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.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 148