Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 9 страница
Like the welfare states that preceded them, the social and economic rights in the UDHR were products of compromise, and many delegates sought to ensure that these rights implied no obligations on states. The United States delegation led the attempt to detach these rights from more radical political challenges to an economic order based on private appropriation and labour exploitation. Drawing on the experience of the New Deal, the US delegation sought a compromise that would transform political demands for redistribution into flexible standards, adjustable in line with policy considerations, and thus never on the same level as civil and political rights. While T. H. Marshall, who pioneered the idea of a progressive movement from civil to political to economic rights, sought to extend the ‘status of freedom’ to combat a ‘hierarchical caste-like system of class’, the drafters of the UDHR were more concerned to ensure that social and economic rights did not unduly disrupt the status inequalities of civil society.22 They reasserted a gendered division of labour, in which secure male employment and female domestic labour would be bolstered by the state provision of a social safety net. The colonial powers (notably France and the United Kingdom), along with the United States, also sought to preserve racial segregation and colonial exploitation by bolstering the legitimacy of racial discrimination as a mechanism for determining entitlement.23
This did not prevent the neoliberals of the 1940s from treating social and economic rights as a threat to freedom, individual rights and personal morality. Any attempt to organise society to provide for economic wellbeing, Hayek suggested, would destroy the spontaneous market order. Reorganising society on the model of the household was ‘totalitarian’, he argued. Today the word ‘totalitarianism’ evokes images of gulags and death camps. For the neoliberals who helped to pioneer the concept, its semantic sphere was much broader, encompassing all ‘collectivist’ interventions into the market order. ‘The common features of all collectivist systems’, Hayek wrote, ‘may be described, in a phrase ever-dear to socialists of all schools, as the deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal.’24 The various collectivisms differed in the goals towards which they wished to direct society, he acknowledged; but they all differed from liberalism in refusing the supremacy of individual ends, and were therefore ‘totalitarian in the true sense of this new word which we have adopted to describe the unexpected but nevertheless inseparable manifestations of what in theory we call collectivism’.25 In demands for ‘freedom from want’, the neoliberals of the 1930s and 1940s saw a threat to freedom, to morality, and to ‘Western civilisation’ itself.
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Neoliberalism and the State as Household
In 1968, soon after his critique of the UDHR, Hayek published a brief essay on the term ‘economy’. Much confusion had been caused by the use of the same word to refer to two distinct phenomena, he argued: on the one hand, ‘economy’ referred to the deliberate arrangement of resources in the pursuit of a unitary hierarchy of ends, as in a household, an organisation or an enterprise; on the other, it referred to the overall structure produced by the interrelation of these households, organisations and enterprises, which we often call ‘a social, or national, or world “economy” and often also simply an “economy”’.26 According to Hayek, the use of the term ‘economy’ to refer to the overall market order smuggled in the idea that society as a whole should be organised on the model of the household in order to provide for people’s needs. This confusion, he argued, had brought about a profound transformation in both law and morals; while a spontaneous order requires abstract, universal rules that enable each individual to preserve ‘his’ own ‘protected domain’, the rules of an organisation are directed to the achievement of specific ends.27 Hayek believed that his contemporaries’ preference for the pursuit of such deliberate ends reflected a decline of the morals of the market and the revival of a ‘tribal’ morality suited to the small group.
In seeking to confine the term ‘economy’ to organisations such as the family and the enterprise, Hayek drew on its ancient Greek origins in the word oikonomia, which signified the management of a household – an oikos. The multiple economic relations that defined the ancient oikos – those between masters and slaves, fathers and children, husbands and wives – were governed to ensure the household’s well-ordered functioning. The freedom that characterised Greek political life, for that minority of the population who could participate in it, relied on the labour of slaves and women, who were confined to the oikos. The household was devoted not to freedom but to the necessities of biological life, and was ruled by a household head with ‘uncontested, despotic powers’.28 Against this household model, Hayek borrowed the term ‘catallaxy’ to refer to the extended market order.29 Derived from the Greek verb katallatein, which meant both to exchange and ‘to turn from an enemy into a friend’, catallaxy embodied the neoliberal belief that the market was a peaceful realm of voluntary relations grounded in mutual interest. It served to distinguish a market society from the coercion and despotism the neoliberals took to be intrinsic to the political pursuit of shared ends.
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Hayek’s critique of the household model of the economy was not original. The nineteenth-century political philosopher John Stuart Mill was the first to criticise the belief that political economy ‘is to the state, what domestic economy is to the family.’30 The management of a household is not a science but an art, Mill contended in 1844; it is, in Aristotle’s terms, a form of phronesis or practical wisdom, governed by maxims of prudence, and aimed at securing the greatest physical comfort or enjoyment with a given means. Political economy, in contrast, was not a governmental paradigm, but a scientific one; not the art of household management writ large, but a science with its own laws and truths. In 1930, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, with whom Hayek would share the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics, had referred to Mill to criticise economists for depicting society on the model of a household, with a single common purpose, and treating economics as ‘social housekeeping’.31
A decade before Hayek, in 1958, Hannah Arendt had drawn on Myrdal to criticise the modern tendency to model ‘the people’ on the family and entrust their care to ‘a gigantic nation-wide administration of housekeeping’.32 For both Myrdal and Arendt, the collective establishment of ends was necessarily political, and could not be determined on the despotic model of the household head. For Hayek and the neoliberals, in contrast, the critique of the household model served to discredit all politics and to privilege the market as resource-allocator. For them, there were only two options: the simple conditions in which ‘the father can supervise the entire economic management’, as Mises put it, or a system of monetary calculation and market prices in which decisions on the allocation of resources are removed entirely from political oversight.33
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The neoliberals attributed the breakdown of the ‘open’ market society and the rise of the household model to what the conservative Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset called the ‘revolt of the masses’. Writing in 1930, Ortega y Gasset argued that standards built up over centuries of European dominance were being torn down by ‘persons not specially qualified’, who no longer knew their place. He traced this levelling to the French Revolution’s rights of man and citizen, which he argued had given the ‘average man’ a new sense of mastery and dignity.34 The neoliberal thinkers were deeply ambivalent about what Röpke called the ‘Janus-faced revolution’. While the ‘ideas of 1789’ had created the air which all now breathed, Röpke wrote in 1942, nonetheless ‘the revolution was a catastrophe’.35 The neoliberals claimed the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as part of the liberal heritage – the ideas of 1789, liberty, equality, and fraternity, as Hayek put it, were ‘characteristically commercial ideas’.36 But in the (Jacobin) Declaration of 1793, which granted sovereignty to the people and stressed the ‘common welfare’, they saw the beginning of the transformation of society into a single organisation. The years 1789 to 1792 ‘were those of the liberal revolution for freedom’, the German ordoliberal Alexander Rüstow argued. ‘In 1792, the totalitarian revolution for domination was begun.’37
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The neoliberals attributed the French revolution’s ‘totalitarian’ turn to the demands of the masses for economic welfare, and to the introduction of ‘state control of prices, commandeering of supplies, [and] compulsory rationing’.38 Here, their analysis was close to that of Arendt, who depicted the French Revolution’s turn towards economic equality as the eruption of the concerns of the household into the political sphere. Arendt argued that, just as for pre-moderns, the distinction between rich and poor was natural and unavoidable; the French revolutionaries asserted the rights of the people against ‘tyranny and oppression, not against exploitation and poverty’.39 In the transformation of the rights of man into the ‘rights of the Sans-Culottes’ (rights to ‘dress, food and the reproduction of the species’), Arendt saw the turning point of all subsequent revolutions.40 For the neoliberals, too, the attempt to deal with poverty by political means marked the ruin of freedom. The ‘finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away’, Hayek wrote, citing the Catholic liberal Lord Acton, ‘because the passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom’.41
The French philosopher and early member of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), Bertrand de Jouvenel, paid particular attention to the role of the French Revolution in the decline of liberty. Jouvenel, who was born into an aristocratic family and inherited the title of ‘Baron’, upheld the fate of individual rights during the revolution as proof that all revolutions augment power, rather than restricting it. In On Power, first published in 1945, he argued that, despite its striking proclamation that ‘man, as man, had certain sacred rights’, the French Revolution had annihilated the rights it claimed to protect.42 Identifying a fundamental conflict between democratic sovereignty and the rule of law, Jouvenel contended that the Revolution had ultimately placed a new, unified national subject on the throne, and elevated the rights of the whole over those of the individual.
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’.43 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’.44 It was US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he believed, who embodied the sacrifice of individual rights for social rights.45 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’.46 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’.47
Neoliberalism was never a narrowly economic doctrine. The early neoliberals were wary of the very idea of the economy, and horrified by what Hayek described as the reinterpretation in economic terms of the old political ideals of liberty, equality and security.48 Repeatedly, they singled out President Roosevelt’s 1941 ‘Four Freedoms’ speech – which added ‘freedom from want’, and ‘freedom from fear’ to the more traditional freedoms of speech and worship – as evidence of the contemporary confusion of the market and household. Roosevelt ended his speech by declaring that freedom ‘means the supremacy of human rights everywhere’. For the neoliberals, in contrast, Roosevelt’s speech marked the demise of all human rights. Hayek argued that Roosevelt had transformed an ‘older liberal tradition of human rights’, entailing limits to the power wielded over individuals, into positive claims for benefits.49 These new rights, Hayek argued, could not be legally enforced without destroying the liberal order that the old civil rights aimed to secure. Social and economic rights would only be possible, he argued – speaking specifically of the UDHR – if ‘the whole of society were converted into a single organization, that is, made totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word’.50
A New Deal
In a 1932 speech in Detroit, where 223,000 people were then unemployed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced a new vision of economic life.51 From ‘the days of the cave man to the days of the automobile, the philosophy of “letting things alone” has resulted in the jungle law of the survival of the so-called fittest’, the man who would soon be president told the assembled crowd.52 Far from being a peaceful realm of mutually beneficial, voluntary relations, the market, Roosevelt said, was governed by the ‘jungle law’ of free competition and individual responsibility. The stock market crash of 1929 had discredited laissez-faire liberalism, which had launched its fight against the feudal order partly as a critique of state paternalism in the name of individual freedom and rights.53 Against the ‘jungle law’ of the free market, Roosevelt outlined a corporatist vision of a reconciled human family, in which government would provide worker’s compensation, child support, old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and public health programmes. Roosevelt drew on the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno, which declared it an ‘intolerable abuse’ for mothers to be forced to work outside the home ‘to the neglect of their proper cares and duties’. Noting that the followers of laissez-faire had decried state welfare measures as ‘paternalistic’, he responded: ‘All right, if they are paternalistic, I am a father.’54
In declaring himself the father of Detroit’s working class, Roosevelt placed himself in a position long occupied by the industrial magnate Henry Ford, who had pioneered a paternalist mode of government predicated on high wages, working-class consumption, women’s unpaid labour in the home, intense disciplinary surveillance of working-class households, and brutal suppression of industrial action. As president, Roosevelt’s New Deal took over central planks of Henry Ford’s model by combining welfare provision with racial segmentation and discrimination, a gendered division of labour, state paternalism and social pacification. He established a racialised compact that mediated the struggle between state, labour and business, and positioned a ‘white working class’ in jobs that were more secure and better paid than those of non-white workers.55
The same year he made his Detroit speech, local police and security personnel from the Ford Motor Company opened fire with machine-guns on a ‘hunger march’ of unemployed workers. The workers were bound for Ford’s River Rouge Plant to present a list of demands, which included not only the rehiring of the unemployed and fuel to tide them over through winter, but also an end to racial discrimination and the right to unionise.56 In this climate of radical political agitation and violence (the attack on the march had killed five and injured more than twenty others), Roosevelt sought to depoliticise economic welfare. ‘I am afraid that some of you people today in Detroit have been talking politics’, he told his audience. ‘Well, I am not going to. I want to talk to you about Government. That is a very different thing.’57
Roosevelt may have sought to distinguish government from politics, but, for the neoliberals, any challenge to the role of the market in distributing resources was a political threat to an open society. If the neoliberals were vehement opponents of the New Deal (and of the post-war welfare state), this was certainly not because they wanted to ‘talk politics’, or because they objected to the perpetuation of a sexual division of labour and racial segmentation. Rather, they believed that state-welfarism cushioned people from the consequences of their actions, and thereby undermined ‘the moral and social health of the nations’.58 Wilhelm Röpke provided a succinct description of the difference in social philosophies that divided liberals from defenders of the welfare state. Those, like himself, who were concerned with the foundations of liberal civilisation, he argued, held up ‘the ideal of the well-ordered house – security through individual effort supplemented by mutual aid’.59 On the other side was a philosophy of collectivism, massification and family breakdown, which was embraced by demagogues and used to manipulate the masses. Holding up Roosevelt as the paradigmatic figure of such demagoguery, Röpke put the point in blunt terms: all talk of ‘freedom from want’ kills genuine freedom.60
Wilhelm Röpke and the Revolt of the Masses: Conservative Neoliberalism
To date, the bulk of scholarship on the intersection between neoliberalism and socially conservative family-values politics has focused on the United States, in an attempt to understand how seemingly amoral neoliberal economists made common cause with the moralism of the neoconservative right. In her brilliant account of the place of the family in neoliberalism, Melinda Cooper argues that, although they eschewed the ‘overt moralism of social conservatives’, Chicago and Virginia School neoliberals rejected the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s because they worried about the economic costs of family breakdown and the weakening of the family’s privatised social-welfare function.61 Cooper follows the pioneering approach of Wendy Brown, whose American Nightmare’ explains the compatibility of the ‘fierce moral-political rationality’ of neoconservatism with ‘market-political rationality’ as a product of the neoliberal weakening of democratic values, which enables the ‘moralism, statism, and authoritarianism’ of neoconservatism – even as the latter aims to compensate for some of the former’s effects.62 Such accounts undoubtedly illuminate our understanding of the United States, where Chicago economists such as Gary Becker mused about replacing marriage entirely with voluntary, short-term contractual relations between individuals of any gender, while social conservatives promoted ‘traditional marriage’ and railed against the breakdown of the nuclear family.
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