A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Yet even in the evolved form of Marx's critique, there is a drastic set of differences between that general account - which might fit, for example, the modern globalization of markets and the globalization of property rights quite well - and some specific account needed to capture the particularity of international human rights regimes and movements in the last several decades. ... In a very brief section of her book, the most popular history of neoliberalism ever written, Klein takes up how human rights imposed "blinders" on the relationship between capitalism and terror. ... A brief, and therefore necessarily superficial, survey of the shortcomings of human rights norms and movements with the structural transformations of the era of market fundamentalism in mind must start with a basic and rarely made point: In their legalized forms, human rights do not purport to provide an egalitarian agenda. ... When it comes to the sorts of goals envisioned by the International Covenant for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, it is not how much they promise but how little that needs to receive more emphasis, since the covenant strives for a minimum floor of protection in domains like housing, health, and food, rather than a fuller bodied egalitarianism. ... Whether or not he is persuasive on either count, it seems hard to doubt his conclusion that the superficiality of the effects of human rights politics on trade outcomes so far demands some other approach. ... Susan Marks, for her part, focuses on the way in which human rights law, even when it purports to seek root causes of human rights violations, is not currently organized to permit the sort of structural critique eventually needed to target neoliberalism - or perhaps capitalism in any of its possible variants.