Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

by Samuel Moyn

Overview

“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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674241398
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/17/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Samuel Moyn is Professor of Law and Professor of History at Yale University. His interests range widely over international law, human rights, the laws of war, and legal thought in both historical and contemporary perspective. He has published several books and writes in venues such as Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, New Republic, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

1 Jacobin Legacy: The Origins of Social Justice 12

2 National Welfare and the Universal Declaration 41

3 FDR's Second Bill 68

4 Globalizing Welfare after Empire 89

5 Basic Needs and Human Rights 119

6 Global Ethics from Equality to Subsistence 146

7 Human Rights in the Neoliberal Maelstrom 173

Conclusion: Croesus's World 212

Notes 223

Acknowledgments 265

Index 269

Editorial Reviews

[A] marvelous book.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Nils Gilman

No one has done more than Samuel Moyn to unsettle the story of human rights as a triumphal march of upgrades from Magna Carta to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…Not Enough asks us to rethink what human rights might accomplish if they were deployed not simply to set limits on state power, but to harness that power for the purpose of fostering economic equality.

New York Review of Books - Benjamin Nathans

An engaging and illuminating intellectual history of the rivalry between those focused on rights and those who have insisted on a more substantively egalitarian approach to emancipation…Intended to help everyone, from policymakers to political theorists, avoid the mistakes of the past in order to shape the future more fairly.

Commonweal

Samuel Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness. If we don’t address the growing global phenomenon of economic inequality, the human rights movement as we know it cannot survive or flourish.

George Soros

No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights than Samuel Moyn…In Not Enough, 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…This book, like the author’s last, is the rare academic study that is sure to provoke a wider discussion about important political and economic questions.

Wall Street Journal - Adam Kirsch

Moyn provides important insights into how international and domestic inequalities have increased in recent decades…[His] trenchant critique of classical liberal economic and political thought questions many long-standing human rights assumptions. An important addition to the literature.

Choice - C. E. Welch

Promises to cement [Moyn’s] reputation as one of the most trenchant critics of ‘liberal humanitarian’ foreign policy.

Chronicle of Higher Education - Jon Baskin

Human rights do not seem to be enough in our era of unshared affluence. Samuel Moyn’s fascinating and highly timely book explores how we ended up here despite the higher hopes for humanity pursued by multiple political and philosophical movements over the last two hundred years. This is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the present age with its overwhelming challenges and breathtaking possibilities.

Mathias Risse

A brilliantly conceived and much-needed book on human rights and inequality. Moyn has a genius for writing history that is intelligent, surprising, and disciplined by fine judgment.

Jedediah Purdy

[S]peaks to the urgency of our contemporary politics… In Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, 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… Best read as a companion history to Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Not Enough explains how—across the fields of development, moral advocacy, philosophy, and governmental policy—the ideal of sufficiency gradually supplanted what was once an ideal of equality for all… The apparent paradox exposed in Not Enough is what makes the book another tour de force: what are we to make of the fact that our age of human rights was coterminous with the age of neoliberalism? …Moyn implores us to consider: what is the value content of justice in our age of human rights, and how do we try to rectify inequality, if the social and economic rights enumerated in international human rights law put no ceiling on wealth creation?

Los Angeles Review of Books - Patrick William Kelly

Why do the grimmest obscenities of economic inequality barely register on the human rights agenda? What is the historical explanation for this? Moyn’s book offers fresh and nuanced insight into these questions, surveying a dizzying array of protagonists, from eighteenth-century Jacobin revolutionaries to late twentieth-century Princeton postgrads.

Times Literary Supplement - Adam Etinson

[Moyn] effectively provincializes an ineffectual and obsolete Western model of human rights…Moyn’s book is part of a renewed attention to the political and intellectual ferment of decolonialisation, and joins a sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana…[The book’s] critical—and self-critical—energy is consistently bracing, and is surely a condition of restoring the pursuit of equality and justice as an indispensable modern tradition.

London Review of Books - Pankaj Mishra

Not Enough makes it impossible to conceive of the current status of human rights in the same way again…[It] leads the critical and ethical heart to beat much faster.

Boston Review - Mark Goodale