Introduction

Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World is a follow-up to Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), in which he argued that the rise of an international human rights discourse began neither with the Enlightenment or the French and American Revolutions nor, significantly, in the aftermath of World War II. Rather, he sees the idea of human rights as a moral force, arising in the 1970s, as a largely depoliticized response to the crisis of socialism and disillusionment with the idea of transformative revolution.

In this new book, Moyn expands his argument by setting the explosion of human rights ideology and politics in the context of the transition “from the era of the welfare state to that of neoliberal economics” (x). Or, to put it another way, human rights arose just at the moment when the welfare state promise of some, however limited, distributive equality, gave way to market fundamentalism and an acceptance of individual subsistence replaced a moral discourse of egalitarian, or redistributive, justice. Based on an array of political thinkers and philosophers, and a few key documents, Moyn presents an extended critique of human rights discourse but at the same time holds some hope that material equality might still become a key human right.

While the language of human rights has been used since at least the French and American Revolutions, Moyn argues, exactly what constitute those rights has often been vague and undefined. In particular, he says, thinkers have often avoided the question of material well-being — that is, whether human rights require a social minimum or sufficiency for all or whether human rights ultimately require a form of material equality — is there a floor or a ceiling when it comes to the distribution of material goods and resources? Twentieth-century welfare states answered this dilemma by promising an array of social minimums to their citizens — but only to some citizens and only to those within national borders. Those benefits and entitlements, Moyn suggests, resulted largely from pressure by socialists and trade unions and were more a form of class compromise and conflict avoidance than gestures toward human rights. The New Deal, particularly Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 Second Bill of Rights, held only a tepid “right to adequate protection from” economic fears (68). The postwar promise of full employment signaled American liberalism’s goal of sufficient distribution alone, jettisoning any modicum of material equality. While socialist countries (here he includes National Socialism as well) promised to deliver some form of equal distribution, these were limited only to certain citizens within the nation-state. Neither socialism nor liberal welfare states, Moyn says, envisioned rights that would transcend the nation-state.

The 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, Moyn contends, did little to influence either national or global policy until well into the 1970s. During the 1940s and ’50s, thinkers such as Gunnar Myrdal proposed a “global welfare” regime (104–9). Again, however, Myrdal’s proposals were grounded in the nation-state model and did little to address inequalities among states. Myrdal’s and other’s (including Robert McNamara and the World Bank) efforts to address global inequality took the form of development projects that aimed to boost the floor of sufficiency — that is, set minimum standards of basics like health, housing, and education. But these measures did little to address inequalities either within or among nations.

Not until the late 1970s — in the context of the oil crisis, anticolonial movements, and political tensions within both welfare and Eastern Bloc states — did human rights become a significant intellectual and political movement. While some new postwar nations in the global South took up a rhetoric of equality, Moyn sees the 1974 New International Economic Order (NIEO) as the most significant push for global equality beyond national boundaries. The NIEO sought material equality including industrial modernity and national development, but its application fundamentally depended on growth and productivity. Ultimately, the effort stalled largely on the same limiting shoals of national sovereignty. While the NIEO opposed the “naming and shaming” practices of the human rights movement toward sovereign states, it was unable to build any lasting institutional alternative...