Not Enough – LPE Project

Bias and Exclusion in Human Rights History

Kate Redburn — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 14:58:46 +0000

This post concludes our symposium on Sam Moyn’s Not Enough. Read the rest of the posts here. *** I am so grateful to the blog, and the respondents who wrote in to it, for the attention Not Enough has gotten here. In my brief rejoinder, I will focus on the criticisms for the sake of ongoing discussion — most of which reveal the biases and exclusions in the book’s coverage, when it comes to the past...

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When Splitters become Lumpers: Pitfalls of a Long History of Human Rights

Kate Redburn — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 12:37:26 +0000

For a close reader of Moyn's work on human rights, the differences between Not Enough and The Last Utopia are head-spinning. Where the latter attacked the very idea of historic continuity in explaining the human rights movement that emerged in the 1970s, Not Enough builds an entire narrative on continuities. The result is an aspirational history for a reformed human rights movement, a history of roads not taken that can still be reclaimed. By not heeding his own lessons from Last Utopia, Moyn understates the emergent human rights movement’s inability to contest what became neoliberalism.

The View from Somewhere: on Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough

Kate Redburn — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 11:30:11 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Sam Moyn’s Not Enough. Read the rest of the posts here. *** I am a judge; I used to be a law professor in Bogotá, but this past January I became a judge, a judge in a human rights court, a special tribunal created by the 2016 peace agreement to try both the former FARC guerrilla, and the Colombian Army. A transitional justice mechanism, my court is severely...

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What Comes After Not Enough?

Kate Redburn — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 10:12:30 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Sam Moyn’s Not Enough. Read the rest of the posts here. *** What might a new human rights movement look like after Occupy, Brexit, Piketty, and Trump? Sam Moyn’s new book brings us deftly to the edge of this question, and it’s here that I want to jump in. Not Enough offers important insights into some of the failures of the existing movement, at least in its...

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Capitalism, Inequality, and Human Rights

Kate Redburn — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 11:00:24 +0000

Not Enough is a sweeping, erudite account of the place of human rights in debates about equality from the pioneering days of the Jacobin state in revolutionary France, through the mid-twentieth century welfare state, and the grand decolonial visions of the New International Economic Order (NIEO). With that said, there are two central points on which I find Moyn’s argument lacking: the presentation of “the human rights movement” as some sort of monolith, and Moyn’s understanding of the genesis of inequality under capitalism and, relatedly, the conceptualisation of capitalism, as such.

Compatibility as Complicity? On Neoliberalism and Human Rights

Kate Redburn — Mon, 28 May 2018 10:00:01 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Sam Moyn’s Not Enough. Read the rest of the posts here. *** Over the past decade, Sam Moyn has emerged as one of the most significant critical historians of international human rights. His latest book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World contrasts the international human rights movement’s focus on achieving “sufficiency,” (i.e., basic minimums of social...

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Getting the NIEO Right

Kate Redburn — Mon, 21 May 2018 10:00:33 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Sam Moyn’s Not Enough. Read the rest of the posts here. *** Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough is a pointed history of the present. It provides a fast-paced narrative of the surprising ways we got to where we are now in our moral and political imagination of what is politically possible. In this sense, like its precursor The Last Utopia, it is a distinctive kind of...

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Born-Again Equality

Kate Redburn — Mon, 14 May 2018 10:00:39 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Sam Moyn’s Not Enough. Read the rest of the posts here. *** Sam Moyn’s Not Enough gives us a sweeping account of more than two centuries of the political quest for economic equality. His history locates early calls among the Jacobins who demanded fair distribution during the French Revolution. It moves through the nineteenth-century era of economic liberalism in...

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Human Rights and Political Economy

Kate Redburn — Mon, 07 May 2018 10:19:51 +0000

Did the Human Rights movement fail? In his new book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Samuel Moyn responds in the affirmative. He argues that the international human rights movement narrowed its agenda to address the sufficiency of minimal provision, leaving the movement impotent in the face of rising global inequality and attacks on social citizenship at the level of the nation-state.

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