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In her 2019 book I The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism i , Jessica Whyte investigates 'the historical and conceptual relations between human rights and neoliberalism'.[1] To undertake this investigation, Whyte returns to the 1940s to trace the way in which the post-war neoliberal thinkers of the Mont Pèlerin Society "mobilised and developed"[2] a language of human rights as a way to serve their own ends. But what was really important was that they didn't just conceptualise human rights in individualistic terms; they made an argument that human rights were not natural rights, that human rights actually had only emerged on the basis of liberal market capitalism and therefore if liberal markets disappeared, human rights would disappear too. B SP: b It's interesting that at no point do you say that human rights is I necessarily i a companion to power, but ... maybe we can come back to that question at the end, as to whether human rights can be redeemed or not ... because I think there are some quite interesting political insights in the book, which bode ill for supporters of human rights. [Extracted from the article]

This is a reply to: Meine, Anna. 2016. “Debating legitimacy transnationally.”Global Discourse6 (3): 330–346.http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2016.1175084. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]