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.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 388