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).

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 8