A Review of Jessica Whyte's “The Morals of the Market” (2019)

The term “neoliberalism” gets thrown a lot in intellectual and political discourse, yet with seldom clarity to what it entails. Some may loosely relate it to the de-politicisation of the economy, the weakening of the State in favor of private corporations, or even the revival of laissez-faire capitalism. While one cand find some truth in those assumptions, they inevitably stray from the ideology as conceived by the neoliberal intellectuals of the past century.

Besides narrating the marriage of neoliberalism and human rights (which we will cover later), this book sheds a light on what actually neoliberalism stood for. Whyte contends that what the neoliberals envisaged through their numerous gatherings following the second world war, was a new, global economic order premised on what they have termed the “morals of the market.”

[T]he ‘morals of the market’ were a set of individualistic, commercial values that prioritised the pursuit of self-interest above the development of common purposes. A market society required a moral framework that sanctioned wealth accumulation and inequality, promoted individual and familial responsibility, and fostered submission to the impersonal results of the market process at the expense of the deliberate pursuit of collectively formulated ends. It also required that moral obligations are limited to the requirement that we refrain from harming others, and do not require positive obligations to others. (Intro.)

Far from the early liberal concept of the “invisible hand” or the criticisms by opponents of “amoral economics,” what the neoliberals proposed was state interference for the sake of maintaining individualistic freedom in the market. Neoliberalism is what it is: it is not a return to the old fin de siècle liberal economy, but a solution to the problems that the latter faced.

In developing their moral order, neoliberal intellectuals played with notions of “civilisation” and “anti-totalitarianism.” The Mont Pèlerin Society of 1947 met in the context of two fatidical events: the decolonisation movement in the Third World, and the drafting of an international human rights charter. The neoliberal discourse evolved in relation to colonialism and human rights throughout the decades. For instance, while neoliberal intellectuals were critical of the British administration of the colonies for obstructing the competitive market, they saw the decolonial movements as a turn towards “communist totalitarianism” which must be stopped in order to secure global free trade and the extraction of natural resources, in other words “neocolonialism”.

Similarly, the intellectuals at Mont Pèlerin Society invoked many critical remarks regarding the UDHR. In particular, they sought to undermine the “superfluous” rights and prerogatives which it included, namely social, economic and cultural rights that, in the eyes of MPS, was a stepping stone for totalitarianism: welfare policies lead to socialism, socialism to communism and finally towards totalitarianism. Their criticism for human rights accrued in degree with the drafting of the human rights covenants which accentuated social and economic rights. However, the neoliberal criticism was not directed towards human rights per se, but the scope of said human rights. These intellectuals adopted a Lockean conception of human rights that limited itself to the protection of individualistic freedom and private property.

The theoretical doctrines of the neoliberals contended with the real-life events in an intriguing manner. Neoliberals supported several undemocratic regimes, namely in Pinochet’s Chile where they enacted economic reforms and even defended the political crackdown of the Pinichet regime. This weird stance did not invalidate their defense of human rights and freedom:

Friedman’s argument in Chile was not that political freedom and economic freedom were ‘entirely unrelated’, as Letelier and Klein both argue.40 Rather, he argued that they were intimately related: property rights are the essential foundation of all other human rights, he contended, and a free market is necessary for realising the ‘equal right to freedom’. (Ch. 4)

In addition, the showdown between the neoliberals and human rights NGOs’ investigating Pinochet’s violations wa sless radical than what it seemed. NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Liberté Sans Frontières originated from a similar human rights discourse to that of the neoliberals, which limited the scope of human rights that are worth protecting.

Their [humanitarian NGOs] special contribution was to pioneer a distinctly neoliberal human rights discourse, for which a competitive market order accompanied by a liberal institutional structure was truly the last utopia. (Ch.5)

Whyte’s critique of human rights and neoliberalism is very essential in this day and age, especially in a Third World inflitrated by humanitarian NGOs whose agenda serves the interests of global capital and reproduces the injustices of the past century’s colonialism and coercive interventions in the affairs of postcolonial polities. Whyte’s reference to postcolonial intellectuals such as Fanon and Nkrumah is also very much cherished.