In The Morals of the Market, Jessica Whyte breaks new ground in the study of neoliberal political thought and human rights. Whereas the social-scientific literature often assumes that human rights constitute a bulwark against neoliberal capitalism, Whyte argues that in certain cases the former has instead served to justify the latter. Whyte’s study specifically examines how neoliberal justifications of competitive markets and individual property rights were built on racialized narratives that placed “Western civilization” over and above colonial and postcolonial societies, which were deemed inimical to what Friedrich von Hayek once called “the morals of the market.” In a novel reading of original texts, Whyte shows that postwar neoliberal intellectuals revived an eighteenth-century argument about the “sweetness of commerce”—as famously depicted by Albert Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests—which held that the cold, self-interested character of market relations tempers the hot, unruly nature of human passions. While the neoliberals wielded a version of this argument in their effort to blunt the power of ascendant postcolonial nation-states, Whyte suggests, they also recast it through a generalized dichotomy wherein markets yield peace and politics breeds violence.

Even though the book intersects with recent histories by Melinda Cooper, Adom Getachew, Samuel Moyn, and Quinn Slobodian, among others, Whyte’s intervention is both original and remarkable for how it weaves together competing conceptions of rights, appeals to humanity, and visions of international law and political economy. It specifically departs from the debates among the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) drafters at the United Nations in 1948—including Charles Malik (Lebanon), P.C. Chang (China), Hernando Santa Cruz (Chile), and Eleanor Roosevelt (United States)—and from the discussions of neoliberal intellectuals who founded the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) in 1947, including Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek (Austria), Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow (Germany), William Rappard (Switzerland), and Milton Friedman (United States). Whyte shows that, in the wake of World War II and the so-called crisis of civilization, the question of rights shaped both the form and content of the postwar political, economic, and legal order.

The first three chapters form a seamless dialogue between the UDHR drafters and the MPS founders—so seamless that, at times, one forgets that this dialogue only became explicit in the following decades and, at other times, one loses orientation to the chronological relationship between them. In her study of the UDHR’s drafting, Whyte illustrates how the national representatives debated Western versus alternative approaches to human rights with profound philosophical and political stakes, including the meaning of individual and group rights, freedom of religion and conscience, and relative standards of living in the colonies. The Western conception of individual rights that prevailed over non-Western conceptions in the UDHR, we learn from Whyte, later dovetailed with the neoliberals’ own defense of Western civilization against the alleged “dangers” of non-Western societies (the subject of chapter 1). While Rüstow criticized “idolization of the standard of living,” for instance, Mises claimed that “the very idea of a ‘physiological minimum of subsistence’ was an invention of ‘demagogues,’” because it presupposed a knowledge claim about individual needs and denied the diversity of consumer preferences (pp. 107–8). The UDHR’s rights to social welfare and collective self-determination were, in this sense, socialist bricks on what Hayek had called the “road to serfdom” just a few years earlier. Because “the East” lacked the “civilizing” ethos of Western individualism, according to Mises, postcolonial nation-states were inherently prone to communist ideology and abuses of political power. By drawing on older arguments about the peacefulness of market exchange, Whyte explains, “Mises portrayed civilization as inextricably economic and racial” (p. 58).

Although the neoliberals were staunch opponents of social, economic, and cultural rights, they did not reject rights tout court. Instead, they increasingly sought to narrow and reframe the meaning of human rights such that individual property rights were placed at their very heart (the subject of chapter 2). “Property rights are not in conflict with human rights,” as Milton Friedman explained in the late 1970s. “On the contrary, they are themselves the most basic of human rights and an essential foundation for other human rights” (p. 167). Rights to property and the free movement of capital thus became central in preventing postcolonial states and transnational agreements, such as the New International Economic Order (NIEO), from developing alternative arrangements of production, redistribution, and trade (the subject of chapter 3). Following a fascinating archival vignette about the MPS members’ rejection of Rüstow’s critique of colonialism, Whyte observes that the neoliberals conceived imperialism not as “the highest stage of capitalism,” as Lenin would have it, but as the “politicization of the economy.” In the postwar period, they were specifically indicting European social democrats who were administering the colonies in ways inimical to free-market principles. The neoliberals formed a front against the demands of postcolonial leaders by separating political sovereignty from economic ownership and by distinguishing the “coercive” sphere of politics from the “peaceful” realm of market exchange. The neoliberals thus pursued what the Ghanaian intellectual and politician Kwame Nkrumah called “neocolonialism”: the attempt to strip the power of postcolonial states to regulate and expropriate the private ownership of capital in their territories (as Getachew has also illuminated) and at “encasing the market” (in Slobodian’s coinage) through national and international law.

The neoliberal attempt to legitimate Chile’s authoritarian government with a free-market constitution is a case in point (and the subject of chapter 4). Here Whyte examines Friedman’s and Hayek’s well-known justifications of Pinochet’s regime—that both economic and political freedom were greater under Pinochet than under his democratically elected predecessor Salvador Allende—in a novel way. Taking issue with Naomi Klein’s suggestion in The Shock Doctrine that the neoliberals were cynical economists using Chile as a laboratory for their technical prescriptions, Whyte convincingly argues that this was less an exceptional experiment than a consistent part of their concrete program. The effort to separate politics from market relations and to “depoliticize” civil society implied that the most foundational freedom is the freedom to participate in the market. Thus state coercion to ensure functioning markets is legitimate, whereas political challenges that interfere with markets are illegitimate. A “liberal dictator,” in Hayek’s words, is preferable to a “democratic government lacking in liberalism” (p. 172). Meanwhile NGOs like Amnesty International were permitted in Chile, Whyte suggests, precisely because they cast human rights in an apolitical light—as pertaining to the most egregious forms of individual suffering (torture) and censorship (freedom of conscience and religion), rather than to basic social needs and substantive economic resources. Through a case study of another NGO, Liberté sans Frontières (LSF), Whyte contends that human rights became not just “powerless companions” that accompanied the rise of neoliberalism, as Samuel Moyn has argued, but rather “fellow travelers” with a similar overarching and individualizing logic (the subject of chapter 5).

Despite Whyte’s significant and compelling interpretation of neoliberal discursive strategies and the growing role of human rights within them, the book’s sometimes sweeping narrative may tend to overemphasize the degree to which the neoliberals relied on human rights appeals to advance their project and the degree to which human rights discourse was fully “neoliberalized” beyond the two main cases it considers. What I would like to consider more closely here, however, is the extent to which the study may tend to blur rather than differentiate among the various currents of neoliberal thought, thereby overlooking important ways in which neoliberal concepts and positions changed over time.

This can be seen in the book’s titular concept, “the morals of the market.” Like the recent books by Melinda Cooper and Wendy Brown, among others, Whyte’s book is part of a growing trend to untangle neoliberalism from “economism” and to focus on the “extra-economic” components of this multidimensional tradition of thought. Yet unlike these works, Whyte is also advancing a historical claim about the impetus of both Hayek’s intellectual project and the neoliberal movement writ large. Whyte’s reading of the rise of neoliberalism suggests, “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 civilization with destruction” (p. 11). However, in making “the morals of the market” the book’s interpretive linchpin and in suggesting neoliberalism was “above all” a moral project, this account runs into a few issues. The first is that, because of the Chicago School’s and Virginia School’s “economism” (which is notably also attributed to Mises, the herald of “consumer sovereignty”), Whyte leaves them out of her historical account before bringing them back in toward the end of the book. Another issue is that the “morals of the market”—defined by Whyte as “a set of individualist, commercial values that prioritized the pursuit of self-interest above the development of common purposes” (p. 11)—is a rare and rather vague concept that neither had a central place in Hayek’s work nor conforms to common understandings of “moral conservatism.”

Additionally, and perhaps more significantly, the book may initially read Hayek’s embrace of traditional morals backward—that is, proceeding from his later works like Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973) and running back to earlier works like The Road to Serfdom (1944)—thereby merging rather than distinguishing between differences and shifts within his oeuvre. In an opening section titled “Friedrich Hayek and the Morals of the Market,” Whyte cites Law, Legislation and Liberty at length, and The Constitution of Liberty (1962) once, to elaborate Hayek’s view of morality as the basis of the neoliberal program. But such arguments about unconscious moral development and cultural evolution can scarcely be found in the early Hayek. Although Road to Serfdom does treat the subject of morality, Hayek’s account is different from what Whyte sometimes suggests; for example, when she debunks scholars of neoliberalism who focus on homo economicus by citing a line from chapter 14 of Road to Serfdom that hails the “moral values” of the nineteenth century. In this very chapter, however, Hayek’s main intention was precisely the opposite: namely, to combat the “End of Economic Man” thesis popularized by Peter Drucker at the time, as well as the rise of “Economophobia” more generally. Though less frequently in Road to Serfdom than in his later writings, Hayek does identify the question of morals with the domain of individualism (and turns the latter into a kind of Western “civilizationalism”), while warning of socialism precisely because it contains thicker commitments to moral “collectivism.” But whereas Hayek’s later work interprets moral development as an unconscious selection of values and institutions that increasingly correspond to impersonalized market structures, his early work is less a defense of conservative morals and family values than an economic critique of socialist planning and its alleged tendency toward a homogeneous system of morals. In other words, if Hayek’s later work tends to collectivize traditional morals in and beyond the market, his early work is more focused on combating the dangers of moral collectivization in socialism.

Insofar as the seeds of Hayek’s later account can be discerned in The Road to Serfdom, which they can indeed, the attention Whyte gives to moral concerns in early neoliberalism is important and quite novel. For example, her reading allows us to perceive important parallels between the Austrians and the German ordoliberals, such as their distinction between individualism and collectivism that blends into a defense of “the West” and a critique of socialism as “civilizational regression.” Yet one question a reader might pose to Whyte (and to Hayek himself, for that matter) concerns the capaciousness of the term “morals.” This interpretive dilemma pertains not only to Hayek’s suggestion that “individualism” can be a kind of collective morality without being “collectivist.” It also concerns the problem of ascribing a consistent and coherent account of morality throughout his writings, such that morals are simultaneously equated with individualism, markets, spontaneous order, conservative cultural mores, traditional family values, Christianity, and a racially lined concept of Western civilization. What I am suggesting, in short, is that Hayek’s thinking on morals changed over time, as did that of other neoliberals, and that Whyte’s intervention serves as a welcome invitation to further explore the differences within and between these thinkers, especially in the interwar and postwar periods.

What results from Whyte’s study is a striking and more vivid picture of neoliberal and ordoliberal approaches to international economic order as an inherently civilizational and racialized political project. By piecing together the theory and the politics of these intellectuals and by placing them in dialogue with overlooked adversaries, this book makes a significant contribution to the historical and theoretical literature on neoliberalism, law, and political economy. Among the most profound implications of Whyte’s argument, perhaps, is that the strict bifurcation of human rights and political economy by scholars and practitioners alike comes with profound consequences—indeed, precisely of the kind that the neoliberals themselves prescribed.