Human Rights in a Neoliberal World: The Limits of Economic and Social Rights

Abstract

Economic and social rights are often excluded from the corpus of human rights for being ‘unenforceable’, ‘aspirational’, ‘unrealistic’, and ‘ideologically charged’. Nowhere is this exclusion more evident than in the work of contemporary ‘minimalist’ scholars of human rights, such as Michael Ignatieff, Jacob Mchangama, Aaron Rhodes, and Suri Ratnapala. In this thesis, I argue that despite being shrouded in the language of ‘pragmatic’ critique, these minimalist thinkers employ essentially the same lines of critique as their more overtly ideological neoliberal predecessors. In Chapter One, I examine the minimalist argument against the inclusion of economic and social rights on the basis that such rights wrongfully ‘inflate’ human rights beyond a core of fundamental civil and political rights and, in so doing, dilute the value of the human rights project. In Chapter Two, I examine the minimalist argument against the inclusion of economic and social rights in the corpus of human rights based on their supposedly ‘ideological’ or ‘programmatic’ character. In both chapters, I expand on the work of ‘indivisibility’ theorists, such as Philip Alston, Asbjørn Eide, and Gerard Quinn, to argue that the assumptions that underlie these objections cannot be substantiated. The thesis concludes each chapter by warning indivisibility scholars against ceding too much ground to minimalist critics to determine the terms of the debate – and by extension, limit the scope of economic and social rights. In this sense, the thesis explores how indivisibility scholars have watered down the demands of economic and social rights to render them more palatable to a neoliberal audience. It ends with a discussion of whether economic and social rights can transcend these limitations to become a more radical egalitarian project.