourse on colonialism was classically liberal, and it drew heavily on John Locke's justification of colonialism as 'improvement'. God meant for the earth to be cultivated, Locke had contended, and thus he gave it to the 'industrious and rational'. Those who 'fail' to improve the land – d'Estaing's nomadic desert people who wasted the oil beneath their feet, for instance – had no grounds for complaint if it was appropriated by others.

The reaction to Rüstow's book elevated the rejection of Western guilt into a formative tenet of neoliberal development discourse. Yet, rather than a backward-looking attempt to secure the colonial order, this rejection was forward-looking, orientated towards forestalling Third Worldist demands for restitution. This is clearest in the work of Bauer, who had stressed since the early 1970s that 'it is untrue that the west has caused the poverty of the underdeveloped world, whether through colonialism or otherwise'. Bauer, a Hungarian-born British development economist and MPS member, was a vehement opponent of state-directed development and Cold War modernisation theories. In 1981, several years before the LSF Colloquium, Bauer published a book that attributed accounts of Western responsibility for Third World poverty to colonial guilt.

Bauer's response to postcolonial demands of the 1970s was largely consistent with the earlier MPS members' Lockean defence of European colonialism. Referring to an English student pamphlet that accused the British of taking 'the rubber from Malaya, the tea from India, raw materials from all over the world', Bauer – who had begun his career working for a trading company with rubber interests in Malaya – retorted that this was the opposite of the truth; 'the British took the rubber to Malaya and the tea to India', he wrote. Far from the West causing the poverty of the Third World, Bauer argued that (what he euphemistically called) 'contacts with the West' had been the central agents of material progress.

At the LSF colloquium, Bauer argued that the world's poorest peoples were indigenous communities and 'Amazonian Indians', precisely because they enjoyed the fewest 'external contacts'. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, in contrast, offered proof of the economic benefits such 'contacts' brought. Elsewhere, Bauer claimed that not even the transatlantic slave trade could be claimed as a cause of 'African backwardness', as slavery had been endemic in Africa prior to the slave trade and was only ended by the West. 'Whatever one thinks of colonialism it can't be held responsible for Third World poverty', he concluded.

Bauer reserved his most strenuous criticism for those who spoke of 'economic colonialism' or 'neo-colonialism', to define the situation of post-independence states. Such terminology, he argued, 'confuses poverty with colonial status, a concept which has normally meant lack of political sovereignty'. Bauer took direct aim at the analysis of neocolonialism developed by Kwame Nkrumah that we examined in Chapter Three. Bauer challenged this politicisation of economic relations, and rejected Nkrumah's charge that neo-colonialism was keeping the African continent 'artificially poor'. A nation can be subjected to political colonialism, he argued, but it makes no sense to speak of colonisation or domination in the economy as economic relations are not the product of the imposition of a single will. On the contrary, he argued that the market impersonally coordinated the free, voluntary interactions of numerous individuals, and must be protected (by the state and law) from political interference.

Drawing on the theorisation of the market as information processor that enabled people to draw on dispersed, tacit knowledge, developed by his MPS colleague Hayek, Bauer depicted the market as a system of disseminated knowledge and mutually beneficial free exchange that produces order without the need for conscious and deliberate planning. Prices for raw materials were set by the market and not determined by the West, he argued – they were the products of numerous individual decisions, and not of the actions of a single decision-maker or of collective collusion. For the neoliberals, any intervention that altered the results achieved by the subtle mechanism of the price system would prevent its feedback loops from operating. … But the neoliberals' argument was not simply economic; rather, they followed Montesquieu in arguing that, as commercial relations were founded on mutual need, the 'natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace'. Neoliberal thinkers depicted the market as a realm of peaceful and mutually beneficial relations, and portrayed politics as a Schmittian field of friend/enemy distinctions and violent coercion.

Bauer concluded his speech at the LSF Colloquium by rejecting the premise of discussions about Third World poverty: 'There is no problem in the Third World', he argued; 'there are only differences of income' – differences which are 'neither surprising nor reprehensible'. Along with his neoliberal colleagues, Bauer replaced the language of 'inequality' (which implied unjust structural relations) with that of 'difference' (which was merely the necessary condition of a competitive economy). There was nothing emancipatory about this stress on difference. For the neoliberals, 'difference' was the apolitical condition of a competitive economy, which, as Foucault notes, is defined not by the exchange of equivalents but by a 'game of differentiations' in which some have large incomes and others do not. The neoliberal rhetoric of 'difference' naturalised and justified deep and racialised inequalities, and obscured the history of colonial exploitation. … Repeatedly, he took aim at the contention articulated most succinctly by Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere: 'In one world, as in one state, when I am rich because you are poor, and I am poor because you are rich, the transfer of wealth from rich to poor is a matter of right; it is not an appropriate matter for charity.'

All Bauer's writings aimed to demolish the premise that the wealth of the colonial powers was a consequence of the poverty of the colonised – and vice versa. The prosperity of the United States and Japan, he insisted, has nothing to do with the poverty of Chad, Mali and Nepal. The development economist therefore rejected the very category of the 'Third World', arguing that it conflated 'a vast and diverse collection of societies differing widely in religion, culture, social institutions, personal characteristics and motivations'.

Bauer criticised proposals for redistribution, which he argued rest on the belief that, as we are all 'basically the same', wealth differentials must reflect 'some perversion of the natural and just course of events by some malevolent force, in particular, the power of the rich to impoverish the rest'. … Bauer, like Mises much earlier, stressed the basic inequality of people, and of peoples, arguing that economic achievement depends primarily on 'aptitudes, motivations, mores and modes of thought and on social institutions and political arrangements'. Those who benefit from a market economy are those who are most adaptable, entrepreneurial, industrious, ingenious, thrifty, ambitious and resourceful, he claimed, while the 'less adaptable may go to the wall'.

Bauer depicted generalised poverty as a result of the absence of an institutional structure capable of promoting the subjective qualities the competitive market required. His remedies were not as brutal as those used by the Chicago Boys in Chile, but the aim was the same: to eradicate non-market sources of social reproduction in order to enforce submission to the market and cultivate entrepreneurial subjects.

The problems of development were not strictly economic. The challenge for the neoliberals was to overcome the egalitarianism of communal cultures and the assumption that basic welfare was a right, and to instil the morals of the market and a culture of individual rights.

While neoliberals in the US, the UK and Europe bolstered their challenge to the welfare state by bemoaning its weakening of family responsibility, as we saw in Chapter 2, the neoliberal development theorists faced precisely the opposite problem: in the Global South, they believed that the extended family structure was too effective in its welfare function; in cushioning individuals from the imperatives of wage labour, the extended family was a barrier to a competitive market order, and its redistributive moral economy diminished the rewards of individual entrepreneurialism.

At the 1973 Algiers meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Algeria's President Houari Boumediène stressed the 'vital need for the producing countries to operate the levers of price control'. The success of the 1973 oil embargo by the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had bolstered confidence that similar collective action on the part of producers of raw materials could alter the terms of trade and transform an international economic system that was perpetuating exploitation, racial discrimination and the impoverishment of the Third World. … The following year, 1974, the UN General Assembly passed the 'Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order', which proclaimed the 'right of all States, territories and peoples under foreign occupation, alien and colonial domination or apartheid to restitution and full compensation for the exploitation and depletion' of their natural resources by colonial powers.

Rather than aiming to replace free-market relations with coercive price control, as their opponents claimed, defenders of the NIEO challenged the order of 'freedom' and 'equality' that benefited colonial powers and their corporations at the expense of former colonies, and they called for ' "substantive equality" to compensate for inequality'. Here, they followed Marx, who argued in his Critique of the Gotha Program that 'equal right', which measures unequal individuals by a single standard, ignores their different abilities and needs, and can only result in inequality. 'To avoid all these defects', Marx wrote, 'right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.'

The neoliberals, in contrast, celebrated equal right precisely for its role in perpetuating existing inequalities. Hayek and his neoliberal colleagues were fervent defenders of the rule of law because they believed that, given that people are unequal, the ‘only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently’. They saw a stress on formal equality before the law as a means to prevent redistribution for the purpose of greater substantive or socioeconomic equality, and to rule out demands for foreign aid, support for industries of former colonies, or reparations to transform the legacies of past injustice.

Bedjaoui was the strongest critic of this order of equal right. The Algerian lawyer disparaged the ‘froth and veneer of decolonisation’, and highlighted the persistence of ‘universal exploitation, and the dichotomy between poverty and affluence’ in the wake of formal independence. The very neutrality and formalism of international law had permitted colonisation, exploitation and racial discrimination, Bedjaoui argued, and facilitated the enrichment of the wealthy countries at the expense of impoverished ones. Just as Marxist critics of human rights have argued that abstract equality and freedom mask substantive inequality and domination, Bedjaoui rejected the ‘phantom sovereignty’ that masked relations of domination under the cover of formal equality. Instead, he invoked a new international law that would facilitate ‘corrective or compensatory inequality’ to promote the development of the Third World.

Although critics have noted Bedjaoui’s universalism, they tend to depict him, and the NIEO agenda, as ‘generally unsympathetic’ to the rhetoric of human rights. Bedjaoui’s strident defence of the sovereignty of newly independent states did put him firmly at odds with the new human rights movement of the time, and the NIEO has been depicted as a programme of ‘state rights against private capital’, for which the freedom and rights of individual citizens was an ‘ancillary product’ of national independence. In reality, however, Bedjaoui was not indifferent to individual rights, and nor did he subordinate the individual to the state. The Algerian lawyer celebrated the fact that the ‘State, that Moloch or Kronos that devours its own people, or rather, devours itself, is in process of being de-hallowed’, and stressed that the equitable sharing of the world’s resources required attending to the problem of ‘human rights’. ‘What would be the use of exploiting for man’s benefit the immense riches of the sea-bed, within the framework of the new ‘law of mankind’, he asked, ‘if man’s dignity or integrity is threatened’? While Bedjaoui mobilised the language of human dignity and rights, his horizon, and his universalism, extended far beyond the liberal individualism of the major human rights NGOs of his time.

In 1981, with neoliberalism in the ascendancy, US President Ronald Reagan used his speech at the Cancún summit on development to exhort Third World leaders to embrace ‘the magic of the market’. Cancún has been described as the ‘death-knell of the NIEO’, the moment when it was finally displaced by the neoliberal counter-revolution in development theory. … At the same time, the human rights–based ‘critique of the atrocity, misrule and despotism of the state’ was wielded by both human rights advocates and neoliberals against the utopia envisaged by Third Worldists.

From its inception, Liberté sans Frontières sought to contest the argument that a 'new international economic order' was the solution to underdevelopment. In his introduction to the proceedings of the LSF Colloquium, Brauman argued that the absurd and dangerous NIEO would result in inflation and a transfer of wealth from the poorest to the most favoured individuals and nations. He contended that the NIEO was built on the false premise that the terms of trade between rich and poor countries were deteriorating and that, if implemented, it would lead away from the successful path pursued by Asian countries like South Korea. Looking back more recently, Malhuret reflected that LSF's founders believed 'the path taken by the New [International] Economic Order was leading to a dead end', while countries with liberal economies – the so called 'Asian Tigers' – were developing rapidly. The real stake in this attack on the NIEO was defending the efficacy of a liberal economic order against demands for redistribution and state planning. The 'burden of human error and bad local political decisions, rather than external elements, is the determining factor in a number of tragic situations', Brauman stressed.

The same year that LSF held its first colloquium, the Heritage Foundation declared that, in the name of a New International Economic Order, the General Assembly had attacked 'the very essence and philosophy of the free enterprise system. The undeveloped world, it charged, seemingly without irony, 'prefers to strive to get a share of the West's wealth as a kind of wealth transfer payment rather than work at creating its own wealth'.

Despite the stated aims of LSF to provide a forum 'free of ideological presuppositions', its attacks on Third Worldism and the NIEO intersected with the agenda of Reaganite neoliberals, who had become increasingly concerned that the new nations were vilifying 'the West' and the free enterprise system'. Philippe Laurent, then Executive Director of MSF Belgium, recalls a meeting in which Malhuret explained his proposed organisation as a 'war machine' that would combat Third Worldism and 'fight for neoliberal ideas'. Malhuret's model, Laurent recalls, was the Reaganite US think tank the Heritage Foundation. Both Malhuret and Brauman visited the Heritage Foundation, and while they both later reflected that it was too far to their right, there was nonetheless a disconcerting similarity in the two groups' responses to the NIEO.

Moynihan argued that the spontaneous ideology of Third Worldism was an inheritance of Fabianism. He laid out an oppositional strategy with three key 'points of systematic attack': defending liberal institutions, including 'the most creative international institution of the twentieth century', the multinational corporation; challenging the idea of a crisis in the Third World, pointing out that 'these economies do less well than they ought: that the difference is of their own making and no one else's, and no claim on anyone else arises in consequence'; and, following the lead of organisations like Amnesty International, 'speaking for political and civil liberty' with 'enthusiasm and zeal'.

The human rights vision outlined by LSF was not simply an alternative to the structural analysis embodied in the NIEO – rather, it was part of a concerted attempt to shift attention from the global economy to the Third World state.

Rather, its failure, as Umut Özsu notes, 'was at root an affirmation of the weakness of public authority in the face of private power, the Global South in the face of the Global North, the developmental state in the face of the state legitimated market'. In 1979, Hayek warned that the 'strongest support of the trend towards socialism comes today from those who claim they want neither capitalism nor socialism but a 'middle way' or a 'third world'. To follow them, he argued, was a sure path to socialism, and 'socialism as much as fascism or communism inevitably leads into the totalitarian state'. Increasingly, the Third World vision of economic redistribution was viewed not only as economically suicidal but also as 'totalitarian'.

The success of the NIEO, as Berger has noted, would have required the capacity to redistribute resources on a global scale. By the time the NIEO was calling for the extension of redistributive welfare policies to the global arena, these policies were in crisis. Anghie has argued that, given that the human rights movement of the 1970s shifted attention away from the structure of the global economy, it is 'surely not a coincidence' that this movement flourished alongside the imposition of neoliberal policies by the international financial institutions. I have suggested that there is more at stake in this 'non-coincidence' than a shift of optics. The activist humanitarians of MSF did not merely divert attention from global economic structures to individual rights violations on the part of states. Rather, their focus on human rights violations by postcolonial states was only one aspect of a concerted campaign against Third Worldism and the utopia embodied in the NIEO.

While the human rights advocates of LSF mobilised neoliberal economic analyses to challenge Third Worldism and the NIEO, the neoliberal economists embraced the language of human rights. They soon saw that this new language, and the organisations that mobilised it to curtail the range of feasible political options and to license interventions into postcolonial societies, could bolster their own agenda of imposing market discipline on former colonies. Neoliberal human rights dispensed with the project of guaranteeing broad popular rights to basic welfare, but not with 'economic rights' per se. Rather, they saw in human rights the possibility of securing the rights of investors and the wealthy in the face of challenges to their property and power.

In an article written with John O'Sullivan in 1977 – Moyn's human rights 'breakthrough' year – Bauer explicitly mobilised the language of human rights to contest the NIEO. Under the heading 'Human Rights in the Third World', Bauer and Sullivan contended: 'Western liberal opinion has been strangely and culpably blind to the extent of the persecution of economically productive, perhaps relatively well-off but politically unpopular, minorities'. This account of the human rights abuses carried out by postcolonial states merges cases of assault on classical civil and political liberties with violations of economic (or market) freedoms. Third World governments, they argued, had persecuted minorities, discriminated against them in employment, and conducted expulsions and 'even massacre'. They had suppressed freedom of the press, engaged in forced collectivisation of agriculture, restricted the inflow of foreign capital, established state monopolies and restrictive licensing of economic activities, and suppressed private firms. It was these human rights abuses, Bauer and O'Sullivan argued, that had resulted in the 'poverty and economic backwardness' of Third World societies.

The treatment of abuses of civil rights on the same plane as the licensing of economic activity or the establishment of state monopolies reflected the refusal of the neoliberals to view the economy as a separate sphere, distinct from the political. Rather than an economy inhabited by egoistic 'man' and a political sphere inhabited by abstract citizens, the neoliberals argued that economic control was 'not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest, it is the control of the means for all our ends'. Securing freedom therefore required the shaping of a competitive market and the use of rights to protect the sphere of individual's means from political intervention. In contrast to the common argument that the entrenchment of neoliberalism saw the decline of 'social and economic rights', 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.

The neoliberal rejection of politics did not entail a rejection of government intervention or an advocacy of laissez-faire; on the contrary, it implied what Bauer termed 'state action on a wide scale'. Rewriting Adam Smith's invisible hand, Bauer stressed the necessity to devise suitable institutions to harness selfish interests to the general interest. The premise of neoliberal thought was that the institutional structure profoundly influences the operation of the economic system, and 'does not arise from the operation of the system itself'. Neoliberalism countenanced a significant role for state action in relation to the market, as Foucault noted; but this action served to secure the conditions for the market, not to compensate for its effects. What Foucault missed, as he prepared his lectures on neoliberalism, was the extent to which the new interventionist politics of human rights, which fascinated him at the time, shared in the dominant 'state phobia' (which conflated state welfarism with totalitarianism) that he portrayed as his time's inheritance from a previous generation of neoliberals.

Allegations of exploitation were not only untrue, but positively harmful to the Third World, he argued, as they diverted attention from the personal and social causes of material progress and encouraged the view that incomes were extracted rather than earned. In his own version of Hayek’s famous ‘road to serfdom’, Bauer argued that any concession to a belief in Western exploitation of former colonies legitimised severe maltreatment, including expropriation and massacre.

Bauer’s commitment to a form of Hayek’s ‘Road to Serfdom’ thesis meant he saw little meaningful distinction between reformist socialism and totalitarianism: J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902) led directly to Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), he argued, then on to the denunciation of neocolonialism penned by Nkrumah, and ultimately to the totalitarian state.

In his letter to Commentary, Bauer protested the ‘fanciful’ contention of ‘The United States in Opposition’ that Third Worldism was a variant of Fabian Socialism. Moynihan’s vision of the Third World as ‘a brotherhood of gradually evolving Fabians’, he argued, obscured the blatant reality that it was in fact characterised by virulent antagonism to the West and the market system, and severe maltreatment, including expropriation and massacre, of millions of people. Despite rejecting this account of Third Worldism as a form of Fabianism, he nonetheless held late British colonial policy responsible for the politicisation of economic life in the former colonies. At the end of the British Empire, he argued, updating earlier neoliberal criticisms of Britain’s Fabian-inspired post-war colonial policy, limited government had been replaced by economic controls and ‘the ready-made framework of a dirigiste or even totalitarian state was handed over by the British to the incoming independent governments’.

While the lines of influence that pass from Hobson to Lenin to Nkrumah are real enough, the point of Bauer's genealogy was to characterise capitalism as peaceful and nonviolent, and any politicisation of the economy in the name of equality as requiring 'world government with totalitarian powers'.

Against Lenin's claim that imperialism was a phenomenon of capitalism in its monopoly stage, the neoliberals argued that imperialism was a distortion of the peaceful economic relations of capitalism caused by the politicisation of the economy. The real cause of inter-state conflict and colonialism, they argued, was the erosion of the liberal distinction between sovereignty and property, which had made territorial control the necessary precondition for the utilisation of the natural resources of a country.

Underpinning the NIEO, Bauer identified a fundamental and unjustified 'belief in the natural equality of man as an economic performer'. Rejecting this premise, he argued that political action to equalise living standards 'implies extensive forcible remodelling of peoples and societies, far-reaching coercion, and wholesale politicisation of life'.

From this perspective, political intervention that sought to restrain or compensate for the results of the market would lead to coercion and conflict. Echoing this perspective, Bauer argued that, if successful, Third World demands for 'wealth transfers' would result in 'the spread of totalitarian government and a further erosion of the position of the West'. These results would be greatly exacerbated if international redistribution was combined with egalitarian domestic measures, as equality could only be achieved through 'an immense extension of the use of the coercive power of governments over individuals' in order to homogenise the diversity of existing nations and individuals.

As early as 1978, Jacques Julliard had launched the media polemic against tiers-mondisme with an article that prophesied that, in Africa, there would be 'no socialism except a totalitarian socialism'. As critics noted at the time, the terms of this anti-tiers-mondiste condemnation of the postcolonial state replicated colonialist predictions about what would eventuate in the colonies if independence were achieved, depicting them as places of barbarism and oppression.

The anti-totalitarianism of LSF had less in common with Arendt's work on totalitarianism, which she depicted as a phenomenon of imperialism, than with that of the neoliberals, for whom socialism led straight to totalitarianism. Increasingly, the Third World vision of economic redistribution appeared to be not only economically suicidal, but also a 'totalitarian' threat to human rights.

The success of neoliberalism was not predicated merely on its arguments for the superior efficiency of markets, or its challenges to the economics of socialist planning. Rather, neoliberals pioneered a series of political arguments about the dangers of wealth redistribution, interference with the market and mass participation in politics, especially in the post-colony, that helped to legitimise austerity and the crushing of Third Worldist demands for global wealth redistribution. … These arguments were taken up enthusiastically by the humanitarians of LSF.

The humanitarians nonetheless played an important role in shifting responsibility for Third World poverty away from the legacy of colonialism and the neocolonial framework of the global economy, and onto the leaders of individual Third World states.

Humanitarians, LSF wagered, were better equipped than 'the specialists of the economy, politics or business' to win an argument that liberalism is not simply conducive to economic growth, but in fact the only system capable of securing justice and liberty. The humanitarians lent their moral prestige to what the Heritage Foundation called the 'free enterprise ideological counter-attack' on Third Worldism and the NIEO. Their key impact was on the terrain of political idealism, as they helped long-cherished right-wing themes cross over to the political left, and re-signified state-led redistribution as a totalitarian threat to liberty and human rights.

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.

Extreme economic inequality should be seen as 'a cause of shame on the part of the international human rights movement', Alston argued. Moreover, he charged that major human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, had been deeply reluctant to factor questions of distribution and resources into their advocacy, and consequently the deep structures that perpetuate such inequalities have been left untouched. While reprimanding the human rights NGOs for their failure to address social and economic rights, Alston also argued against conflating these 'lop-sided and counter-productive institutional choices' with the structure of human rights law. Economic and social rights are a key part of that structure, he contended, even if they are often treated as 'minor league discussions' by human rights NGOs, and the United States has spent several decades trying to undermine them.

And yet there is more at stake in Alston's intervention than a concern for poverty and inequality in their own right. This long-time human rights lawyer is also concerned to salvage the 'legitimacy of the overall human rights enterprise'. If the human rights movement is currently facing powerful contestation globally, he writes, this is largely due to the perception that its preoccupations 'do little or nothing to address the most abiding and pressing challenges confronted by a large part of humanity'. Although Alston's attention to social and economic rights, poverty and economic equality is salutary, the interests of the 'human rights enterprise' are not necessarily identical with those of that 'large part of humanity' whose most pressing concerns it has so far failed to address. It is therefore not obvious that bolstering the threatened legitimacy of that 'enterprise' is the surest way to address humanity's most pressing challenges. Despite their claim to work in the interests of all human beings, the strength of official human rights organisations and institutions is not necessarily an index of the state of humanity itself.

Human rights is now common currency in the languages of many nations and in the languages of relations between nations … Few would say, however, that human rights are alive and well in all or most countries. Few would insist that the international effort has brought a substantial improvement in the welfare of many human beings. Even its staunch supporters have noted that international protection has faltered, perhaps even relapsed; that there is in fact a 'crisis' in human rights.

In response to the human rights 'crisis' of his time, this dean of human rights law laid out a programme for what Joseph Slaughter calls 'the hi-jacking of human rights' - that is, he sought to win the language away from anticolonialists, who used it to defend self-determination and anti-racism, and reinvent human rights as an (apolitical) adjunct to US power. The central premise of this programme was that there was no necessary conflict between the particular interests of the United States and the universal values of 'humanity'.

By the time major states and international financial institutions had embraced the belief that only free markets could secure free people, and that human dignity was intimately tied to a market order that freed individuals from dependence, these had been neoliberal articles of faith for decades. Since the end of World War II, organised neoliberalism had been focused on promoting a world order in which morals and interests would reinforce each other. In human rights standards, they too saw a means to 'depoliticise' international economic relations, protecting the right to trade and securing the space in which individuals and corporations could pursue their interests unhindered.

As a recipe for combating the rise of extremism, this combination of free markets and human rights has not been a great success. Instead, right wing movements, overtly racist parties and authoritarian leaders have come to power by publicly disparaging the 'globalist' agenda, even as many of them have embraced the austerity politics and attacks on welfare (and racialised welfare recipients) that have defined the neoliberal consensus for decades. While neoliberalism survived the Global Financial Crisis largely 'unscathed', as Philip Mirowsi notes, it has not survived entirely unchanged. Today, the explicit appeals to 'Western civilisation' and the racialised fear of 'the masses' that defined early neoliberalism are resurgent, and appeals to humanitarianism are increasingly replaced by xenophobic and exclusionary attempts 'to beat people into submission' in order to protect the 'smooth operation of the market economy'.

That neoliberalism tends to produce authoritarianism was a lesson learnt in the Global South long before the recent rise of right-wing authoritarianism in Europe and the United States. As the imposition of neoliberal reforms by international financial institutions eroded states' 'political capacity to govern', these same states often relied more heavily on repression in order to implement unpopular economic policies. In the postcolony, the 'crumbling' of the independence and sovereignty for which anticolonialists had fought subjected these states to the 'tutelage of international creditors', severing the ties between citizenship and rights to public services.

Alston's 2018 report on extreme poverty and human rights in the United States offers a stark snapshot of the impact of decades of neoliberalism in one of its key heartlands. Despite the great wealth of the United States, he reported that around 40 million of its citizens lived in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million in 'Third-World conditions of poverty'. Meanwhile, in the period since 1980, annual income earnings of the top 0.001 per cent of the population had risen by 636 per cent, while the average annual wage for the bottom 50 per cent had stagnated.

In advocating social and economic rights to rectify the inequality and economic insecurity that has 'laid the groundwork for popular revolt', and in calling on the international financial institutions to forestall such revolt, Alston's new agenda for human rights ultimately remains consistent with previous attempts to moralise capitalism and pacify the 'revolt of the masses', which was the central concern of neoliberalism in the middle of the twentieth century.

Rather than seeking to transcend politics by recourse to morality, markets or law, the inequalities of our time call for the reinvigoration of political contestation over ends. Only a political struggle against those institutions, governments and corporations that have promoted and benefited from the inequality and 'economic powerlessness' of the neoliberal age can open a horizon of freedom for all. A break with neoliberalism requires a break with the morals of the market.

The rise of right-wing, racist movements and parties, including those that aim to entrench rather than ameliorate the inequalities of the neoliberal period, suggests that the project of subordinating politics to human rights norms and transferring governance to international financial bodies has failed to create more inclusive and equal polities. The insistence that freedom requires submission to the market, and the acceptance of the inequalities it produces, has led neither to equality nor to freedom.

Central to this sales pitch was the argument that individual freedom rested on three pillars: representative democracy, civil and religious liberty, and free private enterprise; take away one leg of this 'tripod of freedom', the representatives of business warned, and the whole edifice would crumble.

Hayek drew partly on the philosopher H. B. Acton's defence of 'the morals of markets', in his 1971 book commissioned for the Institute for Economic Affairs by the Mont Pèlerin Society member Arthur Seldon. H. B. Acton, The Morals of Markets: An Ethical Exploration (London: Longman/IEA, 1971). He also relied on the work of the economic historian H.M. Robertson, whose 1933 study of the rise of economic individualism challenged Max Weber's account of the Calvinist influence on the 'spirit of capitalism' and argued that it was the development of industry and commerce that had brought about a shift in morals, not vice versa.

Although Hayek hoped humanity would continue 'gradually to approach' a scenario in which the same rules applied to all humans, he warned that the attempt to realise this by allowing the free movement of people would re-awaken nationalist sentiments and set back the cause of freedom. While trade should be free to cross borders, the free movement of people remained an 'ultimate ideal' which should not be pursued impatiently.

In this sense, Brown is right that the contemporary liberal subject is so integrated into the goal of economic growth that she can easily be sacrificed to that end. And yet, rather than recent austerity politics ushering in a shift in neoliberal rationality 'from limitless to constrained, from freedom to sacrifice', as she puts it, the willingness to sacrifice individuals to the market was foundational to neoliberal thought.

The term was initially used by the nineteenth-century political economist Richard Whately in an attempt to free the new science of political economy from its association with the less than elevated concerns of the household.

In the major history of the drafting of the UDHR, Johannes Morsink argues that the 'women's lobby' largely expunged sexist language from the declaration, and that this 'oversight' does not detract from the commitment of the drafters to equality between the sexes.

In December 1941, as permanent secretary to the Council of Defense of the Empire, he had travelled from Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt to Indochina and the Cameroons to collect information on support for the French Republic in these territories. In the late 1950s, Cassin, now vice-president of France's Conseil d'État, authorised emergency powers to combat anticolonial resistance in Algeria.

In Malaya, British colonial authorities responded to workers' revolts in the rubber plantations with emergency legislation, detaining more than 30,000 people without trial, destroying the property of communist sympathisers, using chemical defoliants to destroy crops, and rationing food to starve out guerrillas. By then, rubber exports from Malaya provided Britain with its largest income from the Empire, which was used partly to fund the welfare state.

The neoliberal response to anticolonialism followed the pattern that Karuna Mantena has identified in the later period of the British Empire, when liberal imperialist disillusionment in the face of resistance to the 'civilising' mission was followed by recourse to culturalist rationalisations for failure which served as 'alibis of empire'.

Farrant, McPhail, and Berger, 'Preventing the "Abuses" of Democracy', pp. 517–18. Hayek's own doctoral student, Ralph Raico, was among those who sent him Amnesty reports and called on him to reconsider his visit.

Depoliticising society by transforming proletarians into entrepreneurs had long been a central goal of European neoliberals. Mitigating the 'sensitivity and instability' of mass society, according to Roepke, required a policy of 'decentralization, de-proletarianization, the anchoring of men in their own resources, encouragement to small farmers and small business, increased property ownership, and the strengthening of the middle classes'.

In a similar vein, Melinda Cooper uses the term 'the moral crisis of inflation' to describe the ways in which Chicago School economists and neoconservatives in the United States united in opposition to social welfare, and especially welfare to single mothers.