This chapter examines the embedded liberal perspective of the Anglo-American thinkers who played a lead role in designing Bretton Woods order, including John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. These thinkers endorsed the broad liberal goals of boosting global prosperity, international peace, and individual freedom, but they argued that these goals could only be met with a new kind of institutionalized liberal multilateralism that would make an open world economy compatible with various kinds of active public management of the economy. The roots of embedded liberalism can be found in efforts to reformulate the international side of classical economic liberal thought earlier in the twentieth century, including by thinkers such as Jehangir Coyajee.and John Hobson. The promoters of embedded liberalism at Bretton Woods sought to accommodate not just new ideas of domestic social security and activist macroeconomic management in Western Europe and North America but also the Soviet Union’s commitment to central planning and neomercantilist views prominent in many less industrialized regions. At the same time, they made much less effort to engage with the perspectives discussed in the second part of this volume.

A brief introduction to Part Two presents key international documents on human rights and clears up some misunderstandings, drawing particularly on Henry Shue, Alan Gewirth and John Ruggie. Today not only does the obligation to secure human rights lie with nation-states, but also it pertains to non-state actors such as business enterprises, universities, civil society organizations and religious communities. - In line with the UN Framework for Business and Human Rights, all 30 internationally recognized human rights are listed and deemed necessary for a human life with dignity. They include the civil and political rights as well as the economic, social and cultural rights of the International Covenants and four ILO Core Conventions. They are also incorporated in the G4 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the indivisibility, interdependence and interrelatedness of human rights.