The Measurement of Social Rights after Neoliberalism: the Case of the United Nations

Starting from the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the article aims to analyze the United Nations work in measuring and monitoring social rights. Firstly, the study describes the political and ideological reasons favoring the rise and fall of social rights at the international level. Specifically, the work focuses on the ideological turn occurred over the seventies from social democracy to neoliberal democracy. The hypothesis of the study is that such a paradigm shift affected the production of instruments for measuring social rights. Therefore, the lacking of these instruments can only in part be attributed to the serious methodological challenges that have yet to be overcome in providing valid and meaningful measures of economic and social rights. Indeed, political and ideological reasons linked to the rise of the new hegemonic neoliberal paradigm brought to the demotion of social rights. As a consequence, no serious political or cultural demand for the measurement of such rights has been made. Drawing on a Gramscian approach, the research considers measurement and monitoring not only as cognitive tools, but rather as political and ideological instruments created to legitimize the values of the hegemonic paradigm. The UN ineffectiveness in monitoring social rights is due both to the methodological weakness of the process and to the ideological climate delegitimizing such rights. Although the ongoing alleged crisis of neoliberalism is an urgent topic for an all-encompassing future research agenda, the article suggests some provisional conclusions on the causes of neoliberalism’s persistence.