Volume 7 Issue 1 November 2020
Book Review: The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism by Jessica WhyteDANIEL CULLEN
|
Each January, at the time of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Oxfam publishes new statistics showing that the wealth of an absurdly small number of individuals is roughly equal to that of an absurdly large number of others. In 2019, these figures were 26 people and 3.8 billion people respectively. In the years since the financial crisis of 2007-08, such absurdities have come to signify the economic inequalities which social movements worldwide have increasingly found common ground in opposing. In understanding the changes in governance that permitted these conditions to emerge, it is difficult to avoid the rise of neoliberal economic policies from the 1970s onwards. Meanwhile, in articulating opposition to inequalities and injustice, the language of rights, such as the right to healthcare, is commonly used. This is the result of the growing popularity of ideas of human rights, particularly during the second half of the twentieth century. Looking back over those decades, these patterns may appear paradoxical: why has the age of neoliberalism also been the age of human rights?
|