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.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 44