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Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
“No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights.”
―Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal
“Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”
―George Soros
The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality has quietly disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization has emerged as the dominant force. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn considers how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of broader social and economic justice.
Moyn places the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift and explores why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside exploding inequality.
“Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse… Sure to provoke a wider discussion.”
―Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal
“A sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana… Consistently bracing.”
―Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books
“Moyn suggests that our current vocabularies of global justice―above all our belief in the emancipatory potential of human rights―need to be discarded if we are work to make our vastly unequal world more equal… [A] tour de force .”
― Los Angeles Review of Books
―Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal
“Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”
―George Soros
The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality has quietly disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization has emerged as the dominant force. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn considers how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of broader social and economic justice.
Moyn places the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift and explores why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside exploding inequality.
“Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse… Sure to provoke a wider discussion.”
―Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal
“A sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana… Consistently bracing.”
―Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books
“Moyn suggests that our current vocabularies of global justice―above all our belief in the emancipatory potential of human rights―need to be discarded if we are work to make our vastly unequal world more equal… [A] tour de force .”
― Los Angeles Review of Books
296 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2018
90 people are currently reading
1571 people want to read
About the author
Samuel Moyn
37 books123 followersSamuel Moyn is professor of law and history at Harvard University. He is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, and Christian Human Rights (2015), among other books, as well as editor of the journal Humanity. He also writes regularly for Foreign Affairs and The Nation.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
April 12, 2018
This marvelous book is a history of the hardest thing to explain: why something did NOT happen. Histories of non-events are inherently difficult to write because of the methodological commitment of historians to stick close to documentary sources, and things that don’t happen rarely leave behind an obvious documentary trail.
In this case, the non-event that Samuel Moyn describes in his new book is the institutionalization of a political ethic of material egalitarianism. And the way he writes this is in the form of an intervention into two huge historiographical debates, the first on the history of human rights (a field whose essential contours he defined with his book The Last Utopia) and the history of neoliberalism. The puzzle he seeks to explain is: how is it that the the era of neoliberalism, commonly said to have begun in the mid-to-late 1970s, coincides almost perfectly with the triumphant rise of a discourse of human rights? In other words, how is it that an era whose ethical self-conception was rooted in a transnational movement to prevent abuses such as torture, disenfranchisement, and political imprisonment was also the era in which national and global economies were remade in ways that have allowed wealthy capital owners to capture the large majority of the productivity gains the economy has experienced, and as a result has created in-country inequalities not seen since the height of the late 19th century?
To answer this question, he goes back to revisit the scene of what he deems another historiographical crime, namely the claim that the 1940s were the great era for the rise of human rights, centered on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Before The Last Utopia, historians had often declared the UDHR to be the opening salvo of the modern human rights era, the great declaration of transnational hopes for a more just postwar world that would unfold over the coming decades — a cornerstone of “A New Deal for the World.” The central project of The Last Utopia was to debunk this claim, marking the 1970s rather than the 1940s as the great moment for the flowering of human rights. Moyn’s case for and explanation of the 1970s moment turned essentially on the collapse of the socialist ideal, and his claim was that dreams of human rights more or less backfilled the failed dream of socialism in the wake of the “global 1968.” Certainly he showed compellingly that nominally the 1970s were an inflection point for the rise of human rights, and fingering the failure of socialism as the morally responsible party was a compelling and clever answer.
There were several puzzles and problems that emerged out of this interpretation however, as the heated and field-defining subsequent debate over The Last Utopia revealed. The first concerned the status of the 1940s human rights moment. Moyn had more or less dismissed that moment as a dead letter — and been even more scoffing towards claims that attempted to site the origins of human rights discourses even earlier, in the eras of the French and the American revolutions. Yes, there had been a discourse of rights during the 1940s, Moyn argued, but this had been a vague and broad discourse that enumerated a grab bag of different forms of rights, including collective rights and individual rights, social rights as well as political rights, positive rights (“to” things) as well as negative rights (“from” things) — and had been largely ignored by policy makers and academics alike. The form of human rights discourse that in the 1970s eventually “broke through” (the title of an volume Moyn co-edited) were specifically a form of human rights that was much narrower than the woolly conception of rights that had been discussed around the UDHR: exclusively about individual political rights to be free from certain kinds of largely physical abuse at the hands of the state. Moyn’s argument strongly suggested that this truncated and focused version of human rights that eventually stormed the world stage and global moral imaginary did so in part because it served the geopolitical purposes of one of the two superpowers at that point in time. In this sense, while Moyn debunked the claims of fans of human rights that they were heritors of a venerable intellectual and moral tradition stretching from the U.S. Declaration of Independence through abolitionism and anti-genocide, he did at least confirm (albeit somewhat sardonically) their claims that the Helsinki Accords (1977) were a crucial moment for swaying the moral argument between the West’s form of liberal capitalism and the East’s form of dictatorial collectivism.
The second historiographic puzzle emerged in part out of the enormous growth of interest in the historical rise of neoliberalism and inequality in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the publication of Thomas Piketty and the Paris School’s own field-redefining empirical data about the historical patterns of in-country inequality over the last two centuries. Piketty and Co’s work, which was rooted in a huge data sets providing time series of national inequality, revealed that the middle third of the twentieth century were a rather unique moment in the history of economic distribution, when across the North Atlantic industrial core, wealth and income inequalities narrowed dramatically. Inequality had been huge and growing throughout the 19th century, Piketty showed, had been enormously compressed in the first half of the twentieth century by the dual factors of wealth destruction in wartime and the redistributionist policies imposed by postwar welfare states. Starting in the 1970s, however, in all countries income and wealth distribution began to reassert itself, and despite national differences and a whole series of business cycles, has inexorably proceeded now for nearly half a century.
Not Enough inserts itself into these questions by moving Moyn’s gaze from the 1970s back to the 1940s, asking a rather peculiar, negative (and this fiendishly difficult to answer) question: why, in that great postwar moment of national solidarity and debt to the war fighting working classes, as national welfare states were vastly expanded, did an ethos of equality NOT get formalized in virtually any country? And here Moyn introduces the key distinction on which the book rests, between two different ethical principles that apply across a whole series of different domains, notably both economics and politics, namely: an ethos of equality versus an ethos of sufficiency. An ethos of equality asserts that a just moral order depends on everybody more or less have the same amount of the key “good things in life,” including material goods, but also things like dignity and political power. By contrast, an ethos of sufficiency is unconcerned with relative endowments, and is only concerned with making sure that every individual meets some minimal threshold with respect to the good in question.
Moyn’s essential point is that the discourse on human rights in the 1940s was blurry on this distinction — again, Moyn attempts to explain an intellectual non-event. While there were certainly some intellectuals arguing explicitly for egalitarianism — the socialist politician and intellectual Harold Laski is the quiet hero of the book — Moyn argues that part of the motive for building welfare states was quite precisely to avoid directly confronting the sufficiency-v-equality conundrum by raising the minimum floor so high that the differences between the worst and best off would be if not irrelevant then at least politically neutralized. The failure to establish equalitarianism as the ethical basis of the welfare state at the moment of its creation, however, left the door open for the vengeful return of inequality starting in the 1970s. The discourse of human rights were simply, as his title says, not enough to hold back the eventual economic revanchism of the financialized and globalized capitalism that would emerge in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Of course, it’s hard to blame people in the 1940s for failing to foresee what would happen thirty years later. But the point is that human rights were fundamentally unhelpful not just for defending egalitarianism later but even for justifying the original postwar welfare states. The builders of postwar welfare states simply were unconcerned with questions of human rights, because the available discourse on human rights was not very useful to their purposes. Yes, the (largely collective and positive) social and economic rights enumerated in the UNDR (which would be ignored by the 1970s champions of individual and negative political rights) resonated with the welfare-state-building ambitions of the postwar period, but were largely ancillary to them. Few of the builders of these welfare states made reference to human rights as a justification for the institutions they were building.
As Moyn argues, this evasion is a crying shame, since the failure to formalize the egalitarian ethical foundations of the welfare state in the 1940s left the door open to the rise of inegalitarianism later, starting in the 1970s. Yes, minimum material standards would continue to be met in most places — social housing, primary and secondary education, basic health care, pensions, and so on — but these remained stuck at a low level even as wealthy disparities were allowed to grow, and the emergent rich began to use their riches to acquire for themselves much nicer, private versions of these goods: expensive and thus exclusive private schools, expensive and thus exclusive private transportation networks, expensive and thus exclusive private health care systems, and so on. And as the wealthy opted out of the public and collective institutions, into their bespoke private institutions, what had once seemed “sufficient” increasingly has become seen as “minimal” (at best).
To take one example: the quality of public school educations, as measured by the learnings and skills most people leave there with when they leaving, may not have gotten worse in absolute terms since the 1940s, but it hasn’t necessarily gotten much better either — even as the wealthy have moved their children into private schools with much smaller class sizes, better equipment, and far more personalized attention. Given the importance of education for success in the knowledge economy, these disparities of outcomes then reinforce class distinctions. This adverse election dynamic is well known, and Moyn’s acute point is that human rights discourse as we know it in its post-1970s form has literally nothing to say about it.
The rise of the welfare state in the 1940s is thus the event that marginalizes the UDHR at that moment. For Moyn, the “rediscovery” of the UDHR in the 1970s is thus a rather ironic event, especially as those who embrace it at the moment, claiming that their own activities draw on it, do so even as they ignored the baggy references to social and economic rights. (This is a not uncommon pattern among those who claim new “rights” to things in the present with reference to “original” texts; consider the contemporary American proponents of an individual right to carry military weapons cite the second amendment of the U.S. constitution, but blithely ignore the part about “a well-related militia” and the justification of the right as a way to avoid the evil of a standing army.) If Moyn in The Last Utopia dismissed the UDHR in the 1940s as a dead letter, in this new book he actually re-valorizes it for its commitment to distributive justice, even as he continues to insist that this most valuable part of the UDHR was essentially ignored both at the time of its publication in the 1940s and by those who resucitated it in the 1970s as a statement of individual political liberties. In this reading, the UDHR is recast from a marginal irrelevance to a tragically misunderstood figure.
Moyn’s book is an intellectual history, primarily, and spends little time on the technical details of the growth of inequality, but if he had it might have suggested some additional factors that need to be accounted for in the explanation of the non-attention of most human rights organizations to questions of equality. For example, while Piketty and Co’s work has documented the inexorable rise of in-country inequality, the work of Branko Milanovic has emphasized the arguably just as important compression of between-country inequality that has also unfolded during the period of neoliberal ascendency since the 1970s. In other words, while the rich have everywhere gotten richer than their countrymen, globally there has been a kind of economic convergence, as the poorest countries have caught up to rich ones.
Moyn largely ignores this story, and indeed explicitly sets it aside. His normative frame of reference is the national welfare state that, as he says, are “the sole political enterprises that, to date, have ever secured a modicum of distributional equality, in particular constraining the dominance of the wealthiest.” (7) In a sense, Moyn is asking why the welfare state failed to provide a barrier against the reemergence of vast economic inequalities, and also implicitly pleading for the possibility that contemporary welfare states might be resuscitated if not outright reinvented on the basis of an at last explicitly egalitarian rather than sufficientarian basis. But is the national welfare state, with all its inevitable exclusion on the basis of racial and gender hierarchies (which Moyn forthrightly acknowledges) really the only or even best basis for an egalitarian politics for the 21st century?
To develop a better form of egalitarianism, one that acknowledges that fact that our economies in the third decade of the 21st century are no longer national but are profoundly global in scope and connection, perhaps we need to revisit another set of intellectual possibilities that emerged in the protean postwar moment of the 1940s, namely the idea of a world government. Arguable the key barrier to an effective redistributionist politics for the 21st century is the ability of capital to flee any state that takes redistribution seriously for a more capital-friendly jurisdiction. Shutting down tax havens and offshore banking would be a good first step, but without a set of global institutions, any egalitarian projects at a local level are likely either to reinforce inequalities at a global level (e.g. the Nordic countries, which are country clubs masquerading as sovereign states, and impose the equality of the gentleman’s club on their members, rooted in exclusion of outsiders) or to be felled by the flight of the resources that need to be redistributed to friendlier climes.
In this case, the non-event that Samuel Moyn describes in his new book is the institutionalization of a political ethic of material egalitarianism. And the way he writes this is in the form of an intervention into two huge historiographical debates, the first on the history of human rights (a field whose essential contours he defined with his book The Last Utopia) and the history of neoliberalism. The puzzle he seeks to explain is: how is it that the the era of neoliberalism, commonly said to have begun in the mid-to-late 1970s, coincides almost perfectly with the triumphant rise of a discourse of human rights? In other words, how is it that an era whose ethical self-conception was rooted in a transnational movement to prevent abuses such as torture, disenfranchisement, and political imprisonment was also the era in which national and global economies were remade in ways that have allowed wealthy capital owners to capture the large majority of the productivity gains the economy has experienced, and as a result has created in-country inequalities not seen since the height of the late 19th century?
To answer this question, he goes back to revisit the scene of what he deems another historiographical crime, namely the claim that the 1940s were the great era for the rise of human rights, centered on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Before The Last Utopia, historians had often declared the UDHR to be the opening salvo of the modern human rights era, the great declaration of transnational hopes for a more just postwar world that would unfold over the coming decades — a cornerstone of “A New Deal for the World.” The central project of The Last Utopia was to debunk this claim, marking the 1970s rather than the 1940s as the great moment for the flowering of human rights. Moyn’s case for and explanation of the 1970s moment turned essentially on the collapse of the socialist ideal, and his claim was that dreams of human rights more or less backfilled the failed dream of socialism in the wake of the “global 1968.” Certainly he showed compellingly that nominally the 1970s were an inflection point for the rise of human rights, and fingering the failure of socialism as the morally responsible party was a compelling and clever answer.
There were several puzzles and problems that emerged out of this interpretation however, as the heated and field-defining subsequent debate over The Last Utopia revealed. The first concerned the status of the 1940s human rights moment. Moyn had more or less dismissed that moment as a dead letter — and been even more scoffing towards claims that attempted to site the origins of human rights discourses even earlier, in the eras of the French and the American revolutions. Yes, there had been a discourse of rights during the 1940s, Moyn argued, but this had been a vague and broad discourse that enumerated a grab bag of different forms of rights, including collective rights and individual rights, social rights as well as political rights, positive rights (“to” things) as well as negative rights (“from” things) — and had been largely ignored by policy makers and academics alike. The form of human rights discourse that in the 1970s eventually “broke through” (the title of an volume Moyn co-edited) were specifically a form of human rights that was much narrower than the woolly conception of rights that had been discussed around the UDHR: exclusively about individual political rights to be free from certain kinds of largely physical abuse at the hands of the state. Moyn’s argument strongly suggested that this truncated and focused version of human rights that eventually stormed the world stage and global moral imaginary did so in part because it served the geopolitical purposes of one of the two superpowers at that point in time. In this sense, while Moyn debunked the claims of fans of human rights that they were heritors of a venerable intellectual and moral tradition stretching from the U.S. Declaration of Independence through abolitionism and anti-genocide, he did at least confirm (albeit somewhat sardonically) their claims that the Helsinki Accords (1977) were a crucial moment for swaying the moral argument between the West’s form of liberal capitalism and the East’s form of dictatorial collectivism.
The second historiographic puzzle emerged in part out of the enormous growth of interest in the historical rise of neoliberalism and inequality in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the publication of Thomas Piketty and the Paris School’s own field-redefining empirical data about the historical patterns of in-country inequality over the last two centuries. Piketty and Co’s work, which was rooted in a huge data sets providing time series of national inequality, revealed that the middle third of the twentieth century were a rather unique moment in the history of economic distribution, when across the North Atlantic industrial core, wealth and income inequalities narrowed dramatically. Inequality had been huge and growing throughout the 19th century, Piketty showed, had been enormously compressed in the first half of the twentieth century by the dual factors of wealth destruction in wartime and the redistributionist policies imposed by postwar welfare states. Starting in the 1970s, however, in all countries income and wealth distribution began to reassert itself, and despite national differences and a whole series of business cycles, has inexorably proceeded now for nearly half a century.
Not Enough inserts itself into these questions by moving Moyn’s gaze from the 1970s back to the 1940s, asking a rather peculiar, negative (and this fiendishly difficult to answer) question: why, in that great postwar moment of national solidarity and debt to the war fighting working classes, as national welfare states were vastly expanded, did an ethos of equality NOT get formalized in virtually any country? And here Moyn introduces the key distinction on which the book rests, between two different ethical principles that apply across a whole series of different domains, notably both economics and politics, namely: an ethos of equality versus an ethos of sufficiency. An ethos of equality asserts that a just moral order depends on everybody more or less have the same amount of the key “good things in life,” including material goods, but also things like dignity and political power. By contrast, an ethos of sufficiency is unconcerned with relative endowments, and is only concerned with making sure that every individual meets some minimal threshold with respect to the good in question.
Moyn’s essential point is that the discourse on human rights in the 1940s was blurry on this distinction — again, Moyn attempts to explain an intellectual non-event. While there were certainly some intellectuals arguing explicitly for egalitarianism — the socialist politician and intellectual Harold Laski is the quiet hero of the book — Moyn argues that part of the motive for building welfare states was quite precisely to avoid directly confronting the sufficiency-v-equality conundrum by raising the minimum floor so high that the differences between the worst and best off would be if not irrelevant then at least politically neutralized. The failure to establish equalitarianism as the ethical basis of the welfare state at the moment of its creation, however, left the door open for the vengeful return of inequality starting in the 1970s. The discourse of human rights were simply, as his title says, not enough to hold back the eventual economic revanchism of the financialized and globalized capitalism that would emerge in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Of course, it’s hard to blame people in the 1940s for failing to foresee what would happen thirty years later. But the point is that human rights were fundamentally unhelpful not just for defending egalitarianism later but even for justifying the original postwar welfare states. The builders of postwar welfare states simply were unconcerned with questions of human rights, because the available discourse on human rights was not very useful to their purposes. Yes, the (largely collective and positive) social and economic rights enumerated in the UNDR (which would be ignored by the 1970s champions of individual and negative political rights) resonated with the welfare-state-building ambitions of the postwar period, but were largely ancillary to them. Few of the builders of these welfare states made reference to human rights as a justification for the institutions they were building.
As Moyn argues, this evasion is a crying shame, since the failure to formalize the egalitarian ethical foundations of the welfare state in the 1940s left the door open to the rise of inegalitarianism later, starting in the 1970s. Yes, minimum material standards would continue to be met in most places — social housing, primary and secondary education, basic health care, pensions, and so on — but these remained stuck at a low level even as wealthy disparities were allowed to grow, and the emergent rich began to use their riches to acquire for themselves much nicer, private versions of these goods: expensive and thus exclusive private schools, expensive and thus exclusive private transportation networks, expensive and thus exclusive private health care systems, and so on. And as the wealthy opted out of the public and collective institutions, into their bespoke private institutions, what had once seemed “sufficient” increasingly has become seen as “minimal” (at best).
To take one example: the quality of public school educations, as measured by the learnings and skills most people leave there with when they leaving, may not have gotten worse in absolute terms since the 1940s, but it hasn’t necessarily gotten much better either — even as the wealthy have moved their children into private schools with much smaller class sizes, better equipment, and far more personalized attention. Given the importance of education for success in the knowledge economy, these disparities of outcomes then reinforce class distinctions. This adverse election dynamic is well known, and Moyn’s acute point is that human rights discourse as we know it in its post-1970s form has literally nothing to say about it.
The rise of the welfare state in the 1940s is thus the event that marginalizes the UDHR at that moment. For Moyn, the “rediscovery” of the UDHR in the 1970s is thus a rather ironic event, especially as those who embrace it at the moment, claiming that their own activities draw on it, do so even as they ignored the baggy references to social and economic rights. (This is a not uncommon pattern among those who claim new “rights” to things in the present with reference to “original” texts; consider the contemporary American proponents of an individual right to carry military weapons cite the second amendment of the U.S. constitution, but blithely ignore the part about “a well-related militia” and the justification of the right as a way to avoid the evil of a standing army.) If Moyn in The Last Utopia dismissed the UDHR in the 1940s as a dead letter, in this new book he actually re-valorizes it for its commitment to distributive justice, even as he continues to insist that this most valuable part of the UDHR was essentially ignored both at the time of its publication in the 1940s and by those who resucitated it in the 1970s as a statement of individual political liberties. In this reading, the UDHR is recast from a marginal irrelevance to a tragically misunderstood figure.
Moyn’s book is an intellectual history, primarily, and spends little time on the technical details of the growth of inequality, but if he had it might have suggested some additional factors that need to be accounted for in the explanation of the non-attention of most human rights organizations to questions of equality. For example, while Piketty and Co’s work has documented the inexorable rise of in-country inequality, the work of Branko Milanovic has emphasized the arguably just as important compression of between-country inequality that has also unfolded during the period of neoliberal ascendency since the 1970s. In other words, while the rich have everywhere gotten richer than their countrymen, globally there has been a kind of economic convergence, as the poorest countries have caught up to rich ones.
Moyn largely ignores this story, and indeed explicitly sets it aside. His normative frame of reference is the national welfare state that, as he says, are “the sole political enterprises that, to date, have ever secured a modicum of distributional equality, in particular constraining the dominance of the wealthiest.” (7) In a sense, Moyn is asking why the welfare state failed to provide a barrier against the reemergence of vast economic inequalities, and also implicitly pleading for the possibility that contemporary welfare states might be resuscitated if not outright reinvented on the basis of an at last explicitly egalitarian rather than sufficientarian basis. But is the national welfare state, with all its inevitable exclusion on the basis of racial and gender hierarchies (which Moyn forthrightly acknowledges) really the only or even best basis for an egalitarian politics for the 21st century?
To develop a better form of egalitarianism, one that acknowledges that fact that our economies in the third decade of the 21st century are no longer national but are profoundly global in scope and connection, perhaps we need to revisit another set of intellectual possibilities that emerged in the protean postwar moment of the 1940s, namely the idea of a world government. Arguable the key barrier to an effective redistributionist politics for the 21st century is the ability of capital to flee any state that takes redistribution seriously for a more capital-friendly jurisdiction. Shutting down tax havens and offshore banking would be a good first step, but without a set of global institutions, any egalitarian projects at a local level are likely either to reinforce inequalities at a global level (e.g. the Nordic countries, which are country clubs masquerading as sovereign states, and impose the equality of the gentleman’s club on their members, rooted in exclusion of outsiders) or to be felled by the flight of the resources that need to be redistributed to friendlier climes.
November 25, 2020
A history of the concept of civil rights through the centuries. It started as a concept that people of the elite or close to the elite dreamed up. It was first relegated to a few in society and in time opened up to those in a well off country and eventually the least well off of them. It then it spread to colonies and the less well off in them. But it’s benefits have been hard to negotiate and fleeting for the most needy. Since capitalism no longer has to compete with communism, human rights has contracted in the United States. Europe tended to finalize social democracy and benefit people through healthcare and basic subsistence. Still capitalism seems to determine if human rights are available and able to function.
July 24, 2018
Fascinating and very careful history of the human rights regime and its interplay with neoliberal markets. I read this together with the Globalists (another recent book and account of the history of neoliberalism) and the books really complement each other. Moyn rebuts the conspiratorial thesis put forward by Nomi Prims and others about human rights being a ploy to advance the neoliberal agenda, but he explains how it was complementary nonetheless. There was no conspiracy and advocates of human rights were earnest reformers for the most part, but the focus on human rights allowed regimes that fostered inequality. Moyn's distinction between pushing for subsistence and equality is a central theme in the book and his history is incredibly illuminating.
February 20, 2025
Moyn positions his critique of human rights as the language of (social) justice in the space between leftist thinkers like Naomi Klein and the uncritical human rights warriors, exemplified by the trope of the Eastern European liberals who in their backlash against “actually existing” socialism scorn at any mention of material equality. He argues that while the human rights monopolisation of the justice discourse following the collapse of socialism should not be blamed for the rise of neoliberalism, its toothlessness, lack of ambition and satisfaction with minimal “sufficiency” in the socio-economic domain—as opposed to normative claims to “equality”—served as a smokescreen for the neoliberal transition and disappearance of the national welfare states.
Tracing the development of rights; from natural, and political to human, Moyn demonstrates the vacillation of the rights discourses between the purported binary frameworks: positive vs. negative freedom, political vs. economic, the nation-state vs. globalised economic system, and sufficiency vs. equality. Consequently, he constructs an intellectual history of the twentieth century around the final opposition between the politics of sufficiency and equality as a history of struggles over material distribution, ie what share people ought to get of the good things in life”. The distributional paradigms—sufficient minimum “floor” vs. equal relative shares—Moyn argues, should not be viewed as incommensurable. Rather, following the Jacobins who were the first to institutionalise these ideals, he proposes that a modest “modicum of equality” should be a regulative principle in the world where everyone has a “sufficient” minimum.
The kernel of Moyn’s argument lies in recognition of “the explosion of inequality” in the latter half of the last century following the gradual collapse of the Western “reconciliationist welfare states”. The neoliberal imaginary, conceived partially in response to the post-colonial demands for greater equality within the global economic system (The New International Economic Order, NIEO), and the depoliticisation of the human rights discourse in the 1970s Eastern European dissident movement (opposing the authoritarian regimes on “moral grounds”) made human rights—by the time lacking any commitment to material inequality—a “powerless” tool. However, it is at these fundaments, where Moyn’s argument begins to founder.
Positing inequality as the biggest issue facing us today, he fails to historicise it, and, as Jennifer Pitts argued in her brilliant review (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full...), he focuses merely on the problem of distribution to the exclusion of other facets of political economy which contribute to inequality and exploitation. These are, as the NIEO movement and Pitts recognise, “the colonial and neocolonial exploitation of the global south, … discriminatory trade and labor regimes and the theft of natural resources”. Not only Moyn fails to integrate the causes of inequality into his narrative, but he does not seem to take into account the consequences of explosive inequality for political power leading to other forms of exploitation.
This omission undermines his argument that the human rights discourse was merely powerless and not actively complicit in the emergence of predatory neoliberalism. He recognises that the discourse served the American empire and its enterprises abroad (“bringing democracy” to the Middle East), but rejects that this would be its essential function. Without a robust theory explaining the unequal distribution of economic and political power, however, such assertions are merely speculations. Inequality did not emerge in a power vacuum, and neither did the discourse of human rights.
Tracing the development of rights; from natural, and political to human, Moyn demonstrates the vacillation of the rights discourses between the purported binary frameworks: positive vs. negative freedom, political vs. economic, the nation-state vs. globalised economic system, and sufficiency vs. equality. Consequently, he constructs an intellectual history of the twentieth century around the final opposition between the politics of sufficiency and equality as a history of struggles over material distribution, ie what share people ought to get of the good things in life”. The distributional paradigms—sufficient minimum “floor” vs. equal relative shares—Moyn argues, should not be viewed as incommensurable. Rather, following the Jacobins who were the first to institutionalise these ideals, he proposes that a modest “modicum of equality” should be a regulative principle in the world where everyone has a “sufficient” minimum.
The kernel of Moyn’s argument lies in recognition of “the explosion of inequality” in the latter half of the last century following the gradual collapse of the Western “reconciliationist welfare states”. The neoliberal imaginary, conceived partially in response to the post-colonial demands for greater equality within the global economic system (The New International Economic Order, NIEO), and the depoliticisation of the human rights discourse in the 1970s Eastern European dissident movement (opposing the authoritarian regimes on “moral grounds”) made human rights—by the time lacking any commitment to material inequality—a “powerless” tool. However, it is at these fundaments, where Moyn’s argument begins to founder.
Positing inequality as the biggest issue facing us today, he fails to historicise it, and, as Jennifer Pitts argued in her brilliant review (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full...), he focuses merely on the problem of distribution to the exclusion of other facets of political economy which contribute to inequality and exploitation. These are, as the NIEO movement and Pitts recognise, “the colonial and neocolonial exploitation of the global south, … discriminatory trade and labor regimes and the theft of natural resources”. Not only Moyn fails to integrate the causes of inequality into his narrative, but he does not seem to take into account the consequences of explosive inequality for political power leading to other forms of exploitation.
This omission undermines his argument that the human rights discourse was merely powerless and not actively complicit in the emergence of predatory neoliberalism. He recognises that the discourse served the American empire and its enterprises abroad (“bringing democracy” to the Middle East), but rejects that this would be its essential function. Without a robust theory explaining the unequal distribution of economic and political power, however, such assertions are merely speculations. Inequality did not emerge in a power vacuum, and neither did the discourse of human rights.
Want to read
February 4, 2022Very nice introduction part, I actually enjoyed this book. The topic is super interesting. However, I think you have to be a native English speaker - or my English simply lacks the sophistication of the author's level. I gave up on the second chapter - but even the introduction was very motivating and promising - even reading the first 2 chapters added me some ideas.
Ühühüh I hate abandoning books.
Ühühüh I hate abandoning books.
Want to read
May 26, 2023JC571 .M8635 2018 College Library Rm. 1191
October 17, 2018
Five stars! Samuel Moyn is a Professor of Law and History at Yale University. I heard him speak, on the Duke University Campus, last month.
He offers a perspicuous explanation of how inequality has grown during the ascendancy of human rights. This is a fine companion read to:
Lind, M. (2017). The New Class War.
American Affairs, Summer 2017, Volume I, Number 2.
Retrieved May 27, 2017 from: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/20...
Lind and Moyn offer different, but equally accurate, of causes of the growth of inequality.
"The real trouble about human rights, when historically correlated with market fundamentalism, is not that they promote it but that they are unambitious in theory and ineffectual in practice in the face of market fundamentalism's success" (p. 216).men
There is cogent advice in this for my Progressive friends.
"The truth is local and global economic justice requires redesigning markets or at least redistributing from the rich to the rest, something that naming and shaming are never likely to achieve, even when supplemented by novel forms of legal activism" (p. 218).
Yes. We do need to share. And yes, we do need a significant negative income tax.
"And it will need to be frightening enough to prompt social bargains that the welfare state supervised to the end of material fairness, while not incurring the tremendous costs of twentieth-century conflict" (p. 219).
Nothing changes until the elites are frightened.
"As egalitarian ideals and practises died, the idea of human rights accommodated itself to the reigning political economy, which it could humanize but not overthrow" (p. 9).
"Thomas Aquinas believed unavailability of a bare minimum to survive made property "common" for the taking, while Franciscan spirituals in the centuries that followed explained that followers of Jesus who could not own property at all could still use that of others to survive" (p. 17).
"The right to strike remained so controversial that it would not make it into the canonical text of the Universal Human Rights" (1948) (p. 32).
"The Universal Declaration has to be seen circling around the project of national welfare" (p. 44).
"The compelling truth, in short, is how belated and uninfluential international norms were on the ongoing welfare experimentation in its various guises, as states each embarked on a national economic project" (p. 59).
"Of course, this referred to equality of means for privileged citizens across classes - the command man so long as he was white - without taking on the gendered and racialized form in which the New Deal had come" (p. 78).
"It became imaginable to champion the New Deal nostalgically while really only proposing to humanize neoliberalism, even as human rights could become America's bequest to the world, past and future" (p. 88).
"The decolonization of the world after World War II was easily the most startling event widest-ranging implications in the history of distributive justice" (p. 98).
"The new International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which ultimately came into legal force in 1976, was one of obvious significance in global history" (p. 110).
"Many activists newly recruited into the transnational activism facing down the depredation, imprisonment, and torture of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe and the authoritarianism in Latin America placed the whole problem of a broader social justice on indefinite hold, or dropped it altogether, in order to focus on personal freedoms" (p. 120).
"For the founder human rights activism was much more about saving the activist's soul, rather than building social justice" (p. 123).
"The final end of colonialism after several hundred years, and direct intervention by the United States, became not a moment of opportunity to set things right, but a projection of guilt for the failure of sufficiency on those demanding equality too" (p. 138).
"Yet by 1980, human rights were far along far along in their transit from principles of an egalitarian welfare package for fellow citizens to aspirations of global sufficiency for fellow humans, . . . ." (p. 145).
"In this resolute individualism, the birth of global justice looks like it testifies to the enormous power - and possible limits - of a moment when International human rights in ethics and globalizing fundamentalism in economics became companions on the road towards the present" (p. 172).
"At the very least, campaigns for human rights distract from the true source of the very evils they purport to oppose" (p. 174).
"After its participation in the creation of welfare states, socialism had become and long remained the the most identifiable language of material equality, and it's departure explains more than any other factor why the age of human rights was also the age of neoliberalism: it was no longer the age of the socialist left" (p. 180).
See figure on p. 182.
"Neoliberalism, not human rights, is to blame for neoliberalism" (p. 192).
"To the extent the human rights non-governmental organizations later burgeoned across the global south, they almost always refused to exclude economic and social rights, in a stark departure from their northern opposite numbers. No human Rights NGOs, northern or southern, emphasized inequality for its own sake" (p. 195).
"A struggle for the recognition of identities beyond those of white males challenged the narrow terms of established welfare states, but only in the age of state retrenchment and redistributive failure" (p. 202).
"It is still true today that most inequality is due to differences in average income between countries, not within them" (p. 211).
He offers a perspicuous explanation of how inequality has grown during the ascendancy of human rights. This is a fine companion read to:
Lind, M. (2017). The New Class War.
American Affairs, Summer 2017, Volume I, Number 2.
Retrieved May 27, 2017 from: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/20...
Lind and Moyn offer different, but equally accurate, of causes of the growth of inequality.
"The real trouble about human rights, when historically correlated with market fundamentalism, is not that they promote it but that they are unambitious in theory and ineffectual in practice in the face of market fundamentalism's success" (p. 216).men
There is cogent advice in this for my Progressive friends.
"The truth is local and global economic justice requires redesigning markets or at least redistributing from the rich to the rest, something that naming and shaming are never likely to achieve, even when supplemented by novel forms of legal activism" (p. 218).
Yes. We do need to share. And yes, we do need a significant negative income tax.
"And it will need to be frightening enough to prompt social bargains that the welfare state supervised to the end of material fairness, while not incurring the tremendous costs of twentieth-century conflict" (p. 219).
Nothing changes until the elites are frightened.
"As egalitarian ideals and practises died, the idea of human rights accommodated itself to the reigning political economy, which it could humanize but not overthrow" (p. 9).
"Thomas Aquinas believed unavailability of a bare minimum to survive made property "common" for the taking, while Franciscan spirituals in the centuries that followed explained that followers of Jesus who could not own property at all could still use that of others to survive" (p. 17).
"The right to strike remained so controversial that it would not make it into the canonical text of the Universal Human Rights" (1948) (p. 32).
"The Universal Declaration has to be seen circling around the project of national welfare" (p. 44).
"The compelling truth, in short, is how belated and uninfluential international norms were on the ongoing welfare experimentation in its various guises, as states each embarked on a national economic project" (p. 59).
"Of course, this referred to equality of means for privileged citizens across classes - the command man so long as he was white - without taking on the gendered and racialized form in which the New Deal had come" (p. 78).
"It became imaginable to champion the New Deal nostalgically while really only proposing to humanize neoliberalism, even as human rights could become America's bequest to the world, past and future" (p. 88).
"The decolonization of the world after World War II was easily the most startling event widest-ranging implications in the history of distributive justice" (p. 98).
"The new International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which ultimately came into legal force in 1976, was one of obvious significance in global history" (p. 110).
"Many activists newly recruited into the transnational activism facing down the depredation, imprisonment, and torture of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe and the authoritarianism in Latin America placed the whole problem of a broader social justice on indefinite hold, or dropped it altogether, in order to focus on personal freedoms" (p. 120).
"For the founder human rights activism was much more about saving the activist's soul, rather than building social justice" (p. 123).
"The final end of colonialism after several hundred years, and direct intervention by the United States, became not a moment of opportunity to set things right, but a projection of guilt for the failure of sufficiency on those demanding equality too" (p. 138).
"Yet by 1980, human rights were far along far along in their transit from principles of an egalitarian welfare package for fellow citizens to aspirations of global sufficiency for fellow humans, . . . ." (p. 145).
"In this resolute individualism, the birth of global justice looks like it testifies to the enormous power - and possible limits - of a moment when International human rights in ethics and globalizing fundamentalism in economics became companions on the road towards the present" (p. 172).
"At the very least, campaigns for human rights distract from the true source of the very evils they purport to oppose" (p. 174).
"After its participation in the creation of welfare states, socialism had become and long remained the the most identifiable language of material equality, and it's departure explains more than any other factor why the age of human rights was also the age of neoliberalism: it was no longer the age of the socialist left" (p. 180).
See figure on p. 182.
"Neoliberalism, not human rights, is to blame for neoliberalism" (p. 192).
"To the extent the human rights non-governmental organizations later burgeoned across the global south, they almost always refused to exclude economic and social rights, in a stark departure from their northern opposite numbers. No human Rights NGOs, northern or southern, emphasized inequality for its own sake" (p. 195).
"A struggle for the recognition of identities beyond those of white males challenged the narrow terms of established welfare states, but only in the age of state retrenchment and redistributive failure" (p. 202).
"It is still true today that most inequality is due to differences in average income between countries, not within them" (p. 211).
November 19, 2023
Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough identifies a very interesting phenomenon: that discourse around human rights kicked off only as the USSR disintegrated and neoliberalism kicked off. Such an interesting coincidence deserves an explanation.
Over the last few decades, human rights have fit quite comfortably within neoliberalism. But should they? Neoliberalism takes little issue with the first twenty-one articles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): these have to do with political freedoms and property rights, and have close kin in the UDHR’s predecessors, the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789).
Updated review.
Over the last few decades, human rights have fit quite comfortably within neoliberalism. But should they? Neoliberalism takes little issue with the first twenty-one articles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): these have to do with political freedoms and property rights, and have close kin in the UDHR’s predecessors, the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789).
The next seven articles are harder to square within neoliberalism since they demand, among other social and economic rights, the right to shelter and food, to education, and even to paid holidays. These were sharply censured by one of neoliberalism’s leading thinkers, Hayek:
The conception of a ‘universal right’ which assures to the peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the Abominable Snowman, ‘periodic holidays with pay’ shows the absurdity of the whole thing. (Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1979)
Moyn argues that human rights set merely a floor for basic needs, allowing limitless wealth accumulation for the few provided some allowances are made for bare subsistence living for the many. To address inequality — both between nations and within a nation — a new framework is needed. In this conception, indeed, human rights are exactly the fig leaf necessary for a return to the horrors of 19th century capitalism after the cannibalization of the welfare state. I agree with him that human rights organizations have largely prioritized political rights, and that the neoliberal era has made embarrassingly poor progress in the provision of shelter and food, education and paid holidays, globally.
I am less convinced that it is so much an inherent failing of the tool of human rights than simply the doing of those wielding it. Article 27 demands “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” Article 28 declares “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.” Together, I think these rights demand that the technological progress of the Global North (high speed rail, internet, the most cutting edge cancer drugs, for example) be made available to all the people of the world regardless of their place of residence. The human rights movement under neoliberalism has not chosen to work towards these ends (and indeed this human right is also violated for many people residing in the wealthiest countries).
Although he is nebulous to the point of caginess about what his preferred solution is, Moyn argues throughout for the need of a distributive concept of equality versus ideals that aim only for a subsistence existence. Presumably, some conception of the rights due to all people would have to encompass a “share” of all wealth? It is interesting, therefore, that Article 27 (quote above) indeed provisions to all humans a share of science and technology. Simply declaring a right to a share evidently hasn’t been enough. So what sort of government permits that?
One of the neoliberal critiques of human rights is whether it is possible to satisfy them within a worldview founded on individual responsibility. Here’s Hayek again:
It is evident that all these ‘rights’ are based on the interpretation of society as a deliberately made organization by which everybody is employed. They could not be made universal within a system of rules of just conduct based on the conception of individual responsibility, and so require that the whole of society be converted into a single organization, that is, made totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word.
Moyn, likewise, is terrified of the “totalitarian” systems that chose an alternative to the welfare state in their efforts to eliminate inequality (i.e., socialism). It is not clear what system he calls for, nor how this system would avoid such “totalitarian” tendencies.
Moyn’s argument largely traces the intellectual history of the concepts of distributive equality versus subsistence allowances — particularly from an American perspective although with a few scholars with some ties to the Global South, like Amartya Sen. He does not investigate the source of wealth inequality (although he nods briefly towards the devastation wrought by colonialism), nor does he ground his analysis in what sorts of interventions effectively reduced inequality (though there is a brief foray in how investment in education both satisfies a human right and reduces inequality). This is a blind spot: one can hardly tackle a problem without knowing what causes it and what has fixed it in the past.
His treatment of intra-nation versus inter-nation inequality is simplistic. Political projects are largely judged by their intent to lift the very neediest in the globe out of poverty. In this way, the USSR’s accomplishments in dramatically raising literacy and life expectancy within its borders are dismissed because they aimed for “socialism in one country” (rather than addressing global inequality). (Nor is there curiosity regarding why the Soviets pivoted from their original goal of socialism across the world to just socialism in one country.) Similarly, heightened intra-nation inequality during the marketization of China is lambasted, although the wealth gap between China and the wealthier countries narrowed during this time for both its poorest and its better off citizens. Is it possible to reduce intra-nation inequality without, at least for some period, heightening inter-nation inequality? Because Moyn examines neither the source of inequality nor practical examples of addressing it (beyond the former colonial empires’ welfare states), he cannot answer this question.
Updated review.
June 3, 2018
Continuando con la gran producción literaria sobre desigualdad, Samuel Moyn cuenta una historia entre la relación del surgimiento de los estados de bienestar en el mundo, su auge y caída y el surgimiento de la lucha por los derechos humanos y la explosión del neoliberalismo en el mundo.
Moyn argumenta que la declaración universal de derechos humanos en el fondo tenia en mente un funcionamiento pensando en el estado de bienestar, como un subproducto del mismo en el que se dio un gran debate entre si la igualdad material era un objetivo o la provisión mínima de satisfactores sin importar consideraciones distributivas.
El ocaso del estado de bienestar y luego del socialismo y la llegada del modelo neoliberal acabaron en gran medida con las preocupaciones sobre la igualdad y dejaron al discurso de los derechos humanos separado de las ideas de igualdad que en un principio los alimentaron. El libro nos invita a pensar que debemos pensar a la agenda de derechos humanos y la agenda de combate a la desigualdad nuevamente como parte integra, pensar en la igualdad material y no solo en los mínimos de supervivencia.
Moyn argumenta que la declaración universal de derechos humanos en el fondo tenia en mente un funcionamiento pensando en el estado de bienestar, como un subproducto del mismo en el que se dio un gran debate entre si la igualdad material era un objetivo o la provisión mínima de satisfactores sin importar consideraciones distributivas.
El ocaso del estado de bienestar y luego del socialismo y la llegada del modelo neoliberal acabaron en gran medida con las preocupaciones sobre la igualdad y dejaron al discurso de los derechos humanos separado de las ideas de igualdad que en un principio los alimentaron. El libro nos invita a pensar que debemos pensar a la agenda de derechos humanos y la agenda de combate a la desigualdad nuevamente como parte integra, pensar en la igualdad material y no solo en los mínimos de supervivencia.
January 30, 2025
"De tragedie van de mensenrechten is dat ze de wereldwijde verbeelding in beslag hebben genomen maar tot nu toe weinig noemenswaardigs hebben bijgedragen en enkel de neoliberale reus op de hielen hebben gezeten. De belangrijkste reden dat mensenrechten een machteloze metgezel zijn van het marktfundamentalisme is dat ze niets te zeggen hebben over materiële ongelijkheid.
Elke directe verplichting tot materiële gelijkheid (een plafond voor de welvaartskloof tussen rijk en arm) ontbreekt in de Universele Verklaring van de Rechten van de Mens en de wettelijke regimes en sociale bewegingen die deze als hun leidraad nemen: mensenrechten garanderen statusgelijkheid, maar geen distributieve gelijkheid. Niets in het schema van mensenrechten sluit absolute heerschappij uit, zolang er wordt voldaan aan de ondergrens van voldoende voorzieningen. Daarom zijn mensenrechten, zelfs volkomen verwezenlijkt, verenigbaar met radicale ongelijkheid. Hoe verrassend het ook lijkt, er blijkt geen tegenspraak te zijn tussen drastische materiële ongelijkheid en de vervulling van basisvoorzieningen.
De morele betekenis en mogelijk zelfs het historische succes van mensenrechten moet niet in twijfel worden getrokken als het gaat om het bestrijden van politieke onderdrukking en het beteugelen van buitensporig geweld of zelfs in campagnes voor economische en sociale rechten. Maar in de gevallen dat ongelijkheid werd beperkt, was dat nooit op de individualistische en vaak antistatelijke basis die mensenrechten delen met hun marktfundamentalistische dubbelganger. Als het aankomt op het mobiliseren van steun voor economische rechtvaardigheid, zijn de belangrijkste instrumenten van de mensenrechtenbeweging - het spelen van informatiepolitiek om de onderdrukking van staten of de rampen van oorlog te stigmatiseren - gewoonweg niet geschikt.
De waarheid is dat lokale en wereldwijde economische rechtvaardigheid het herontwerpen van markten vereist of op zijn minst een herverdeling van de rijken naar de rest, iets wat 'naming and shaming' waarschijnlijk nooit zullen bereiken, zelfs niet wanneer aangevuld met nieuwe vormen van juridisch activisme. Gelijkheid werd nooit bereikt door stigmatisering van (overheids)bestuur, maar juist door enthousiasme ervoor en toewijding eraan.
Op morele gronden zouden de rijken in de wereld zich moeten willen bevrijden van enkel een bekrompen identificatie met hun medemensen wanneer hun levens op het spel staan in de meest spectaculaire ontheemding, armoede en geweld.
Tot op heden is een wereldwijde welvaartsstructuur alleen maar denkbeeldig geweest, maar nooit geïnstitutionaliseerd. Onze taak is daarom niet gemakkelijk. Het is zelfs extreem ontmoedigend."
Elke directe verplichting tot materiële gelijkheid (een plafond voor de welvaartskloof tussen rijk en arm) ontbreekt in de Universele Verklaring van de Rechten van de Mens en de wettelijke regimes en sociale bewegingen die deze als hun leidraad nemen: mensenrechten garanderen statusgelijkheid, maar geen distributieve gelijkheid. Niets in het schema van mensenrechten sluit absolute heerschappij uit, zolang er wordt voldaan aan de ondergrens van voldoende voorzieningen. Daarom zijn mensenrechten, zelfs volkomen verwezenlijkt, verenigbaar met radicale ongelijkheid. Hoe verrassend het ook lijkt, er blijkt geen tegenspraak te zijn tussen drastische materiële ongelijkheid en de vervulling van basisvoorzieningen.
De morele betekenis en mogelijk zelfs het historische succes van mensenrechten moet niet in twijfel worden getrokken als het gaat om het bestrijden van politieke onderdrukking en het beteugelen van buitensporig geweld of zelfs in campagnes voor economische en sociale rechten. Maar in de gevallen dat ongelijkheid werd beperkt, was dat nooit op de individualistische en vaak antistatelijke basis die mensenrechten delen met hun marktfundamentalistische dubbelganger. Als het aankomt op het mobiliseren van steun voor economische rechtvaardigheid, zijn de belangrijkste instrumenten van de mensenrechtenbeweging - het spelen van informatiepolitiek om de onderdrukking van staten of de rampen van oorlog te stigmatiseren - gewoonweg niet geschikt.
De waarheid is dat lokale en wereldwijde economische rechtvaardigheid het herontwerpen van markten vereist of op zijn minst een herverdeling van de rijken naar de rest, iets wat 'naming and shaming' waarschijnlijk nooit zullen bereiken, zelfs niet wanneer aangevuld met nieuwe vormen van juridisch activisme. Gelijkheid werd nooit bereikt door stigmatisering van (overheids)bestuur, maar juist door enthousiasme ervoor en toewijding eraan.
Op morele gronden zouden de rijken in de wereld zich moeten willen bevrijden van enkel een bekrompen identificatie met hun medemensen wanneer hun levens op het spel staan in de meest spectaculaire ontheemding, armoede en geweld.
Tot op heden is een wereldwijde welvaartsstructuur alleen maar denkbeeldig geweest, maar nooit geïnstitutionaliseerd. Onze taak is daarom niet gemakkelijk. Het is zelfs extreem ontmoedigend."
August 3, 2022
Moyn sticks with you and earns his right to be one of the seminal figures in the human rights conversation. His thesis that human rights movements not being enough to conquer the inequality of impoverished populations is a fascinating conception of human rights. Earlier human rights advocates sought to juggle rights conversations between the tension of sufficiency and equality. Ultimately, the world sided with the sufficiency argument as the world welcomed neoliberal institutions and ideals.
I disagree with Moyn's thesis that human rights are not enough to conquer inequality alone. I have come to believe that human rights do not exemplify the nature of the human story in relation to an Almighty God. Biblical principles speak to the idea that human's do not 'deserve' rights from God. Instead, God graciously gave us gifts of life, and dignity in relation to animals. Using the term 'human rights' assumes that we can demand certain components of our being from God.
We cannot demand these things. Instead, we must graciously understand that the only thing we deserve is death as a part of our sinful nature. It is only through God's grace and mercy that we can receive salvation and dignity through faith. Human rights movement's are a modern day reconstruction of the Tower of Babel. We are seeking to reach heavenly concepts while being unable to fully grasp the true essence of what it means to be human (since we do not yet understand what it is truly like to be human without sin). Moyn comes to the human rights conversation from the perspective that human rights are an incomplete tool in realizing/freeing humanities inherent perfection. To Moyn, humans are perfectly capable of defining what they 'deserve' by getting closer and closer to material equality. This is a completely different foundation from where I am coming from. We help and assist humanity because God calls us to share our resources, time, and energy to help meet the physical, spiritual, and emotional needs of a broken world. We should understand that we are sharing gifts given by God, and not demanding God to provide us with things we 'deserve.'
Moyn unlocked my understanding of what the human rights movement has become in the modern era. He also allowed me to reflect upon how I view the concept of human rights as a Christian. In this respect, I am indebted to his analysis and insight.
I disagree with Moyn's thesis that human rights are not enough to conquer inequality alone. I have come to believe that human rights do not exemplify the nature of the human story in relation to an Almighty God. Biblical principles speak to the idea that human's do not 'deserve' rights from God. Instead, God graciously gave us gifts of life, and dignity in relation to animals. Using the term 'human rights' assumes that we can demand certain components of our being from God.
We cannot demand these things. Instead, we must graciously understand that the only thing we deserve is death as a part of our sinful nature. It is only through God's grace and mercy that we can receive salvation and dignity through faith. Human rights movement's are a modern day reconstruction of the Tower of Babel. We are seeking to reach heavenly concepts while being unable to fully grasp the true essence of what it means to be human (since we do not yet understand what it is truly like to be human without sin). Moyn comes to the human rights conversation from the perspective that human rights are an incomplete tool in realizing/freeing humanities inherent perfection. To Moyn, humans are perfectly capable of defining what they 'deserve' by getting closer and closer to material equality. This is a completely different foundation from where I am coming from. We help and assist humanity because God calls us to share our resources, time, and energy to help meet the physical, spiritual, and emotional needs of a broken world. We should understand that we are sharing gifts given by God, and not demanding God to provide us with things we 'deserve.'
Moyn unlocked my understanding of what the human rights movement has become in the modern era. He also allowed me to reflect upon how I view the concept of human rights as a Christian. In this respect, I am indebted to his analysis and insight.
June 24, 2018
I'm glad I read the book because it introduced me to some new ideas, perspectives I hadn't really heard before. But I had issues with how firmly the book takes one stance while having no interest in convincing anyone who doesn't share most of it. Much of it was an attempt to cover history, not to preach, but the history was aggressively polarized.
March 4, 2022
So difficult to read and to follow. Got Lost several Times and the arguments are not even organized. Others were left incomplete. I am sure that if the author took some more time to make it more readble and enjoyable to the reader, it could be very good. But as it is, it is obscure, confusing and does not even provide his points of vue for all the questions raised.
October 29, 2019
A very interesting read and Moyn makes a strong case that sufficiency and equality are not necessarily compatible. Also, human rights, sufficiency and democracy are neither that easy to combine in a coherent fashion. Challenging and thought provoking, but also convincing.
Read
March 26, 2019Κριτική του Θωμά Ψήμμα για το βιβλίο στο περιοδικό μας: https://marginalia.gr/arthro/ta-anthr...
May 2, 2022
Too many people don't have enough and the emphasis on human rights is not enough to give them what they need. The "right" to free speech doesn't fill an empty belly.
May 13, 2024
Not his best work
January 15, 2019
"...[I]f it does not save itself from its peaceable companionship with neoliberalism, the human rights movement looks more and more like a palliative that accepts the permanence of recurrent evil without facing it more frontally."
This book was essentially the long version of this article. I think Moyn has been a bit unfairly criticised as writing off the human rights movement. Instead, I think he's actually calling for human rights activists to recognise that the movement has devolved into advocating for basic subsistence rather than true economic equality and justice. I can't remember which article of Moyn's I was reading now (possibly his debate with Alston?), but I thought he had a decent point -- for ESCR, we're no longer fighting for economic equality, but for a minimum level of destitution. We've given up on capping wealth, which was once a core component of the socialist/welfare/moral justice movement. Moyn argued if we want to be serious about addressing inequality then we need to do more than just safeguard basic minimums. -- And, a more uncomfortable conversation in a neoliberal age, look to once again equate economic extravagance with immorality and a breach of human rights.
This is a striking thought: "Human rights, even perfectly realized human rights, are compatible with inequality. Even radical inequality." -- But I think he really goes further. The human rights system itself not only allows for the existence of inequality, but can actively perpetuate it. Inequality is fundamental to how our current human rights system functions.
It's been interesting studying human rights' structures, philosophies, and legalities. It's kind of amusing how all the human rights activists going into these studies seem to come out the other end thinking, shit, maybe the human rights project isn't such a great thing to advocate for after all. ...I think it's important that we have complicated narratives and relationships to human rights. It's the only way we can really work on making the system fit our ideals. (She says, sounding very young and naive.)
Okay, so, book review! If you're looking to read this book for its philosophy on human rights, you can save yourself the time and just read Moyn's article. But as well as being a legal scholar, Moyn is predominantly a historian. This book set out in excruciating detail how the human rights project has evolved and adopted neoliberal mechanisms over time -- it's an interesting account of history. If you enjoy history, read the book. The tone is sort of in the the vein of the BBC's In Our Time podcasts -- so much so, that I got confused as to whether I'd heard about 'the poor laws' from the podcast or Moyn's book.
September 24, 2018
Socialism or Barbarism?
The human rights movement has been criticized from the left in recent years, charged with abetting the grotesque results of neoliberal market capitalism, namely, runaway inequality. A new book by Samuel Moyn, “Not Enough, Human Rights in an Unequal World,” clears the movement of this specific charge, but observes that “the critical reason that human rights have been a powerless companion of market fundamentalism is that they simply have nothing to say about material inequality.” Nor does he let go of a central fact in this debate, that is, “the coexistence of the human rights phenomenon with the death of socialism.” There are no innocent bystanders. By ignoring inequality and keeping public focus on other issues, human rights activists have made a dreadful mistake; though not to blame for the rise of right-wing authoritarian – some would say neo-fascist – governments throughout the First World, they have stayed silent on a condition fueling it, fury over inequality.
There is a lot more to say about this book, read my full review at:
http://www.eveottenberg.com/blog.htm?...
The human rights movement has been criticized from the left in recent years, charged with abetting the grotesque results of neoliberal market capitalism, namely, runaway inequality. A new book by Samuel Moyn, “Not Enough, Human Rights in an Unequal World,” clears the movement of this specific charge, but observes that “the critical reason that human rights have been a powerless companion of market fundamentalism is that they simply have nothing to say about material inequality.” Nor does he let go of a central fact in this debate, that is, “the coexistence of the human rights phenomenon with the death of socialism.” There are no innocent bystanders. By ignoring inequality and keeping public focus on other issues, human rights activists have made a dreadful mistake; though not to blame for the rise of right-wing authoritarian – some would say neo-fascist – governments throughout the First World, they have stayed silent on a condition fueling it, fury over inequality.
There is a lot more to say about this book, read my full review at:
http://www.eveottenberg.com/blog.htm?...
June 17, 2020
This book addresses such a fascinating topic - why did the ascendancy of human rights map onto exploding inequality? And if human rights aren’t the ultimate moral goal of societies, what should be? As an advocate at one of the human rights nonprofits deemed by Moyn to be at least passively complicit in the ravaging age of neoliberalism, I found Moyn’s critiques of the limitations of the human rights movement stingingly accurate - especially considering how reliant human rights NGOs are on frequently neoliberal donor dollars (a fact he curiously fails to mention). Human rights, as Moyn so decisively notes, are simply not enough. Their realization alone would not lead to fairness. And yet, we are so extremely far even from the realization of minimal rights that human rights advocacy, imperfect as it is, still feels extraordinarily urgent.
What’s frustrating, however, is how little Moyn engages with the alternative: what does the movement that should take the place of, or supplement, human rights look like? What do international constraints on global equality or global redistributivism look like (it’s telling how sparsely Moyn engages with the policy proposals of the New International Economic Order, painting them as dead letters without deconstructing their substance and continued salience in a modern world)? At the end, this is a trenchant, confident critique of one thing with an incredibly hazy, uncertain conclusion about another.
At best, a rights framework - as opposed to a “this would be nice” institutional design framework, which is what Moyn seems to champion - places guarantees into the hands of the people. The language of rights is critical for enforceability, for naming and shaming, sure - but the simultaneously personal and universal nature of rights is what makes them so alluring. Moyn’s alternative, insofar as he has one, is as dull as a brutalist building.
What’s frustrating, however, is how little Moyn engages with the alternative: what does the movement that should take the place of, or supplement, human rights look like? What do international constraints on global equality or global redistributivism look like (it’s telling how sparsely Moyn engages with the policy proposals of the New International Economic Order, painting them as dead letters without deconstructing their substance and continued salience in a modern world)? At the end, this is a trenchant, confident critique of one thing with an incredibly hazy, uncertain conclusion about another.
At best, a rights framework - as opposed to a “this would be nice” institutional design framework, which is what Moyn seems to champion - places guarantees into the hands of the people. The language of rights is critical for enforceability, for naming and shaming, sure - but the simultaneously personal and universal nature of rights is what makes them so alluring. Moyn’s alternative, insofar as he has one, is as dull as a brutalist building.
August 14, 2019
Not Enough provides a stunning history of the rise of "human rights" as our primary framework for envisioning a better world coinciding with the decline of socialism in our collective moral imagination (he has the receipts: Google Ngrams!) Moyn argues that this myopic focus -- providing a floor of sufficiency to meet for humanity, instead of having a more capacious vision that includes a ceiling on inequality -- enables runaway inequality under neoliberalism, which is itself morally troubling. It's intriguing and a necessary read for anyone whose work necessitates using the language of human rights, in case you're a nonprofit worker who isn't already starting your day by asking yourself if you're accidentally becoming a neoliberal shill.
Should note that it's a historical monograph not oriented toward lay readers. On page 172 Moyn quotes political theorist Charles Beitz: "If we cannot expect moral theory to provide a firm guide for action, one might wonder whether moral theory has any practical point at all," and I wondered while reading if Moyn wanted to produce a book that lent itself to action. It was a question made realer to me by experience -- I left this book along with several others for my mom to read while she was visiting, and when I got back from an errand, she commented woefully, "I tried to read that law one," pointing to Not Enough, "but it was too hard." My mom is college-educated and a frequent reader, but I think her reaction is an indicator that the amount of inside baseball in the book has the potential to alienate those readers outside the academy -- nonprofit professionals, government officials, or corporate social responsibility types -- who might benefit most (actionably) from the introspection it provokes.
Should note that it's a historical monograph not oriented toward lay readers. On page 172 Moyn quotes political theorist Charles Beitz: "If we cannot expect moral theory to provide a firm guide for action, one might wonder whether moral theory has any practical point at all," and I wondered while reading if Moyn wanted to produce a book that lent itself to action. It was a question made realer to me by experience -- I left this book along with several others for my mom to read while she was visiting, and when I got back from an errand, she commented woefully, "I tried to read that law one," pointing to Not Enough, "but it was too hard." My mom is college-educated and a frequent reader, but I think her reaction is an indicator that the amount of inside baseball in the book has the potential to alienate those readers outside the academy -- nonprofit professionals, government officials, or corporate social responsibility types -- who might benefit most (actionably) from the introspection it provokes.
Read
August 29, 2020In Moyn's estimation, the rise of human rights movement after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet collapse has coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, and this is no coincidence. For Moyn, the period since the 1990s is the latest in a long history in the tension between movements that focus on sufficiency and equality, or between a focus on ensuring the very basic needs of the poorest are met or that there is little gap between the rich and the poor. This history stretches back to the Enlightenment, and Moyn devotes early chapters to the rise of the Jacobins and the attempt to balance these concerns during the French Revolution. The book moves quickly to the New Deal era and the Bretton Woods institutions. An interesting point that he makes is that U.S. and western European countries pushed for equality and social rights at home during this time, while, as is well known, pushing for subordination and market penetration in low- and middle-income countries. There are some interesting sections in these parts about newly independent African countries pushing for social rights and some of the benefits that wealthy countries were enjoying for themselves at the time. I also thought it was interesting in several points when he takes pointed issue with the political scientist and anthropologist Jim Scott's argument about the tendency for "the village" to focus on equality.
September 10, 2018
Quite academic, but still a thorough examination of the twin trajectories of human rights and (in)equality over the past 150 years or so. Asks the uncomfortable question of why human rights discourse and practice have flourished even as inequality as skyrocketed. It doesn't give a simple answer, but does explore these two phenomena in depth.
May 9, 2024
Tolles Buch, um die Hintergründe von Menschenrechten und ihren Ansätzen zu verstehen. Die Geschichten diesbezüglich haben und werden uns immer begleiten durch die Geschichte der Menschheit. Deswegen ist es enorm wichtig, jene zu wahren und zu hinterfragen. Vor allem in einem Zeitalter, in dem kritisches Denken die wohl am schwersten zu meisternde Fähigkeit ist.
April 28, 2023
Moyn's book is a very apt critique of human rights activism since it emerged as a powerful mobilizing force in the mid-1970s. The founders of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both founded their organizations as alternatives to socialism, thereby suspending calls for social rights and distributive justice in favor of a much narrower focus on civil and political liberties. This allowed neoliberal ideology to enter the fray and achieve hegemony, with human rights organizations doing nothing to challenge it. As a result, we have more "freedom" today than any other period in history, but we're also more unequal than ever before, and this economic inequality leads to elite capture of nearly all institutions of society.
The book very much advocates the need to put inequality on the human rights agenda (even with a socialist tinge). Otherwise, it will be a movement that continues to primarily benefit the rich and their pet projects more than anyone else.
Great read. 4.5 out of 5.
The book very much advocates the need to put inequality on the human rights agenda (even with a socialist tinge). Otherwise, it will be a movement that continues to primarily benefit the rich and their pet projects more than anyone else.
Great read. 4.5 out of 5.
February 26, 2021
A little dry and academic in terms of prose style, but an interesting subject, and well-researched. I went into this thinking that Moyn was going to argue that human rights discourse actively undermines the struggle for material equality, but he actually does the opposite; he argues against scholars and advocates like Naomi Klein who make that somewhat unidirectional claim. His story is more complex. The history of midcentury third-world self-advocacy, embodied in the NIEO, was new to me and illuminating. Recommended if you don't mind sentences with a few too many abstract nouns.
November 26, 2024
and a half
August 18, 2025
In this book, Moyn traces the history of human rights and their relation to inequality, from the French Revolution to the present neoliberal era. It is short and well-researched.
September 27, 2025
“Human rights have focused on providing a ‘floor of protection’ against insufficiency but have been unable to guarantee a ‘ceiling’ on inequality.”
January 14, 2026
An interesting history of human rights and how we came to were we are today
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