In the space of less than a decade, Samuel Moyn has defined—and largely created—the field of the history of human rights. With 2010’s radically revisionist The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, he revealed how our modern notion of human rights was birthed only in the 1970s, showing their rise to have been a precarious, contingent, and uneven development. Now, with Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Moyn places the history of the human rights project alongside the precisely concurrent ascendance of neoliberalism to consider how the age of human rights has been a golden age for the rich. In the exchange below we pose a few questions to Moyn about this new work that George Soros says “breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”
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Q: Your first book on human rights, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, was published in 2010. You begin Not Enough by noting that “no account of how the present emerged is definitive for long,” and point to the feeling that history is accelerating at a pace in our present age that makes that especially true. How would you characterize the ways in which the transformations of the years between these books have changed your perspective on the origins and achievements of the human rights movement?
Like so many others, I used to be primarily concerned about the viability of the liberal international order consecrated when the Cold War ended. I was curious how human rights became the moral lingua franca of international affairs at that moment, and my research for The Last Utopia took me into histories of ethics and politics as they led to an international order in which human rights matter and social movements pursue them. What was left out, however, was economics—even though I argued in The Last Utopia that, for most of modern times, socialism appealed to more people for far longer than international human rights principles. Already when I wrote up that first book in 2008-9, the global financial crisis was helping make its framing incomplete or even obsolete. Almost ten years later, in 2016-17, I wrote this sequel placing distributional justice and political economy much closer to the heart of the history of human rights than before. (I only hope the spike in populism that year has not made my new book incomplete or obsolete!)
Q: One way of describing Not Enough is that it’s a world history of how people have thought about the fair distribution of the good things in life—who should get what—and you track the shifting global focus from equality (a concern for the share of those good things enjoyed by the least fortunate with respect to the share going to the world’s most well off) to sufficiency (a concern for the share going to the least fortunate only with respect to some minimum level of provision). The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, among others, has argued that inequality shouldn’t concern us as long as sufficiency is satisfied, and Steven Pinker has of course just published another bestseller arguing that humankind has never been better off, in large part because of the steady improvements in absolute quality of life for many in the developing world. Make the case for equality.
Equality might matter as a moral principle in its own right, as many philosophers other than Frankfurt have contended. From the Jacobins in the French Revolution to John Rawls, some modicum of equality always has had a certain number of proponents, though they have debated what precisely requires equalization and how far to justify departures from perfect equality, as most did. But as a history book, instead of arguing directly on behalf of equality in response, I just try to show how many from the French Revolution through just a few decades ago have held out for a more ambitious equality in the face of less exacting obligations. Indeed, one of my goals in Not Enough is to locate the first thinker who contended that sufficient provision is all that morality requires of our institutions—I claim it was Thomas Paine.
I also track how early socialists slowly took on board distributional equality as a norm and, much later, postcolonial voices were the first to demand truly global equality. By the end, the goal is to show how unusual it is to have advocates of sufficiency alone as prominent as Frankfurt or Pinker, in the absence of egalitarian movements and politics, which were rife across modern history. It would have appalled many of our ancestors to see how many people today agree that it is morally acceptable how far the rich are allowed to tower over the rest as long as the poor are at least somewhat better off.