"Rather than treat human rights and neoliberalism as two distinct, global logics [...] Whyte illuminates how human rights 'became the dominant ideology of a period marked by the demise of revolutionary utopias and socialist politics.' Beautifully written, theoretically sophisticated, and excoriating all at the same time, Whyte’s book follows the efflux of this ideology, from its origins in the 1940s, through the postwar period, the Chicago Boys’ involvement in Chile, the rise of Amnesty International, and the perverse anti–Third Worldism and anti-statism of human rights NGOs in the 1980s. [...] common claim [...] that neoliberalism is, as Whyte explains, 'expressly amoral at the level of both ends and means,' an ideology that relies exclusively on an account of human essence as homo economicus. By contrast, Whyte argues, what 'distinguished the neoliberals of the twentieth century from their nineteenth-century precursors' was not 'a narrow understanding of the human as homo economicus, but the belief that a functioning competitive market required an adequate moral and legal foundation.' [...] By blending historical inquiry with theoretical critique, Whyte’s account clarifies that neoliberal human rights did not emerge 'from nowhere' but, rather, flowed from a long-standing, self-conscious, neoliberal tradition of forging rhetorical links between market morals and human rights. [...] Whyte thus convincingly shows that rather than serving as neoliberalism’s 'powerless companions,' key human rights NGOs of this era actively embraced a neoliberal approach to freedom, twinned with a neoliberal suspicion of politics, that all too eagerly transferred the entirety of the blame for violence, instability, and poverty in the Third World onto Third World states themselves. [...] their support for a blinkered, market-proscribed notion of 'freedom' made these NGOs complicit in furthering neoliberalism’s obfuscation of the actual 'coercion and political intervention' necessary to uphold 'existing ‘free’ market relations.' [...] Whyte’s brilliant piece of scholarship slices through this unseeing like a scythe, exposing the violence and ugliness sustained by a liberal world order in which neoliberalism and human rights work in tandem to sustain a toxic politics of deflection. At the end of the day, only by coming to terms with that historical complicity is it possible to imagine a different kind of human rights politics for the future."