Episode 56: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism with Jessica Whyte

המדיק המגריקזו, דודי מפי ביינת עושים, שואזי ג'ארה פשמל קלטיפה, אף עובייה. אסלווייה, תמיך מה, המוח את קלטר, ארגון, את קדוין מה אז, מסיוצג ארשיר, מה מוי שורד, אגן זכה, אודם דום דגה, חונדה, חולה, פריטו, על הבידן, אלנים, תסוי חיימית, המי זוכרי, שן הרצירה גווייה, רגורי, לנדב, עם מרר, מצנוק דדלח, סמסריך, דו צינר, המדיעו, שן הרחק שממיתוי, וברלות, אולים, תדבר דמי, כבר איתך לי, יפס, קרוונייה, שפה, פמי, ארץ תילו, קבי שקד סותו, מ, מפרלבי, רוצה, חמי, מרטור, שפי, שקטר, תעושה, מלבי, דגתוי, ונדר, אדון, חרוק, שם שימדי, מרוצה, מרטור, קו, צי, הוקי, דמי, ודים, צבי, רסית, פוסי, ורולים, דק, תן שווח, חקר, אין, תדבר דמי, "Welcome to Remagining Soviet Georgeum, I'm Sopo". -And I'm Bryan. "I'm really really really excited today because I have guests Jessica White, whose book I fell in love with, "It's one of the best books on human rights and new liberalism I have ever read. "So I'm so happy that you're here with this Jessica, could you introduce yourself to us?" Sure, and thank you for having me on the show. I'm Jessica White, I'm an associate professor of philosophy at the University of New South Wales, and I'm also an Australian Research Council feature fellow. And my research largely is on human rights, humanitarianism, the way that moral ideas are put to work in international politics. One of the best things that I've gotten from your book is that really, I think, first of all, I expected the book to be more about human rights, but actually I learned so much about new liberalism in the fact that I've been reading and especially being on the left, like all we do is criticize new liberalism and read some countless books on it, observe the process, written about it, but I think you gave me the clearest framework to understand it that I have gotten so far. And so maybe you can tell us how your main thesis of the book, which is much more sharper and more poignant critiques than say Samuel Moin, who we've had on this podcast about, well, he discusses about how human rights, this more civil and political rights were pushed than not enough of the sort of social economic part, and that was just an effect of the way the sort of post-Soviet world was developed. But you are saying even something even harsher in that sense that you're saying it was never going to be social and economic rights that human rights was ever pushed, because new liberals were able to take human rights and completely reformulate it to be against any kind of government intervention, and only focus on the rights that the market found morally acceptable to make sure the market was not intervened, like something like, sort of like moral human rights of the market is how I look at it. So maybe you can give us like the overall thesis of your book. Sure, thank you. Well, look, I was really interested in the fact that various people had talked, including Samuel Moin, and others about the sort of historical coincidence of human rights and neoliberalism, the idea that in the late 20th century we saw the rise of neoliberalism and the globalization of neoliberal ideas, policies and institutions, and at the same time we saw the development of strong norms of human rights that tended to supplant or displace older ways of thinking about emancipatory politics. And so I was interested in trying to understand this seeming historical coincidence and whether there was more to it than simply coincidence. So what I did is go back to the mid-20th century when on the one hand the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in 1948, was being drafted. And on the other hand, the neoliberal Montpelloran Society was founded by Friedrich Hayek as a way to try to reinvent liberalism in the context of widespread norms of social democracy, economic planning, socialism, and of course the Soviet Union. So what I discovered is that in fact rather than being at odds with each other, these two bodies of thinking and these two forms of liberal politics in many senses would deeply intertwine, and that in fact neoliberal thinkers had done significant amounts to pioneer the understanding of human rights that came to prominence decades later. So I looked at the way that they had framed ideas of humanity as justifying abandoning any obligations other than very thin obligations that could be realised in market exchanges across the world. Someone like Hayek said the market order is the only order that can embrace all of humanity. So therefore if we want to think in terms of humanity, we have to think with the market rather than against it. And I looked at the way that they worked to frame human rights as protections of globally mobile investors and to re-entrench the norms that had really been central to the colonial era and the international division of labor of the colonial era in particular in a period of decolonisation. And then I guess the bit of my book that is particularly surprising to many people and in some aspects to me also was the extent to which human rights NGOs in a later period in the sort of late 70s, 1980s onwards embraced and drew on ideas that had been formulated by neoliberal thinkers over decades. And they did this in some cases very explicitly in alliance and working with some of those major neoliberal thinkers. And at other times much more sort of implicitly taking up ideas as though they were newly discovered about the, say, the authoritarianism of third world socialism or totalitarianism defined as a whole. Defined as state intervention into the economy, these kind of ideas that had been staples of neoliberal thinking for decades that were taken up by human rights NGOs in the period of human rights ascendancy as progressive norms and shifted from a point where they were clearly ideas associated with the right to being conceived as progressive ideas. I find it really interesting how the debates around NGOs and human rights now initiated by the US right. How because the left has been so embedded with the neoliberal human rights that in reality the left is now defending it against the right wing attacks, though it's so obvious to me how Elon Musk's Twitter is fascinating in a sense that he posts. Milton Friedman, Hayek, he's telling you like we're trying to restructure the state according to more orthodox like the original neoliberal ideas and not this sort of post 90s neoliberalism that embrace this multiculturalism. Instead of the critique of human rights in the way it has been formed and the hegemonic form from the left you're really getting it from the right. Instead of your book I feel like it should have been probably selling like hot cakes and everyone should be embracing this. Instead I see all the leftists trying to defend this neoliberal framework. And so even though the left has been the first critics of neoliberalism somehow is it like because they just don't know enough that they think it's a coincidence or they think like as you say you talk about this there are people who are trying to salvage human rights but they're so marginalized in the whole framework. So I instinctually felt always that human rights framework was a bad framework to use because I've always felt that this was again what we mostly got was individual rights. And so you know, well thank you for helping me put together all these things that I have been thinking and feeling into a much more complex system of thought. But like what do you think about this that this current mood that's happening and then left being so defense defenseless not even different but actually are trying to protect the neoliberal human rights. Look it's really interesting and this moment is obviously very disorienting for many many people many of us myself included. But I think that what you point to is a phenomenon that we're seeing in a whole range of different areas. because the Trump administration is essentially retrenching American soft power, whether that's defunding a US aid or attacks on human rights NGOs or the defunding of full-bright scholarships or a whole range of different areas. We are seeing a phenomenon where people are associated with the left are rushing to the defence of what have previously been in a sense objects of critique. In a way there's a long story which is of what happened between the period that my book is about, which in a way ends in the late 80s, although I have some sort of post scripts about the period in which I was writing, which was the second decade of the 2000s. There's a question of what happened between then and now. I think that it's two things. One of them is that I think that human rights NGOs did embrace some of the critiques that came from the left. We saw, and it's the international changing its mandate to be able to deal with social and economic rights. We saw human rights NGOs doing things that were not as narrowly circumscribed as sort of neoliberal human rights in the way that I would articulate. We saw even Philip Olson as the special UN special rapporteur on extreme inequality in human rights, putting out a report on extreme inequality in the United States, for example. So some of these developments in the realm of human rights, as well as obviously human rights NGOs taking up the question of migration, and we've subsequently seen a real reaction from the right against the extent to which human rights NGOs have moved away somewhat from the vision of embrace of Western civilization, embrace of the hegemonic power of the United States. Etc. So I think that there is this sort of whole period between when I finished the book and now, and certainly between the period that the book is concerned with, and now, where there are so many different developments that have, in a sense, moved us away from the paradigm of neoliberal human rights and created this reaction from the right, where I think in the first Trump administration we had an attempt from the right to reclaim the language of human rights, Pompeo's commission of unalienable rights, which was meant to be about a sort of getting back to basic civil and political rights, freedom of conscience, protection of Christians, et cetera, vision, which mapped on really quite neatly to the neoliberal vision of human rights that I trace in the book, but then you also, I think, more recently have had a sort of almost an abandonment of that terrain by the right and an attempt to actually just dissolve and dismantle the institutions of humane global governments. A few years ago, I met someone who was working at human rights watch in the US, and they were just telling me how there was fights within human rights watch, amnesty between sort of the new guard and the old guard, but the interesting thing is a lot of the new or younger people who are working in these NGOs in New York or somewhere in the US or DC, were, I believe, influence by sort of this Bernie Sanders moment of like we don't even have health care. So by seeing this, they started pushing more for economic rights, but still it's so, and because of this, actually some of the changes happened because the staff itself started demanding it from these NGOs, but it's still so US-centric. Like if you didn't live in the US and if the Bernie Sanders moment didn't happen and if this didn't became so politicized, how it's so normal now in the US to be like, we don't have any health care and everyone jokes like, you have no health care there. I don't know if this would have happened so much and still so much so dependent on the moods and the politics of the US, you know, even with some of the changes I still find very generally more cosmetic, but even like I saw even grants being changed to more social, you know, labor rights and so on, a little bit, not so much, but still because there's, but like I had this, you know, in, but in Georgia, like we're, we're sort of the periphery of all this, a lot of things haven't really changed here, you know, so it depends on where we're looking. I just wanted to let you know about that because I thought that was interesting. I would love for someone to write about these dynamics that happened in the early 2020s or right before 2020, you know, this would have been very fascinating. I just want to bore our listeners. If you could just define or how do you define neoliberalism? What is neoliberalism? And the reason is I want to talk about this is because there's so many sort of popular conceptions among the right on the right on the left, among liberals, among everybody about what neoliberalism is, but your book has a very in-depth study and meticulous breakdown of what neoliberalism is as an idea and what I would say is a really existing neoliberalism. So for our audience, could you just define what is neoliberalism? And I would add, what's the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism? Because I don't know that. Okay, so the book that I've written is primarily an intellectual history and so what I was interested in was the ideas of neoliberal thinkers themselves and what I mean by neoliberal thinkers is largely the people who were associated with the Montpellarant Society, which I previously mentioned, founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947. And that was a project of reviving liberalism in a context where its practitioners felt besieged and marginalized in the context of the rise of socialism and social democracy and economic planning. And so they wanted to revive liberalism, but they believed that in order to do so liberalism had to change. It had to abandon the sort of lussafe-fair naturalism that they associated with 19th century liberalism, the idea that the market order could simply be left alone. And what needed to be done was that competition as an animating norm had to be deliberately installed in all areas of social life. So on the one hand, instead of simply the idea of free trade, neoliberal thinkers posited the idea of competition, which rather than simply being a matter of freedom, they saw as a harsh discipline to which everybody had to submit and in which there would be winners and there would be losers. And they saw an extensive role for the state in enshrining competition and the market across all kinds of realms of social and economic life. And the other thing that I would say about neoliberalism is that it was profoundly a moral project. So there's a vision that I tried to challenge in the book that sees neoliberalism as all about this sort of rational homoeconomicus as being pure economics at the expense of morality and all things good in the world. And I was trying to argue, no, actually there was a thick morality to neoliberal thinking. And this morality was profoundly racialized. It was about a defense of the superiority of so-called Western civilization, which neoliberal thinkers framed as the only civilization that had developed competitive market orders and whose practitioners were therefore more successful than other people. And it was also a moral order that drew on a sort of deep sort of conservative family values thinking in which the family was a central space of the organization of welfare and social reproduction. And so this moral agenda was very much central to what neoliberalism was. And so the thinkers that I was interested in really saw promoting a moral agenda and in many cases it not all an explicitly Christian moral agenda as being the central complement of a market society. Someone like Hayek went as so far as to say that, you know, faulty moral beliefs can destroy a civilization. And in his view, there was a moral battle that had to take place in his own time against those who defended norms of redistribution, for instance, and all of what he saw as collectivist ideas. And these needed to be combated if a civilization premised on competitive market relations was going to flourish. And that's where I think that human rights came in as that moral complement to the expansion of competitive market relations, particularly when we thought about that expansion in global terms. Can you give us, because I found this really fascinating is, You give us some little tip-a-tip. that were happening because you have a parallel conference's meetings happening. And so the University of the Coursary of Human Rights, I found so fascinating. The discussions between the different delegates, maybe you can also discuss what the debates were about, like how some of the loopholes that were left in the discussions and in the University of the Coursary of Human Rights, how that then supported a lot of sort of neoliberal ideas, especially about religion, which was amazing. And also my new villain, Malik, who you introduced to me first time about the Lebanese delegate. Maybe you can discuss some of these historical debates that were happening and how they kind of paralleled each other. Yeah, absolutely. So I find the drafting of the University of Declaration of Human Rights endlessly fascinating because it was a space where I've an extended period of time, you know, almost two years, highly educated and political people from across the globe came together to debate what they saw as the foundations of a good society. So we think about who participated in those debates. The first thing to say is who didn't participate. And, you know, this was a period of formal colonial rule, you know, half the world's people still lived in colonies and had no ability to participate in the drafting of this document of universal human rights. And the status of the youth domestically called non-self-governing territories was something that came up repeatedly in the context of the debates. So there was this enormous exclusion of much of the world. On the other hand, you did have delegates from the United States, from Europe, from the Soviet bloc. You had recently independent India. You had China sort of in the midst of its own revolution with a diplomat who ended up sort of with the existing regime. And, you know, there's the long story then of the people's Republic of China and its own fraught relationship with the UN. But you did have you know, a delegate from Saudi Arabia. You had Charles Malik, the figure that you just mentioned, who was the Lebanese delegate, and Orthodox Christian, who was one of the strongest defenders of the idea of Western civilization and the idea that this declaration had to embody the norms of what he called Western civilization, and particularly that it should draw on a very specific Christian natural law heritage. And so you had enormous disputes between all of these figures at the time. And there was quite a lot of opening there. And the declaration itself, it seems to me, is a document where there are huge openings for different kinds of political positions within it. There are a number of delegates who abstained when this came to the United Nations itself. Among those was the Soviet delegate. And it's very interesting. If you look at the speeches that were made then, one of the real sticking points was about how rights would actually be realised. So throughout the drafting process, the various delegates representing the Soviet bloc countries argue that it was all very well to write things down on a piece of paper. But unless material infrastructures were put in place for the realisation of these rights, then they would remain simply pieces of paper. So they would say things like, what is the use of proclaiming a right to rest when people are forced to go to work in a capitalist society in order to survive? What's the use of declaring freedom of the press if people don't have paper and they don't have access to printing presses? So this was a very practical idea of what was necessary to realise rights. And there were huge debates which took place there. It must be said that many of the neoliberal thinkers were quite horrified by the universal declaration of human rights itself. They saw it as succumbing to the organisation thinking that saw people as members of an organisation capable of granting rights and particularly social and economic rights. And therefore of licensing forms of redistribution between people, which was something that they wanted to see prevented at all costs. So what we saw in the sort of period of human rights ascendancy was that a whole chunk of those rights in the declaration were in many ways sort of left aside by new human rights NGOs which focused very specifically on a sort of small section largely of the civil rights and sort of to some extent of the political rights in the declaration and tended to neglect the question of social and economic rights. One thing that I should say particularly because of where you are and the focus of this podcast is that there's a sort of a standard version of the history of the universal declaration of human rights that says, you know, the capitalist block pushed civil and political rights, the Soviet block pushed social and economic rights. Now I've actually written a paper on this which is separate from the book to say that that picture is largely untrue that actually the social and economic rights are in the declaration largely because of various Latin American delegates who really pushed those rights. The significant contribution of the Soviet block was anti-discrimination and what they came to the universal declaration of human rights with was a commitment to an attempt to outlaw fascism and to outlaw racial discrimination and to embed strong norms against discrimination into this document. Obviously at a time when the United States was practicing Jim Crow and did not want to talk about racial discrimination. And so while the Soviet block delegates made the arguments that I just spoke about about the sort of the need for any declarations of social and economic rights to be backed up by actual material transformation to give people the resources to practice these rights, they essentially were largely disinterested in social and economic rights in the declaration precisely because they thought it's really utterly irrelevant in a capitalist society to write down that everyone has the right to work or the right to rest or the right to paid holidays. So as much as higher would later mock the universal declaration for saying that everybody has the right to paid holidays with leave, the Soviet blocks delegates were just as mocking of the efficacy of writing those kind of things down on a piece of paper. And what they really thought a right declaration could do was achieve a scent amongst the victors of the Second World War and others that the forms of racial discrimination that were associated with fascism should be not allowed to return. The thing I like the most about your book is that it's not simply just an intellectual history. It's a way where you take the ideologists and their ideas very seriously and then show how in the real world they were applied. And to me this is the most important and useful aspect of course being in Georgia where there's this state that was built through the ideology of neoliberalism very often people who oppose it do not know the basis of it. So for example in your book, when you're going through who the neoliberals were and then showing the context in say pinotye's chile it's very very useful. So for our audience could you just talk a little bit about this relationship between the ideology of say human rights and how it manifested probably in this most crude and clear example of a neoliberal regime pinotye's chile after I end it was overthrown in 1973 because to me that relationship between the neoliberals as ideologists and the really existing neoliberalism in Chile was so illuminating. Yeah thank you and I should say that when while before I said that the book is primarily an intellectual history I was also very interested in the way that these ideas actually were taken up in practice. And so yes thank you for bringing me to that. So I mean there's been a lot of academic discussion of the influence of neoliberal thinkers particularly Chicago school economists in pinotye's chile and there's been less attention to the figures who were people like Hayek and Buchanan and figures who were particularly interested with sort of constitutional orders. But one of the principles and you said that I'd take these sort of ideologists and neoliberal thinkers very very seriously and I did. And one of the things that I really tried to do in the book was not to simply dismiss their claims But to ask, if they really believed the things that they were saying, what is entailed by that? So, you know, when Milton Friedman said that, you know, the greatest threat to freedom was economic redistribution. Or when Hayek said that he believed that freedom was greater in Chile under Pina Chi than it was under A&D, you could just dismiss that and say that's absurd. This was a dictatorship which was torturing and disappearing people on mass because they were trade unionists or because they were leftists or because they were in other ways opponents of the regime. It's an absurdity to say that freedom was greater than it was under the regime of A&D. Or you could use that to ask, what does that mean freedom was for these people? And in doing that, it was very clear to me that freedom was essentially the freedom of capital, the freedom not to have your wealth interfered with, the freedom not to have to deal with a trade union that would tell you what you were or weren't allowed to pay your workers, that these were the freedoms that were centrally important to neoliberal thinkers. So, people like Friedman, like Hayek, advised the Pina Chi regime, met with Pina Chi and were really quite enthusiastic about his regime, referring to it as a miracle, for example. And really trying also saying the case of Hayek, I'll just go back, so Friedman, for instance, later tried to frame himself as simply a technocrat who simply gave economic advice to the regime but had nothing to do with all of that, other unsavory human rights abuse type stuff. But really, even in his own speeches in Chile, he was absolutely adamant that political freedom and economic freedom are deeply imbricated, that there can be no political freedom in his own terms without the kind of economic freedom that would be unleashed by the type of shock therapy that he was advocating in Chile. So, really, for then the political and the economic were deeply bound up together. And for Hayek also, this regime, he wrote to newspapers protesting what he saw as the unfair treatment by organizations like Amnesty International of Pina Chi and his regime, arguing that actually this was possibly, a liberal regime, one somewhat lacking in liberalism but far superior to a totalitarian regime and that in fact far superior to what he called an unlimited democracy, which was the form of democracy that existed, for instance, in Western Europe at the time. So these figures were very willing to lend their support to really authoritarian and repressive policies. If not just because they thought that there was some kind of technocratic economic reforms that they would implement that would be useful, but because they shared a moral sensibility, which was about freeing humanity from collectivism, from demands for redistribution and valorizing inequality. - Yeah, the concept of marginal freedom that you discuss, that you have the right to change jobs, but you don't have the right to form a union and ask for higher wages. And just because you're born, you don't have rights. The market has to exist as the source of all your rights was really well iterated and I really enjoyed learning that because I think it's such a helpful way to understand how they think. But I really liked how you kind of, you don't talk about it so much, but you did a lead to discuss Foucault's and this idea of market sovereignty and this everything that is intervening in the market is totalitarianism. But in some ways, how this was taken up by sort of postmodernist philosophers, in the sense that they also believe that this large remaking of man is a doomed project that we should focus on, these smaller, in immediate utopias and not so large utopias, anti-utopinism that is in the postmodernism and how this sort of aligns with neoliberalism as the market is the most important thing that anything outside of the market is totalitarianism is doomed. And so maybe you can discuss how these two ideas of anti-utopinism and immediacy of the market aligns with each other. - So just to return to that idea, you mentioned the margin of freedom. One of the things that's quite striking about most of the major neoliberal thinkers is that they reject the idea of natural rights. So take someone like Ludwig von Measers, the Austrian neoliberal thinker and he was just utterly dismissive about the idea of natural rights. He said nature grants no rights at all. As you suggested, their position was that all our freedoms, all human freedoms, have come about because of market relations. They're all a product in Measers' words of the rise of capitalism. And it's the market, which is the fundamental institution, which makes other forms of freedom and all of our rights possible. And so therefore anyone who's interested in rights and freedom has to be concerned to defend the market order. That also means that compatibility or incompatibility with the competitive market order becomes the test by which all claims to rights are assessed. Are these claims compatible with the competitive market order or would they undermine that market order? So if people are arguing for the right to housing and they're arguing that that right to housing should be enabled through, for instance, rent control, that would be the sort of ultimate incompatible affirmation of rights in the sense that this is incompatible with market competition and the housing market. And really they had an almost hysterical idea of any sort of incompatible intervention into the market would set off this, you know, kick off any and cascade of interventions which would destroy the whole market order and with all our rights, bring about a form of totalitarianism. On the other hand, rights that are compatible with the market order and perhaps even support market competition, many individual rights, for example, can be endorsed on that basis. So you have this real idea that freedom is, there's this sort of margin of freedom that can be achieved in a market society, but any attempt to go beyond those margins, risks totalitarianism. So obviously any kind of grand scale political project that is utopian or that envisages overcoming market relations or God forbid capitalism would be inherently a totalitarian project and one which had to be prevented in the interests of human freedom and rights for neoliberal thinkers. Now in the book I'm interested in the influence that these kinds of ideas had on human rights in Geos, but obviously they were influential more broadly. And as you mentioned, there are many resonances between sort of French theory of the '70s and '80s, particularly and many of the ideas of neoliberal thinkers. I mean in relation to Fico, I think he's an interesting figure. He was certainly one of the most praciant analysts of neoliberal thinking, even if aspects of his own thought certainly merged with key concerns of neoliberal thinkers of that period, but it's very interesting in some of his lectures he talks about what he turns the state phobia of neoliberalism and argues that there's this tendency to associate every sort of social welfare and measure with death camps. And he's actually quite critical by that point of this sort of neoliberal road to certain type idea that in its sort of almost parodic form by Ludwig von Mises, he says, you start off with the government that just wants to give free milk to children and step-by-step socialism on the model of the Nazis inevitably arises. You just think, what milk Nazism really? So Fico also analyzed that kind of idea, But I suddenly agree that this sort of critiques of totality and transparent and planning that were very in fashion in the academy in the sort of '80s and '90s owed much to neoliberal thinking of the period. - And also with the charges of totalitarianism, any kind of collective action, you also mention the racial components like this or sloths aren't not white, but the fact that they're considered backward. And you know, everything east of Austro-Hungary is just like savages. And so I really, so maybe you can talk about how the idea of socialism communism is looked at as a tribalist, anachronistic society and not the future and any kind of anachronism, any kind of backwardness should be combated alongside intelligence as and also backwardness at the same time that the market was the sophisticated, you know, the future, the appropriate form of society for the today's time. Maybe you can discuss that because I thought that was, and also like you also mentioned, Muslims were considered similar ways and very distrusted. You can talk about that. - Yeah, absolutely. So this is one of the really important things I think in thinking about neoliberalism of the 20th century, just how deeply racialized neoliberal thinking was, how animated by racial hierarchies and civilizational hierarchies and how the market for neoliberal thinkers was a distinctive achievement of Western civilization. So to take Hayek because I think he gives one of the most sort of articulated accounts of this kind of argument, he has a civilizational narrative in a sense lending, borrowing from the Scottish enlightenment and figures like Adam Ferguson, for instance, who have a sort of stadial account of the stages of civilization. But for Hayek was very interesting in looking at his own time of demands for socialism and social democracy. He argued that what he was seeing was what he called regress sort of a return to repressed primordial instincts. So according to his civilizational narrative, humanity was originally collectivist that humans lived in sort of what he called the small band or tribal societies for much of our existence. And so actually in a really interesting sense for Hayek, human nature is collectivist. We desire to be with other people. We want to share, we want to work together. We want to redistribute resources. And if we're not subjected to the strict discipline of the market, we will continuously slip back into these sort of regressive collectivist patterns because it's in this sort of ingrained intonation to desire these sort of more egalitarian social norms. And so when the only people thinkers looked around the world, they associated really everyone outside of Europe with the sort of barbarian civilizational regressions that only the Europeans had successfully demonstrated a proficiency for social collaboration through an extensive division of labour. And that meant that they were more successful than others, but they were always threatened by these less successful, less advanced peoples who would try to undermine the market order. And there was always the risk of slipping back even for those societies that had succeeded in achieving these market orders. So there was this sort of racialised argument about the Soviet Union, Mrs. for instance talks about how, well, you know, whatever we think of European fascism, it's not so bad because it emerged amongst highly civilised people. So it will only ever be this sort of, you know, bleep, whereas, you know, communism emerged amongst sort of barbarous peoples and is there for this sort of civilizational threat as well as being an economic and political threat. So you get that kind of language and rhetoric all through the neoliberal thinkers. And yes, often this very curious association between Islam and communism is these sort of fanatical projects that threaten the sort of rational market civilisation of the West. There was this great discussion. There's a libertarian party in Georgia, and they had a, which are just like classic neoliberal, and they had another conservative right-winger and they were discussing the EU, because there's a big debates around EU in Georgia. Well, it's not debates. There should be more debates. So the libertarian guy is like, I'm against regulation, I'm against this, I'm against that any kind of constraint to the market from the EU, which is very few constraints, but still. And the conservative right-winger asks them, like, why do you want the EU to appear against all of these regulations? And he said, because it's the Western civilization, and I was like, oh, OK, so it's like this civilizational part in Georgia is so dominant. Why they want to be part of Europe? It's not even that they care about. They don't even care what the content is, as long as they get to be part of the Western civilization. Everything is a civilizational discourse. They think of this as normal, and they're always fighting against the Soviet mentality, which is the regular human nature, which is collectivist, in general. They distrust workers. They hate them. Even now, there's a miners are losing their jobs. X-300, 500 miners may be losing their jobs, or because the mine is closing down. And a lot of the liberal opposition were mocking them. It's like all these people, they're backward. They are not to be trusted as the disciplined market guy that will make sure that they do not interfere in their market and keep the civilization going. And so a lot of these discussions, even that you talk about the book, like one thing that Soviets try to bring, and also other delegates was to make sure to remove the civilization discourse, yet liberals put it back in. This is a fascinating part, which means that the continuation of the Western civilization discourse, the Western civilization aspiration, is really-- it is the level. Like, the way it's being vested in all of the human rights parts in Georgia and NGOs, and a lot of the liberals that are very much pro-NGOs, it means to constantly refer to everyone as regressive. Their Soviet regressive need to be disciplined. And there's no hope for these people. All and not even an attempt to integrate them into society because they can't be changed. So maybe you can discuss more about the Western civilization apart. And also, you already mentioned this, but maybe the fact that they were really in bivalent towards Nazism. They're like, yeah, like you said, it's a Western civilization moment, so it can't be that bad. Maybe you can discuss more about it. Yes, so I think it's an interesting point of interaction between neoliberal thinkers and the human rights project, because as you just mentioned, this language of civilization was one where the Soviet block delegates were responsible for having that language excluded from the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They said, this is an anachronism belonging to the age of the Tsars. It has no place in this modern human rights declaration. So from that perspective, from the mid 20th century and seen from the Soviet Union, it was the idea of civilization and the idea of a standard of civilization that was the anachronism and that was what was the sort of regressive norm that should be discarded on the path towards some kind of universal humanity. Now, we all know that the universalism of human rights was never so universal that it was always hierarchical and that racial hierarchies always played a central role in whose human rights were defended and whose were not defended. But on the neoliberal side, you saw the embrace of that language of civilization and that idea that there was this way of being in the West and that human rights were the legacy of something called the West. Again, deeply anachronistic way of uniting the history of ancient Greece and Rome and medieval Christianity as sort of a hodgepodge of sources into something called the West. But they were very emphatic. There was this civilizational superiority and that a central feature of that civilizationality. superiority was capitalism and specifically competitive market relations, a way of knitting together social relations through the market rather than in a political form. And so that civilisation of hierarchy was very central to neoliberal thinking of that period. I just want to make one comment that to me this part of the book about empire, colonialism and imperialism as being something which could not be divorced from the ideology of neoliberalism because it's like an inherent component of it, the vanguard of Western civilization. You guys are really disgusted very well. But to me, this was the most illuminating because how blunt some of these neoliberal thinkers were in their racialist hierarchical assumption of how the natural order of things would be. So in the sense, just like an extension of the conservative imperial, the Western civilizational structure being reformulated as kind of this progressive new economic ideology of modernization in a period to defend against this kind of collectivist barbaristic threat. So to me, this was very fascinating. Thank you. And maybe I should say something more about the colonialism and decolonisation aspect because we've talked about the sort of civilizational ideas, but I haven't really talked about how they responded to decolonisation. With that, I think you will mention it yourself is like the fact that the reparations or any kind of correcting the justice of colonialism was banned. You can't do that. And I would like to ask maybe does neoliberalism in the end accept different races into its project, even though they'll never be able to catch up to white people? Or like I would like to have more clarity on that. This reparations thing was something I was thinking about in the colonialism part, which was also that it struck me very interesting. One of the themes of our podcast of course is history. It's not the only thing, but it's a major theme. We talk about history a lot. How history is done was that the neoliberals had this like anti-historical view of the world while simultaneously, of course, relying on a historical form to justify their neoliberalism. You know, in the same way you could say that they were anti the intervention of the state while every aspect of their ideology required this kind of aggressive autocratic state. But in the realm of imperialism, race and colonialism, they made these arguments about how the past was the past and could not be something which could either be undone through reparations like Sopo mentioned or was not even something worth interacting with because it simply was the past and had no bearing on the future as opposed to something which of course the left as historically must be sort of reconciled overcome and overcome in a way to build a new future. In terms of their understanding of colonialism, one of the things that I think is really important to understanding neoliberalism is that while there was a sort of a project of ideological self-clarification that happened in neoliberal circles and particularly in the Montpellar and Society over a couple of decades from its founding in 1947, the point at which I think neoliberalism really becomes animated as a global project is in reaction to decolonisation. And the real fear of neoliberal thinkers was that decolonisation would lead to not only a transformation of formal sovereignty in former colonies but a transformation of economic relations and potentially a transformation and an overthrowing of the colonial division of labour. So many of the efforts of neoliberal thinkers of the period of decolonisation went into attempting to conceptualise how the norms of colonialism could be re-embedded in conditions of formal equality and formal sovereignty. So I say in the book that what Kwame Nakrumah talked about as neo-colonialism was for the neoliberal's a project. So what you see is that they respond in different and interesting ways to decolonisation. So after the Bandon conference in Indonesia, you had some neoliberal thinkers like Alexander Rusto became quite excited and said this is an opportunity to free decolonisation from communism and for us to align ourselves with those people in the colonies who want to achieve independence and ensure that they do so on liberal terms. And many of the demands of the Bandon conference were actually fairly compatible with a sort of market order. They wanted more foreign investment, for example. This was not yet the more radical projects that came to animate much thinking about decolonisation later. But many of the neolibles were just immediately horrified and believe that the people of the former colonies would inevitably bring about totalitarian regimes. Some of this they blamed on the late British empire and on the sort of social democratic and planning norms that were invoked in Britain itself in the late period of the British Empire. And they argued that the people of the former colonies had sort of been given this poisonous legacy by the British Empire in particular. But they were terrified about what they saw as the threat of totalitarianism, which primarily meant the threat of state intervention into the economy. And particularly the expropriation of foreign multinational corporations. So they went about constructing the norms and the legal orders to attempt to ensure that the people of the former colonies and the new independent leaders of former colonies were locked into colonial relationships, whether that was repayment of debt obligations or requirements to maintain the production of cash crops or primary materials. So they were very opposed to attempts within former colonies to transform the international division of labour, the kind of things that were all analysed in their new international economic order in the mid 1970s. And they really went about trying to undermine that project, which was a project on one hand of international redistribution and forms of retribution, reparation for colonialism, but also an attempt to transform the terms of trade and to enable former colonies to develop their economies so they would not simply be exporters of cash crops to wealthier countries. And so this was the point when neoliberal was really organised against third worldism and what were at the time called the sort of third world states. And where they really found common cause with neoliberals in doing so. And I write in the book particularly about medicine from Frontier and how the French organisation formed a think tank called Liberty's Frontier aimed at combating third worldism in the development sector and really went to war metaphorically against arguments about structural inequality demands for economic redistribution and tried to shift emphasis on to the human rights violations of third world states at the expense of discussion of structural economic inequalities that were the legacy of colonial world. Actually, just sort of contemporary, I thought of you when I was looking at the debates between the mega civil war that was happening with I think Franco Swami wrote that the Indians are much more morally ready for the market. They don't have fun or whatever they just study all the time. They're good little workers. And I found this interesting because it seems like a certain elite ruling class believes that the US has now really failed in having these disciplined workers in the US and they're looking for other cultures or other people who are much more ready, disciplined for the market. And I found this interesting in the sense that the Magga has the two different wings. One is that it says Americans should actually focus on rebuilding them and then the other one who's much more of the capitalist wing like Elon Musk and the Swami who are like we don't care about America, it's going to import whoever is going to be there. not going to ruin the market. Like, make sure that they're not asking for unions or all this health care. They're just going to work nonstop and not really committed to saving America for the people, but actually just saving the concept by importing workers or only focusing on the part of the workers in the US that are good for them. And so this moral part, maybe you can discuss a little bit more about what you mean by the moral framework. And on that, maybe of neoliberalism being a philosophy that-- and I do look at it as a philosophy now. It's like a bunch of philosophers got together, thought of this. And then now it seems like neoliberalism is some really high, data-driven economic system or something. But they're just these kind of old, very racist, high-article lovers of empire who came up with this really more horrific version of liberalism. And how this plays out now, and what do you really mean by-- what does it look like to have a moral framework? Because I think the indoctrination part of human-- also, you're using human rights, but also the indoctrination part of every level where you're training and socially engineering people, because they might slip into their old natural ways. That has been something that's-- I've taken from your book much more seriously. And then maybe you can discuss that. I think when I think about the moral framework of neoliberalism, norm that is fundamental to many of them, I think, is submission. It's higher, who states this very explicitly, the need for submission to the incomprehensible order of the market. But I think that it's very much there through neoliberal thinking as a whole, that we need to be prepared to, on the one hand, individually work on ourselves and transform ourselves and discipline ourselves, because the economic conditions that we find around us are like facts of nature that we have to adapt ourselves to. And market competition is similarly a norm that should be treated as if it's a law of nature. And we need to position ourselves to win within those existing laws, rather than imagining that we could challenge them along with others or transform them. Now, I think today we're seeing really fundamental transformations in global economic power, political power. The Trump administration is obviously profoundly transformative, but also profoundly unstable. And there are numerous different strands within that project. And we will see how much they fit together. I mean, the kind of global subjection to the discipline of the market is the idea that justified the offshoring of industrial work from the United States that Trump is now railing against and claiming to bring back. You see people like Marco Rubio, who has this-- his office a little while back put out this report on the state of the working and non-working man in the United States, which is, on the one hand, a profound indictment of the state of US society and de-industrialization on the other, this profoundly conservative social vision about male power. But you see this vision playing out, as you say, with sort of forms of techno-libertarianism. And with deeply capitalist visions that owe enormous amounts to the more radical and libertarian wings of neoliberalism. So I think we're yet to see how these things will play out. One thing that I think it is not too early to say is that the moral order of globalized human rights that I talk about in the book is over. And I think that that order as the complement of a globalizing market society has been exhausted by the contradictions of that society, by its failures, and also by the successes of marginalized groups and of other countries to insert themselves into the language of this supposed universalism. And tried to do what Jacque-Ronsier talks about is verifying a quality. If we're all equal, then why not us? If all people are supposedly equal, then why should the United States be able to determine foreign policy for the globe? For example, so I think some of the successes in pushing the limits of the universalism of that previous moral order have led to the United States essentially rescinding the promise, the never-fulfilled promise of the universalism that underpinned this moral order in the first place. And I think we can't see that just as a Trump phenomenon. We saw it in the previous Trump administration, but it was very much pushed forward by the Biden administration who started talking constantly about the rules based international order and idea that went back to Obama and has a sort of nebulous and unclear relationship to something a little bit less nebulous called international law. But the rules based international order seemed to be whatever the US and their allies decided the rules were at any given moment. And you saw an attempt to back away from those institutions which actually had some kind of universal ascent amongst states, whether that was the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. And you saw the rise of a more sort of friend versus enemy style of international politics that I think Trump is now taking to sort of more extreme links at the same time as scrambling some of those understandings of who constitutes a friend and who constitutes an enemy. So I think we're in a very unstable time, but one way much of this moral order, the morals of the market is really being profoundly undermined. - Yeah, I find, you reference this a little bit, the Samuel Moin references a little bit more with libosum against itself, but I find the most interesting is how really indictment of neoliberalism is that they never really forced Israel to take on any of these kinds of, what they force like former colonies to take on with this human rights and protecting investors and so on. They never did this with Israel. They let them have a state, they let them have welfare, they had government intervention, government, building the market and so on. So because they wanted Israel to actually succeed, therefore they never actually forced any of these neoliberalism until like after it was already developed and so on. And so maybe you can end on with this whole of understanding rule-based order and how every other country had to abide by this global neoliberalism. There was one exception as usual, which was Israel. - Well, look, I mean, Israel certainly went through its own period of neoliberalization, but I think interestingly in the context of human rights, I mean, it's a truism that the US has been prepared to put up its hand and veto numerous, numerous successive resolutions that have attempted to hold Israel to the standards that other states are supposed to be held to. Now we know that human rights have never been universally upheld and Israel is a particularly glaring example of that. But I think that we've witnessed something distinct from that in the context of Israel's genocide in Gaza. And that is not just a failure to uphold the norms, but a failure even to espouse the norms. I think we've seen a profound backing away from ideas of human equality, from ideas of universalism where we're supposed to treat all people as equal. And I think Trump's latest almost parodic plans to build a river era on the sea in Gaza, expel its people and circulating AI videos of he and Netanyahu sipping cocktails with their shirts off on the beach is sort of takes that to an extreme length. But I think that one thing we saw quite clearly from Israeli leaders is that they were absolutely uninterested in really making claims about universal human rights and very well. willing to make simple assertions of racial superiority as the basis for their conduct. I think that we're really seeing a difference stage when the norms are not just violated and hypocritically upheld, but are actually disparaged. I think that the more recent demands to destroy the United Nations, when the UN, when it is where I was United Nations representative, went on camera and said that the UN officers in New York ought to be demolished, that seemed to me to be a pretty profound break with the previous order in which these rules were sort of where there was lip service played to the rules and institutions of international organisation and yet they were of course dishonored in practice. I think we're seeing something quite distinct here and I don't think that the existing order of human rights and the post-19, you know, the second world war, post-second world war international order will survive. qu и вер produce drama , , studied , , ,