The Morals of the Market:Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism

In this masterful book, Jessica Whyte explodes the common myth that neoliberalism and human rights are independent and incompatible projects. From the economists of the Mont Pèlerin Society to the humanitarians who founded Doctors without Borders, Whyte reveals a sometimes shocking covert history of the hijacking of human rights by neoliberal thinkers who recoded human liberty and dignity as the products of submission to a 'free market' and promoted inequality as a social good. The Morals of the Market is provocative, sobering, and indispensable reading for understanding how we find ourselves in our current state of rotten affairs.

Jessica Whyte’s new book provides a thorough, devastating and utterly convincing demonstration of the way neoliberal economists and thinkers hijacked once-revolutionary concepts of universal human rights, and turned them into weapons to be used against emancipatory and anti-colonial political projects all over the world. The full moral and political price of our abject surrender to ‘market necessities’ has never been so clearly calculated; anyone who reads this book will see that it’s high time we stopped paying it.

[An] illuminating new book.

Beautifully written, theoretically sophisticated, and excoriating all at the same time.

A compelling, rigorous, deep and passionate study of the morals underpinning human rights and neo-liberal markets

Perhaps the best book on the subject yet (...) a veritable treasure trove of riches (...) The Morals of the Market will be read and discussed for many years to come because Whyte has produced a rare work which makes interdisciplinary history and philosophy look not only easy, but necessary.

A brilliant new book (...) Engrossing and comprehensively researched, The Morals of the Market sparkles with erudite engagements across modern political theory that contextualises neoliberal thought.

A timely contribution to a field that, at least to some, could be facing its twilight. If we are to dislodge human rights of its condition of fellow travellers, it is important to maintain Whyte’s critical approach

Whyte sets out to tell the ‘story of how neoliberal thinkers made human rights the morals of the market’. On this score Whyte succeeds admirably: through a thorough, well-written, and cogent account of the work of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) and how its leading lights articulated a specifically moral account of the virtues of ‘free’ markets to embed and defend their civilizational ideals.

Jessica Whyte's new book, The Morals of the Market, demonstrates the kind of scholarship we all aspire to: insightful, thought-provoking, and, above all, accessible and engaging (...) a powerful narrative about how neoliberalism and human rights spread in tandem in a mutually constitutive fashion, implanting capitalist social relations across the world, and how human rights were instrumental in crashing alternative political projects, most notably welfarism and third world aspirations for global economic redistribution

What precisely is the relation between neoliberalism and human rights? Jessica Whyte’s elegant Morals of the Market tackles this question directly, skillfully, and insightfully (...) Morals of the Market is an excellent book, all the more so for its clarity and its combination of panoramic synthesis and issue-specific analysis

An excellent new book (...) The Morals of the Market succeeds on every count. This fascinating book has a lot of new and surprising things to teach us about human rights and neoliberalism, those longstanding and cherished objects of left critical theorization. And the lessons it teaches us about them both are essential if we are to properly understand their historical trajectories (and hence to perform the necessary political work of contesting, reframing, or refusing them in the present) (...) an utterly indispensable reference point for thinking about our contemporary political juncture.”

[a] thought-provoking and engaging study on the relationship between human rights and the rise of neoliberalism.

In an effortless and flowing writing style, Whyte confronts neoliberals with their own appalling words, woven into an astonishing and erudite critical synthesis. The book thus delivers a far-reaching and perceptive critique that fills a long-standing gap between human rights studies and analyses of neoliberalism.

In The Morals of the Market, Jessica Whyte breaks new ground in the study of neoliberal political thought and human rights. 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.

How might such a break [with neoliberalism] occur, and a more transformative conception of human rights be made mainstream? In making visible the morals of the market in so many forms, this book not only opens up the space for this question to be asked but will also undoubtedly enrich the reflections and responses of those who are willing to consider it.

With the precision of a chronicler but the reasoning of a philosopher, Whyte shows how self-described neoliberals (who at the time occupied key policymaking positions in transnational governance, like sections of the United Nations itself) fought to distinguish, from the melee of demands for rights, a strict baseline of civic and political rights.