Samuel Moyn > Quotes

“Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every historian has to begin somewhere, but the fact that Israel begins with Spinoza, and then reduces most of what follows the philosopher to a footnote, leaves his account of the Enlightenment founded on something like immaculate conception.”
― Samuel Moyn

“War is always a contest of words as well as of wounds.”
― Samuel Moyn

“It was in part because he understood Zionism’s roots in nineteenth-century thought—crossing into its Romanticism, Hegelianism, and historicism—that Berlin could sometimes be half-sympathetic to “the nations,” as he once put it, “which feel that they have not yet played their part (but will) in the great drama of history.”93 Yet there was an undeniable disparity between his Zionism and his far less indulgent attitude toward other new states after World War II. He felt free to criticize “the resentful attitude of those new nations which have exchanged the yoke of foreign rule for the despotism of an individual or class or group in their own society, and admire the triumphant display of naked power, at its most arbitrary and oppressive, even where social and economic needs do just call for authoritarian control.”94 The tension with Berlin’s Zionism, which didn’t invite such criticism, was glaring. Postcolonial emancipation was not just necessary but moving—for one people.”
― Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

“It is neither cowardice nor betrayal to insist that the Enlightenment's main lesson is to be mindful of how much it has left its inheritors to figure out.”
― Samuel Moyn

“It is for this reason that this book dramatizes how Cold War liberals reimagined the canon of political thought. Perhaps the greatest recent nominalist historian of liberalism, Duncan Bell, has reminded us that one part of the reshuffling of the liberal tradition is recanonization. Nothing about this, of course, is specific to liberalism; if all history is contemporary history, then all canonizing is too, as the past is reconfigured in light of the present. There may, indeed, be no better way into understanding political thought than by studying what ancestry it claims—and whom it censures or expels. “It is well known that each age writes history anew to serve its own purposes and that the history of political ideas is no exception to this rule,” Shklar observed in 1959. “The precise nature of these changes in perspective, however, bears investigation. For not only can their study help us to understand the past; it may also lead to a better understanding of our own intellectual situation.”13 Yet how mid-twentieth century liberalism invented its own past has barely been broached. In Bell’s classic article, he makes the destabilizing but narrow claim that it was only in the twentieth century that Locke was anointed the founder of liberalism. There is much more to say about the canonization process. It overturned a prevalent nineteenth-century version of liberal theory with perfectionist and progressivist features that Cold War liberalism transformed. Creative agency had been liberalism’s goal, and history its forum of opportunity. The mid-twentieth century changed all that.”
― Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

“If human rights are treated as inborn, or long in preparation, people will not confront the true reasons they have become so powerful to-day and examine whether those reasons are still persuasive.”
― Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

“the welfare state.” It would differ from the mere “power state” that the German National Socialists had brought about, achieving redistributive policy and social security without destroying personal freedoms.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“Their extremism indicates, rather, that in the revolutionary era and especially during Jacobin rule, it became more and more the common sense that some sort of “reasonable” equality in the distribution of the good things in life was both feasible and necessary.18”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“Status equality matters fully as much as distributive equality.8”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“It was easier for market fundamentalists in America and elsewhere to obliterate whatever ceiling on inequality national welfare states had imposed and to vault the global rich higher over their inferiors than they had ever been. Meanwhile, the most visible ethical movement was struggling merely to build a global floor of protection for the worst off. As egalitarian ideals and practices died, the idea of human rights accommodated itself to the reigning political economy, which it could humanize but not overthrow.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“Hadji Murat, Tolstoy’s posthumous novella recounting the difficulties of maintaining imperial control in the face of Muslim terrorism, could not seem prophetic to Americans for decades. For a long time, his warnings about making war humane were inapplicable as”
― Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

“The essays Trilling wrote in the later 1930s and 1940s established the position of his epochmaking The Liberal Imagination, his Cold War liberal triumph of 1950, which sold nearly 200,000 copies. This book is perhaps the essential one, alongside Trilling’s 1947 novel The Middle of the Journey, in rethinking the whole era of liberal political theory. By canonizing Freud for Cold War liberalism, the mature Trilling ratified the abandonment of the Enlightenment, the vilification of progress for fear that it always serves as pretext for terror, and above all the psychic self-constraint at the core of liberal thought.”
― Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

“For the moment, at least, human rights history is worth telling because it reveals how partial our activism has become, choosing sufficiency alone as intractable crises in politics and economics continue to mount.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“Korea was the most brutal war of the twentieth century, measured by the intensity of violence and per capita civilian deaths. In three years, four million died, and half of them were civilians—a higher proportion of the population than in any modern war, including World War II and the Vietnam conflict. As Korea showed, World War II did not end the tradition of inhumane war, especially against “savages.” The winter of 1950 was a bleak parody of what was supposed to be a new age of peace.”
― Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

“Human rights politics and law went some way to sensitizing humanity to the misery of visible indigence alongside the horrific repression of authoritarian and totalitarian states—but not to the crisis of national welfare, the stagnation of middle classes, and the endurance of global hierarchy.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“Human rights advocates can work to extricate themselves from their neoliberal companionship, even as others mark their limitations, in order to restore the dream of equality to its importance in both theory and practice. If both groups are successful, they can save the ideal of human rights from an unacceptable fate: it has left the globe more humane but enduringly unequal.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“Jean-Jacques Rousseau doubted it, complaining that the rise of commerce expanded hierarchies of wealth that both morally enervated the rich and fed disorder, even if they left the poor better off.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“Worse, human rights lost their original connection with a larger egalitarian aspiration, focusing on sufficient provision instead.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“Focusing on sufficient protections, human rights norms and politics have selectively emphasized one aspect of social justice, scanting in particular the distributional victory of the rich. It is as if in our highest ethics, material gains for the poor were all that could matter, either morally or strategically, when human rights placed any stress on material injustice at all.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“The human rights revolution of our time is bound up with a global concern for the “wretched of the earth,” but not in the egalitarian sense that the socialist and postcolonial promoters of that phrase originally meant.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“This book’s genealogy of the makings of Cold War political thought, in this spirit, suggests that liberalism doesn’t have to be what it became: ambivalent about the Enlightenment, with a ban on perfectionism, scapegoating bids for progress as terroristic, and treating the West as a refuge for freedom across civilizational lines of race and wealth while harshly disciplining the self.”
― Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

“Human rights were cut off from the dream of globally fair distribution that the global south itself advocated during the 1970s.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“It is also a matter of greater consensus than ever that the high and equal status of human beings entitles them to some basic political freedoms, such as the rights to speak and to be free from torture. When it comes to what share people ought to get of the good things in life, however, consensus is much harder to achieve.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“But strictly speaking, human rights do not necessarily call for a modicum of distributive equality. And a concern for human rights, including economic and social rights, has risen as moral commitments to distributive equality fell.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“The Soviet Union was allowed exclusive inheritance of the Enlightenment in its own self-presentation as the secular progeny of the historic breakthrough to reason and science. That this proprietary relation to the Enlightenment was implicitly granted looks in retrospect almost like a confession: Cold War liberals were not sure they could defend the Enlightenment from Soviet appropriation, or even that they wanted emancipation, when communists arrogated the project for themselves. It is both regrettable and revealing that, instead of opposing the claim of enemy communists to inherit the Enlightenment by showing how opportunistic it was, Cold War liberals accepted the communists’ claim and indicted the Enlightenment instead.”
― Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

“In the era of human rights, many (though by no means all) have become less poor, but the rich have been even more decisive victors. It follows that human rights must be kept in proper perspective, neither idolized nor smashed, to recognize the true scope of our moral crisis today and the melancholy truth of our failure to invent other ideals and movements to confront it. Human rights, focused on securing enough for everyone, are essential—but they are not enough.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“We will do much more for the happiness of the lower classes," utopian socialist Victor Considerant wrote, "for their real emancipation and true progress, in guaranteeing these classes well-remunerated work, than in winning political rights and a meaningless sovereignty for them. The most important of the people's rights is the right to work.”
― Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

“The welfare state shouldered the burden of provision for males above all, and ethnic and racial insiders among them. Women and children certainly mattered, but the welfare state’s schemes treated their plight as derivative, and its very generosity entrenched their subordination to the destiny of the male working nation, especially when welfare states took up natalist policies—a fact that the Universal Declaration’s prohibition of discrimination did shockingly little to affect for a long time.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“The very West European states that went furthest toward welfare were also the larger imperial states that excluded from their generosity the vast bulk of humanity in the empire’s territories.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World