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.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 295