In returning to the French Revolution in the immediate wake of World War II, Jouvenel sought a 'usable history' with which to challenge his contemporaries' 'attacks on those same individual rights which in 1789 had had their sacredness proclaimed'. For this man of the right, whose sympathies lay with the Vichy regime, the primary threat to individual rights was not fascism, but the promise of a 'larger social welfare'. It was US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he believed, who embodied the sacrifice of individual rights for social rights. Jouvenel criticised those narratives that were so common during the drafting of the UDHR, for which social and economic rights were a progressive extension of the older civil and political rights. 'The new rights of man are given out as coming to complete those already proclaimed in the eighteenth-century', he wrote. But instead, 'they contradict and abrogate them'. While the old rights decreed liberty and made individuals responsible, he argued, the new social rights replaced this adult responsibility with tutelage. The old liberty was thereby sacrificed for a new security, he argued; the new promises 'close the cycle which was opened by the declarations of earlier days'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 162