Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 12 страница
The German ordoliberals similarly criticised what Rüstow called the ‘idolisation of the standard of living’.146 They rejected the materialism of what Röpke dismissively dubbed ‘standard-of-life-ism’, and the attempt to fight the Cold War on the terrain of economic productivity.147 Both men saw consumerism as a key marker of a materialistic mass society, and they bemoaned the fact that, in West Germany, social status was increasingly measured in ‘radiograms, television sets, refrigerators’.148 Drawing on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which devolves responsibility to the individual, the family and the local community, the ordoliberals articulated what Rüstow called a Vitalpolitik, which aimed to overcome massification and secure the dignity and contentment of the individual.149 While Mises even disputed that there is a natural need for a fixed number of daily calories, the ordoliberals sought to re-naturalise the family within the social order. Vitalpolitik aimed to reinforce what Rüstow called the ‘eternal family’ – that is, the natural, anthropological unit, rooted in human nature, with responsibility for the welfare of its members.150
If these different neoliberal positions could unite, it was because their rejection of the standard of living was primarily a response to the threat that standardising would lead to equalising. Hayek’s colleagues largely shared his endorsement of minimal state provision for the truly impoverished. In The Humane Economy, Röpke contrasted ‘a state which occasionally rescues some unfortunate individual from destitution’ with another, where, in the name of equality, private income is diverted through the welfare state.151 With typical nostalgia, he argued that, in ‘the old days’, public assistance was intended as a temporary substitute for self-provision, and was therefore ‘meant to safeguard only a certain minimum’. Now, in contrast, public services were becoming the rule, ‘often with the hardly veiled intention of meeting maximal, or indeed, luxury standards’.152 Posing what was then a ‘heretical question’, Röpke wondered if it would be better if the welfare state were abolished, ‘except for an indispensable minimum’, and the money saved directed to nongovernmental social services.153 Responding to the Labour Party’s demand that the poverty line and welfare payments should rise to give welfare recipients a share in rising prosperity, Hagenbuch similarly retorted: ‘In a society of millionaires, the purpose of the Welfare State would be to ensure that the sick, the unemployed and the aged were millionaires also.’154
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As well as being minimal, a compatible social policy would be targeted, employing ‘much more discrimination in the payment of benefits’.155 The neoliberals sought to return to the time prior to the British economist William Beveridge’s proposal, which influenced the introduction of the welfare state, to provide social insurance ‘as of right and without means test’.156 The neoliberals harked back to the household means-test, which was one of the most hated aspects of the poverty-relief of the 1930s. Like the Ford Company’s intrusive paternalism, the family means-test had subjected relief recipients to invasive and humiliating investigations of their finances and savings. Continuing a history of deterrence that had characterised poor relief since the Poor Law of 1834, the means-test treated accepting relief as a matter of social disgrace.157 Like the earlier Poor Laws, it was an object of ‘passionate resentment and embittered feeling’ among working people, as the General Council of the Trade Union Council put it, adding: ‘We hate it with the same intensity that we hate the thought of the workhouse.’158 By treating the family as an economic unit for the purposes of determining eligibility, the means-test undermined unemployed men’s status in the family, forcing them to depend on the wages of their wives or, more commonly, their children. By putting white working-class men in a position of dependence long reserved for women and children, the family means-test was widely interpreted as a crisis of both masculinity and the working-class family.
Neoliberal Paternalism
It has often been noted that a liberal revival that came to prominence as a critique of the paternalism of the welfare state ended up expanding state involvement in the welfare system. Neoliberal welfarism, critics note, enlists the state to coerce welfare recipients into the worst, lowest-paid jobs and subjects them to invasive supervision and income-management. Such ‘neoliberal paternalism’ is often understood as the product of a tactical alliance between free-market neoliberals and family-values social conservatives who found common cause in opposition to the ‘ungovernability’ of the social movements of the 1960s.159 But the social conservatism of a figure like Lawrence Mead, whose ‘new paternalism’ inspired US workfare policies, was prefigured decades earlier by European neoliberals. Mead’s 1986 exhortation that the state must demand ‘acceptance of the verdict of the market place’ was central to neoliberal discussions of welfare from the 1930s.160
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In a paper prepared for the 1958 MPS meeting, Jouvenel described the ‘violent reluctance’ to target assistance to ‘the needy’, as the result of a modern ‘gain in personal dignity’.161 It was no longer acceptable to ask whether someone who falls sick had personal means, he complained; ‘the same help is to be afforded to the wealthy and to the poor’, to the mother of three children married to a labourer and the mother married to the chairman of the corporation that employs him.162 This gain in ‘dignity’ is reflected in Article 23 of the UDHR, which declares that ‘everyone who works has the right to a just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity and supported, if necessary, by other means of social protection’. While they rejected both the idea of a just wage and the idea that social protection was a right, the neoliberals upheld both this gendered vision of family welfare and the association of dignity with work. They sought to turn back the clock to when there was nothing dignified about seeking state assistance. Dignity, for them, was a status that applied only to responsible and self-reliant adults, capable of supporting themselves and their families.
At the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, Hayek had laid out two models of relief: one gives the unemployed worker a dole at the level of his former wage; ‘the other is designed on the model of the poor law in England’.163 The former threatened to trespass on the margins of neoliberal freedom, making workers unwilling to submit to the market and move for work. Only the deterrence of the latter could reconcile relief with a market-pricing mechanism. For all their criticisms of the paternalism of the welfare state, the neoliberals believed that those destitute few who were eligible for state relief had forfeited their independence, their personal responsibility – and possibly their freedom too.
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In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek suggested that government relief posed difficult questions about whether those who received it were entitled to the freedom enjoyed by others.164 The neoliberals were not so far from earlier punitive and privatised conceptions of poverty-management, which made the individual and the family fully responsible for social welfare. John Locke, who is today considered among the great liberals, saw no contradiction between advocating freedom and rights and arguing that children older than three whose families were unable to feed them should be sent to work.165 The paternalism of contemporary neoliberal welfare systems is rooted in the same contention that those who draw on state assistance forfeit their independence and renounce a freedom that is inseparable from submission to the verdict of the market, and from personal responsibility for risk. The Chicago School’s Milton Friedman inherited aspects of this earlier neoliberal tradition. ‘Freedom is a tenable objective only for responsible individuals’, he contended. ‘Paternalism is inescapable for those whom we designate as not responsible.’166
As the paternalism of neoliberal welfarism suggests, the neoliberals’ real problem with the welfare state was never really its paternalism. ‘The language of the old paternal government is still current and so are its categories’, Röpke noted in 1958, ‘but all this is becoming a screen that hides the new crusade against anything which dares exceed the average, be it in income, wealth, or performance.’167 Although they criticised the welfare state for depriving individuals of their freedom and independence, what really horrified the neoliberals was this crusading pursuit of equality. If the problem of relief to the ‘weak and helpless’ were taken as a pretext for ‘levelling out all differences in income and wealth’, Röpke argued, that was the path of ‘social revolution’.168 Decades earlier, Hayek had identified this same spectre lurking behind the paternalist arguments sustaining the New Deal. The demand for freedom from want, he argued, was ‘only another name for the old demand for an equal distribution of wealth’.169 Much later he bemoaned the ‘unfortunate’ fact that ‘the endeavour to secure a uniform minimum for all who cannot provide for themselves has become connected with the wholly different aims of securing a “just” distribution of incomes’.170 Poverty relief, the neoliberals believed, must never interfere with the inequalities of civil society.
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In the summer of 1940, Hayek was pondering the fate of his own family. Then living in London, the Austrian economist believed it likely that he might soon be killed by enemy bombing. Fearing the worst, he considered a number of offers to place his small children with ‘some unknown family’, who would presumably continue to raise them if he did not survive the war. In the most concrete terms, he considered the relative merits of sending his children to the United States, Argentina or Sweden, on the assumption that their social position in the country would be determined largely by chance. From behind this veil of ignorance, Hayek decided that ‘the very absence in the US of the sharp social distinctions which would favour me in the Old World should make me decide for them in favour of the former’. The absence of aristocratic hierarchies and the relative social equality produced by the New Deal, he recognised, would give his children the best possible chance in life. As if as an afterthought, Hayek then added a bracketed qualifying sentence: ‘(I should perhaps add that this was based on the tacit assumption that my children would there be placed with a white and not with a coloured family.)’171 In the midst of an anecdote that Hayek introduced in order to justify the impersonal allocation of social positions through the market, white supremacy appeared between two brackets, as a ‘tacit assumption’ underpinning a narrative of success through hard work and chance. Hayek’s Rawlsian thought experiment thus exemplified Saidiya Hartman’s claim that ‘abstract equality produces white entitlement and black subjection’.172 The ignorance that Hayek often argued prevents us from altering the distributional outcomes of the market was, patently, what Charles Mills calls ‘white ignorance’, which makes the liberal social contract a ‘racial contract’.173
Even in cases in which the unequal starting positions of individuals are ‘determined by earlier unjust acts or institutions’ – as the racial inequality that he tacitly acknowledged in the United States surely was – Hayek argued that it would generally be ‘impracticable’ to correct it. It would be preferable, he suggested, to ‘accept the given position as due to accident and simply from the present onwards to refrain from any measures aiming at benefiting particular individuals or groups’.174 Hayek acknowledged that, given the centrality of the family in a child’s initial social position, inequalities between families would be perpetuated over time. In fact, he endorsed inherited wealth precisely because such a perpetuation of inequality supposedly created a better elite.175 Yet he took for granted that, wherever his children were placed, their welfare would be the sole responsibility of their new family. However much his children’s hopes were frustrated by ‘unmerited disappointment’, there was no justification for state action to equalise their chances. In privatising welfare and foreclosing redistribution, the neoliberals entrenched economic inequalities while naturalising gender subordination within the family and sanctioning race as the ‘natural ordering principle of the social’.176
Any intrusion into the private sphere of the family, even for the purpose of rectifying historical injustices or providing children with more equal starting positions, would be totalitarian, the neoliberals contended. In their more melodramatic moments, they depicted any form of state-licensed redistribution as leading directly to the policies of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. This path might begin with a government that ‘wants to make it possible for poor parents to give more milk to their children’, Mises warned, in an almost caricatured version of the ‘road to serfdom thesis’, but in ‘proceeding step by step on this way it finally reaches a point in which all economic freedom of individuals has disappeared. Then socialism on the German pattern … of the Nazis emerges’.177 Hayek struck a similar tone decades later when he criticised the drafters of the UDHR for imagining themselves as ‘Platonic philosopher-kings’ and seeking a ‘re-organization of society on totalitarian lines’.178
In reality, the social and economic rights in the UDHR were hardly as threatening to the market order as Hayek and his comrades seemed to believe. Framed in minimalist terms, and orientated towards securing the racial and gender order of mid-twentieth-century capitalism, these social and economic rights were ultimately far more compatible with a liberal market than the neoliberals initially feared. Far from ushering in a ‘social revolution’ that overturned hierarchies of status and inequalities of wealth, social and economic rights increasingly came to signify merely the aspiration to realise over time a basic minimum for the most impoverished.179 As Hayek correctly noted in 1976, proclaiming rights to food, education, health, housing and clothing was a very different matter from actually securing food, education, health, housing or clothing for all.
While Hayek attributed the UDHR’s social and economic rights to the Marxism of the Russian Revolution, the Soviet delegates shared much of his cynicism about the practical effects of declaring such rights. In a capitalist country, the Soviet bloc delegates argued, there would always be a ‘flagrant contradiction’ between what was said in the declaration and the reality. The declaration of a right to rest, for instance, ‘had a hollow ring in a society in which a small group always rested, while the overwhelming majority worked all the time’.180 The fundamental transformation necessary to secure such a right was far from the minds of the majority of diplomats who drafted the UDHR. Nonetheless, as they met at Lake Success and at the Palais De Chaillot in Paris, another dramatic transformation was underway as the great age of decolonisation gained momentum. Those colonial subjects whose subjugation, labour and resources underpinned the welfare and freedom of the people of the metropolis were demanding freedom for themselves. Even more significantly, they were refusing Hayek’s claim that it was ‘impractical’ to correct the inequalities deriving from unjust acts or institutions, and were demanding economic transformations to secure real control over their lands and resources.
Neoliberalism, Human Rights and the ‘Shabby Remnants of Colonial Imperialism’
Let us assume that the United Nations had been established in the year 1600 and that the Indian tribes of North America had been admitted as members of this organization. Then the sovereignty of these Indians would have been recognized as inviolable. They would have been given the right to exclude all aliens from entering their territory and from exploiting its rich natural resources which they themselves did not know how to utilize. Does anybody really believe that any international covenant or charter could have prevented these Europeans from invading these countries?
Ludwig von Mises
In 1966, almost twenty years after the United Nations’ human rights process began, the UN General Assembly adopted two legally binding human rights covenants – the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). By then, successful anticolonial struggles had almost doubled the UN’s membership. As the covenants were adopted, the Nigerian delegate expressed pride that his country, though unable to participate in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), had achieved independence in time to make a ‘meager contribution’ to the drafting of the covenants.1 The enthusiastic presence of representatives of newly independent states seemed to show that the universal aspirations embodied in the UDHR had triumphed over those civilisational hierarchies the colonial powers had sought to consolidate back in 1948. In a particularly exuberant speech, the Mexican delegate announced: ‘Like a chrysalis, long enveloped in its cocoon, the Covenants now, spreading their glorious wings, are ready to improve the lot of mankind.’2 For anticolonialists, the cause for celebration was twofold: not only had former colonies participated in the drafting of the covenants as independent sovereign states; they had also succeeded in adopting the right of peoples to self-determination as the first human right.
The Mexican delegate’s optimism seems to challenge the oft-heard critique of the abstraction of human rights discourse, its indifference to the particularity that it is the stuff of lived experience. On the contrary, it seemed to be precisely because the universal human inscribed in the texts of human rights is abstract that it has proved so capable of expanding to include those who were once excluded. From this perspective, both the subjects and borders of rights are structurally in flux, and so the language of human rights can always be taken up by new excluded subjects to affirm their inclusion in the category of humanity. Such a strategy – what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls ‘verifying equality’ – entails seizing and taking seriously what is often dismissed as a groundless claim (that all human beings are born free and equal in rights, for instance) and using it to stage a dispute.3 In the historiography of human rights, this approach is most forcefully articulated by the historian Lynn Hunt, who argues that declarations of rights have a tendency to cascade, including ever more people as subjects of rights.4
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