• Corpus ID: 14422172

A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism

@article{Moyn2014APC,
  title={A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism},
  author={Samuel Moyn},
  journal={Law and contemporary problems},
  year={2014},
  volume={77},
  pages={147-169}
}

• Samuel Moyn
• Published 22 September 2014
• Political Science
• Law and contemporary problems

I INTRODUCTION It is increasingly common to claim that international human rights law is a neoliberal phenomenon. And certainly the common timing is right: the human rights revolution and the victory of market fundamentalism have been simultaneous. In an important new essay, Marxist international lawyer Susan Marks compares Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine with my own recent history of international human rights, which emphasizes the 1970s as the moment of breakthrough for their ascent. Both histories, Marks observes, ascribe the newfound visibility of human rights to their promise to transcend formerly attractive political options east and west that seemed inadequate or even dangerous. (1) "For her too," Marks acknowledges of Klein's treatment, "the human rights movement as we know it today took shape during the 1970s. And for her too, a defining characteristic of the new movement was its non-political creed." (2) But for Marks, Klein succeeds by unveiling the neoliberal circumstances of human rights that have permanently defined their trajectory: [S]he considers that a rather important aspect of the context for the movement's emergence is one Moyn omits to mention: the rise in that period of the neo-liberal version of 'private' capitalism, with its now familiar policy prescription of privatisation, deregulation and state retreat from social provision. To its influential enthusiasts then and now, that is the last utopia.... From Klein's perspective, then, the history of human rights cannot be told in isolation from developments in the history of capitalism." (3) (At this point Marks notes that Milton Friedman won the Nobel prize for economics in 1976, the year before Amnesty International was given the Nobel peace prize.) Friedrich Hayek, the guru of neoliberalism, was as impressed a witness of the human rights revolution of the 1970s as anyone else. But it is interesting that, although occasionally an advocate of the constitutionalization of basic liberties like freedom of speech and press, he was in fact an acerbic critic of that revolution. In an interview, he described the spike in talk around human rights associated with Jimmy Carter's election to the American presidency as a strange fad, which (like all fashions) risked excess: I'm not sure whether it's an invention of the present administration or whether it's of an older date, but I suppose if you told an eighteen year old that human rights is a new discovery he wouldn't believe it. He would have thought the United States for 200 years has been committed to human rights, which of course would be absurd. The United States discovered human rights two years ago or five years ago. Suddenly it's the main object and leads to a degree of interference with the policy of other countries which, even if I sympathized with the general aim, I don't think it's in the least justified.... But it's a dominating belief in the United States now. (4) All the same, since that moment of modish popularity, the staying power of human rights has led to many more positive visions of the essential harmony--if not identity--of economic liberalism and international human rights. The Marxist left, indeed, is hardly the only source of claims concerning the synergetic relationship between the advancement of market freedoms and human rights. (5) If anything, it is much more common to promote neoliberalism as an agent of the advancement of human rights rather than to link them as malign accomplices. Perhaps most notably, Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann argues that, although human rights law may exact some costs to efficiency, the general relationship between economic liberty and human rights is productive and strong, so much so that promoting the former and latter are not very different enterprises. (6) He writes: [E]njoyment of human rights require[s] the use of dispersed information and economic resources that can be supplied most efficiently, and most democratically, through the division of labour among free citizens and through liberal trade promoting economic welfare, the freedom of choice and the free flow of scarce goods, services, and information across frontiers in response to supply and demand by citizens. …