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.
Q: In Not Enough you’re careful to note the real advances wrought by the human rights movement, but are ultimately critical of its low aims, and the abandoned ambitions of the era of decolonization. Despite your disappointment with its goals, though, you do largely grant the good faith of the human rights revolution, unlike some further to the left who’d say it’s been a sham all along. So, absent a conscious decision to set a deliberately low bar, what are the forces that have contributed to what you identify as the movement’s shortcomings?
All ethical movements exaggerate when they promote their relevance to potential affiliates, and the human rights movement is no exception to this rule. The trouble is that the audience of the human rights movement took it too frequently to be a cure-all or panacea, without realizing how limited its aims have been—how rarely and slowly it engaged the distribution of the good things in life, and how, when it did engage, it strove for sufficient distribution alone, even as inequality exploded in so many countries. You might put it by saying that the human rights movement has not been neoliberal, but that, in our enthusiasm for it as the morality of the end of history, we have been.
Q: The historical dynamic really driving the book is the collision of movements for global justice with the ascendance of the neoliberal project, and your interest in identifying the relationship between the two. You’re unequivocal about your judgment that “neoliberalism, not human rights, is to blame for neoliberalism.” And yet, you write that the conclusion that human rights did not abet neoliberalism “makes how they could so easily accompany it more pressing to consider.” Why is that?
“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.”
I have always thought we should never grant the importance and fair successes of ethical movements that appeal to their audiences for affiliation without identifying their limitations, too. After all, there is no reason to accept the current menu of ethical choices or the existing list of social movements that struggle for them. And the lifespan of the human rights movement has coincided with that neoliberal ascendancy that has made material equality its chief casualty. Once we appraise human rights properly, we can see the present not as a moment for ethical self-congratulation, but as one of a vacuum to fill with some of our next efforts.
Q: You refer to human rights as our highest ideals, and, as you note above, the movement has certainly successfully lodged itself in the consciousness of millions of people around the world who are concerned with justice. If you could get a single, succinct message from Not Enough to, say, the many well-intentioned people who donate to organizations like Human Rights Watch, what would it be?
Well, the fact that the book has been endorsed by George Soros—who remains the chief funder of the human rights movement worldwide today—shows that the time is ripe for an enlargement of our sensibilities. If you care about human rights, whether as a member of the audience for the struggle, a person considering how to spend your career, or just as someone with a few extra dollars to donate, you still cannot neglect the aim of distributional fairness. As a matter of morality, equality may require a lot more of our generosity than human rights seem to demand. Even if you are merely thinking strategically, you should recognize that majorities do not seem willing to defend the rights of others at home or abroad if they do not feel they are living in a fair society themselves. For either reason or both, human rights are not enough if not connected to a broader egalitarian agenda.
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