Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 2 страница
Friedrich Hayek and the Morals of the Market
In December 1961, Hayek addressed the Congress of American Industry on ‘The Moral Elements of Free Enterprise.’ The congress, held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, was sponsored by The National Association of Manufacturers, which had a long history of challenging state welfare and organised labour, and attempting to ‘sell free enterprise the way Proctor and Gamble sold soap’.35 Hayek spoke alongside the professor and executive member of the American Meat Institute in Chicago, Herrell DeGraff, and his fellow MPS members and journalists John Davenport and Felix Morley, all of whom addressed questions of morals and values. Hayek’s message was that free enterprise required ‘not only moral standards but moral standards of a particular kind’.36 Like the manufacturers he was addressing, Hayek and his MPS companions had long been convinced that a market order required a conducive moral order. From their perspective, the rise of socialism and social democracy was, first of all, a moral problem. No free society would survive, the Austrian economist told this sympathetic business audience, without a moral climate that instils personal responsibility and regards it as just that people are rewarded materially based on how valuable their services are to their fellows.
Hayek provided a more developed account of the morals of a market society in his late work, Law, Legislation and Liberty. Evoking the fall of Rome – and the thesis of its great historian Edward Gibbon, who attributed that fall to a decline in ancient virtue – Hayek warned that, whether or not Gibbon was correct about Rome, ‘there can be no doubt that moral and religious beliefs can destroy a civilization’.37 For Hayek and those he brought together to form the Mont Pèlerin Society, the demise of the morals that sustained a market order threatened their own civilisation with destruction.
‘Morals’, in this context, referred both to sentiments about right and wrong action and to the system of informal rules of conduct that guide the action of individuals. Hayek distinguished morals from laws by arguing that morals lacked coercive enforcement, but that this did not make them any less crucial to the functioning of a market society. Indeed, Hayek believed that liberalism had taken a significant wrong turn in the nineteenth century, when the British liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill had begun to criticise the ‘tyranny of the prevailing morals’ thereby encouraging a disregard for moral traditions and a growing ‘permissiveness’ in society.38 Although Hayek argued there can be no single, absolute system of rules or morals independent of social organisation, he nonetheless contended that only one system of morals could make possible an open or ‘humanistic’ society in which individuals are valued as such and are relatively free to pursue their own plans.39
|
|
|
According to Hayek, a market society, in which people are guided primarily by expected monetary returns, ‘requires somewhat different moral views’ than one in which they strive towards shared goals.40 What Hayek called the ‘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.
This account of morals was deeply functionalist; the morals of the market, Hayek contended, function to sustain the only order that embraced ‘nearly all mankind’: the competitive market order.41 Given that moral rules exist to support the market order, Hayek urged that ‘conduciveness to that order be accepted as a standard by which all particular institutions are judged’.42 This was Hayek’s own version of the German ordoliberal conviction that economic policies must be systemgerech, or compatible with the whole economic system.43 This market-conduciveness, or compatibility, gave the neoliberals a criterion for assessing claims to human rights that was more precise than a simple distinction between civil and political rights and social and economic rights: to the extent rights supported market relations, the neoliberals actively promoted them; when claims for rights interfered with the competitive market, by requiring state intervention and non-market forms of obligation and redistribution, they opposed them as though the fate of civilisation depended on it.
|
|
|
Today, much critical work on human rights is devoted to deflating the notion that human rights are the codification of a moral sense originating in human nature. Such a claim has little critical purchase on neoliberal accounts of human rights. Hayek, for instance, explicitly rejected the view that morals and rules are ‘permanently implanted in an unalterable nature of man’.44 His mentor Mises had put it in these blunt terms decades earlier: ‘The fact is that Nature grants no rights at all’.45 Rejecting the dichotomy between natural law and rationally constructed rules, Hayek argued that culture, institutions and morals are ‘neither natural nor artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed’.46 Morals develop, he argued, through the unconscious selection of the values and institutions that provide those who submit to them with the greatest benefits. The morals of the market initially emerged in urban, commercial centres, Hayek argued, where substantive bonds were weaker and individuals more accustomed to cooler, more distant market relations with others.47
Hayek drew on the social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment to develop an evolutionary account of morality. Appropriating the work of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson – for whom human history supposedly passed through a sequence of stages, from the hunter to the herdsman to the farmer to the trader – Hayek argued that the evolution from the ‘small band’ to the ‘Great Society’ required the abandonment of feelings of personal loyalty and egalitarian commitments more suitable to tribal existence. It required that the purpose-driven rules of small societies, in which individuals worked together towards shared ends, were replaced by abstract rules applicable to large numbers of strangers – and ultimately to all of humanity.48 From this perspective, the transition to the market economy was achieved through (deeply resented) breaches of the solidarity that governed earlier social relations. ‘Man’, Hayek contended, ‘has been civilized very much against his wishes.’49
|
|
|
In attributing the development of morality to the ‘survival of the successful’, Hayek presented a racialised narrative that took for granted that those Europeans who had developed commercial relations were more successful than others.50 He saw their success as a result of their adoption of ‘moral conceptions which do not prescribe particular aims but rather general rules limiting the range of permitted actions’.51 In his contemporaries’ demands for social justice and social and economic rights Hayek saw atavistic attempts on the part of ‘the non-domesticated or un-civilized’ members of society to resurrect the morals of a ‘tribal society’.52 From such a perspective, socialism and social democracy were not merely economic threats to the productivity and efficiency of economic relations; they were civilisational regressions, the return of ‘suppressed primordial instincts’ that threatened the moral foundations of the competitive market.53
One of my key arguments here is that the neoliberal argument for the competitive market was itself moral and political, rather than strictly economic. Early neoliberals attributed to the market a series of anti-political virtues: checking and dispersing power, facilitating social cooperation, pacifying conflict, and securing individual liberty and rights. They presented commercial or ‘civil society’ as a space of mutually beneficial, voluntary relations that contrasted with the violence, coercion and conflict of the political realm. Market coordination was less a means to enhance productivity and efficiency than a substitute for the violence, coercion and despotism that they argued were endemic to politics – and especially to mass politics. Only the widespread adoption of the morals of the market, Hayek argued, offered ‘the distant hope of a universal order of peace’.
The Sweetness of Commerce
|
|
|
In extolling the pacifying virtues of the market, I argue that the neoliberals revived an older political argument for capitalism first identified by Albert Hirschman in his classic 1977 book The Passions and the Interests. There, Hirschman uncovered what he called the ‘doux-commerce’ (‘sweetness of commerce’) thesis, which, he argued, was conventional wisdom in the mid eighteenth century. Hirschman’s account of the moral virtues of the market began with a sentence in Baron de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, which he ultimately chose for his own book’s epigraph: ‘It is fortunate for men to be in a situation where, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked [méchants], they have nevertheless an interest in not being so.’54 The view that the interests could check the passions, Hirschman argued, was a message of salvation for a world trapped between the violence of the passions and the seeming ineffectiveness of reason.55 Far from viewing commerce as corrupting, as republican thinkers tended to do, Montesquieu praised it for its ‘spirit of frugality, economy, moderation, work, wisdom, tranquility, order and rule’.56 Commerce, he contended, is a source of gentleness, softness and polish, which ‘cures destructive prejudices’ and leads to more gentle mores.57 For Montesquieu, those who pursued their interests through the market stood in a relation of mutual need, and thus the ‘natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace’.58
Montesquieu wrote at a time when world trade was violent and dangerous, inseparable from colonial conquest and the slave trade. Marx mocked such accounts of the pacifying role of commerce in his writings on the ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital. After describing in garish detail the history of Dutch colonialism, with its secret prisons, assassinations, bribery and enslavement, he remarked sarcastically, ‘That is peaceful [doux] commerce!’ Yet, according to Hirschman, it was only when this violence ‘came home’ – with the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the social dislocation of the industrial revolution – that belief in the sweetness of commerce lost its grip on the European imagination. By the twentieth century, Hirschman concluded, no observer could still subscribe to this hopeful vision of the pacifying market. Its subsequent defenders therefore focused on its economic benefits, borrowing from Adam Smith to valorise the increased productivity and efficiency made possible by the division of labour. For most critics, the neoliberal thinkers exemplified this shift from a political to an economic justification for capitalism.
Unlike Hirschman, I argue that a version of this justification of capitalism was central to neoliberal thought in the inauspicious circumstances of the twentieth century. For Hayek, who described his own project as doing ‘for the twentieth century what Montesquieu had done for the eighteenth’, and for his neoliberal colleagues, the challenge was to revive the argument that a society coordinated through the competitive market would replace the coercion, conquest and conflict endemic to politics with voluntary, mutually beneficial, harmonious social relations. The tendency to view neoliberalism as the dominance of the economy over all other spheres of life has obscured its distinctive political argument for the competitive market. Throughout the twentieth century, neoliberals argued that the demise of market competition was a threat to individual freedom that augured the rule of a coercive, bureaucratic power. They faulted socialism and social democracy for politicising distribution and replacing consensual market relations between individuals with violent sectional conflicts over ends. In the wars of the twentieth century, they saw the inevitable result of a turn away from the market economy.
Variants of Hirschman’s thesis run through Mises’s argument that, if not for the greater productivity of the division of labour, there would be no sentiments of sympathy or good will, but only ‘endless bloody fighting’.59 It is central to Hayek’s description of the market as a ‘catallaxy’ – a term derived from the Greek verb katallatein, which meant both to exchange and ‘to turn from an enemy into a friend’.60 It informs Röpke’s argument that allowing individuals to pursue their interests through the market leads to harmonious social coordination, while the pursuit of interests through the political process brings ‘millions of conflicting interests’ into play.61 And it appears even in the positivist Friedman’s argument that the use of ‘political channels’ strains the ‘social cohesion essential for a stable society’, while the use of the market reduces tensions by making it unnecessary for individuals to agree on ultimate ends.62
For the neoliberals, the competitive market was not simply a more efficient technology for the distribution of goods and services; it was the guarantor of individual freedom and rights, and the necessary condition of social peace. If neoliberal thinkers and human rights activists could find common cause, as I suggest they could, this is largely because the concerns of twentieth-century neoliberals were far less narrowly economic than existing accounts tend to allow.
What Do Neoliberal Human Rights Do?
The Chicago School economist Deirdre McCloskey holds up the drafting of the UDHR as evidence that market capitalism promotes the ‘temperance to educate oneself in business and in life, to listen to the customer humbly, to resist the temptations to cheat, to ask quietly whether there might be a compromise here – Eleanor Roosevelt negotiating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948’.63 A recent defender of human rights similarly argues that the drafting of human rights standards provides a model for ‘deliberative, nonviolent, and noncoercive processes of global governance and change’ that could be extended to other areas.64 No doubt the drafting of the UDHR required compromise between defenders of rival political, economic and religious systems. But one thing the drafters largely agreed on – and Roosevelt was no exception – was that the unrestrained market produced not sweetness and civility but conflict and disorder. Looking back in 1966, Hayek was far less complimentary than McCloskey about the compromises that produced the UDHR: the document, he argued, was an incoherent attempt to merge the liberal rights tradition with a starkly different one derived from ‘the Marxist Russian Revolution’.65
Throughout the book, I examine the neoliberal understanding of human rights alongside the diverse conceptions of rights and obligations that motivated the drafters of the UDHR and the two legally binding human rights covenants. Along with classical civil and political rights, these documents enshrined extensive lists of social and economic rights, and, in the case of the covenants, gave pride of place to the right of nations to self-determination. For the neoliberals of the time, the UN human rights process looked less like a model of peaceful market cooperation and more like the globalisation of the ‘collectivism’ that threatened at home. They believed the attempt to secure rights to social welfare and national self-determination would threaten the market order and ‘Western civilisation’. However, I show that, despite their horror at the ‘collectivism’ and ‘politicisation’ that characterised the human rights process in the United Nations, the neoliberals did not simply turn away from human rights; rather, they developed their own account of human rights as moral and legal supports for a liberal market order.
In 1992 Friedman was asked about the original purpose of the Mont Pèlerin Society. There was ‘no doubt’, he replied, that its original purpose was ‘to promote a classical, liberal philosophy, that is, a free economy, a free society, socially, civilly and in human rights’.66 Coming from a thinker who described the authoritarian regime of Chile’s General Pinochet as an economic and political ‘miracle’, this invocation of human rights appears out of place.67 After all, human rights NGOs came to prominence in the 1970s precisely for contesting the torture and disappearances that accompanied neoliberal shock treatment in the Southern Cone. According to a prominent critical view, neoliberal emphases on competitive markets and austerity were ‘inherently inimical to the protection of human rights’, resting on completely different normative foundations.68 As a recent primer on human rights puts it, ‘neoliberalism is one logic in the world today; human rights is the other’.69 From this perspective, the universalisation of human rights and the extension of global capitalism and the world market are ‘the two major, and often competing, globalising forces that strut the world stage’.70
But Friedman’s account deserves to be taken seriously, even if it illuminates the time in which he was speaking more than it does the mid twentieth century. While one scholar has noted that human and political rights were ‘notably absent’ from the 1947 MPS statement of aims, at that time human rights were not yet an obvious aspect of a liberal tradition.71 The phrase ‘human rights’ is similarly absent from the Oxford Manifesto, issued that same year by representatives from nineteen liberal parties as a statement of principles of the ‘Liberal International’.72 The discourse of human rights was still under construction, and there was no consensus even among liberals on the relationship between the newer language of human rights and earlier affirmations of the ‘rights of man’, ‘fundamental rights’, humanitarianism, or individual freedom under the rule of law. The neoliberals were active participants in that process of construction. Human rights played a significant and overlooked role in neoliberals’ mid-century efforts to challenge socialism, social democracy and state planning, and neoliberal thinkers contributed more than has been acknowledged to the version of human rights that came to prominence decades later. By 1992, when Friedman spoke, the neoliberal argument that only a liberal market economy could foster human rights was taken as self-evident by many major international human rights NGOs.
The neoliberals saw human rights and competitive markets as mutually constitutive. In his bestselling polemic The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argued that all claims made on behalf of individuals could be attributed to the rise of the ‘commercial spirit’. ‘ “The ideas of 1789” – liberty, equality, fraternity – are characteristically commercial ideals which have no other purpose but to secure certain advantages to individuals’, he wrote.73 For the author of The Road to Serfdom and his fellow neoliberals, the competitive market made individual rights possible, but the market’s functioning also depended on the rule of law and the ‘recognition of the inalienable rights of the individual, inviolable rights of man’.74 Hayek’s account of the rights of man owed much to his more utilitarian mentor Mises, whose 1922 study of socialism argued that individual rights had emerged ‘hand in hand with the development of capitalism’. Once ‘men’ gained economic freedom, Mises argued, they soon desired it elsewhere, and sought ‘legal recognition of the subjective rights of citizens’.75 Rights, according to this perspective, do not inhere naturally in the human person; rather, they arise only when the capitalist division of labour allows individuals to pursue their own interests and values, freeing them from the arbitrary power of others. It was only capitalism, Mises argues, that made human relationships material and calculable, and brought freedom from the heavens down to earth: ‘Such freedom is no natural right.’76
Дата добавления: 2021-01-21; просмотров: 76; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!