Not Enough offers important insights into some of the failures of the existing human rights movement, at least in its mainstream form. Drawing on these, as well as my own experience with the access to medicines movement, I’ll offer a few thoughts on the shape of a human rights yet to come.
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.
In his latest book, Sam Moyn contrasts the international human rights movement’s focus on achieving “sufficiency,” with more egalitarian conceptions of national welfare and global justice that aspired to curb the unbridled concentration of private wealth. Importantly, however, the book also insists that human rights are not synonymous with forms of neoliberal economic rationality that led to the post-war welfare state’s dismantling.
Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough 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. While usefully reflecting the 1970s optimism that international law could reduce global inequality, it mischaracterizes the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and leaves open the question of precisely how neoliberalism displaced its utopian aspirations.
Moyn’s work could be (and in some ways is) a history of a world we have lost, but it’s also an impassioned call for the just world we have not yet had.
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 drama surrounding President Trump’s decision to impose import tariffs on steel and aluminum has roiled the Republican Party and wide swathes of the corporate elite. The tariff decision comes on the heels of political bluster about the US being treated “unfairly” by other countries. This accusation of “unfairness” when it comes to US trade…
This is the second post in a two-part series about law and political economy in the South African context. The series reports on a collaboration among leading ‘heterodox’ economists, left-wing sociologists, high level government policymakers, and legal scholars, advocates and activists aimed at “thinking large” about reconstructing the nation’s political economy. *** The way out…
This is the first post in a two-part series about law and political economy in the South African context. The second post can be found here. The series reports on a collaboration among leading ‘heterodox’ economists, left-wing sociologists, high level government policymakers, and legal scholars, advocates and activists aimed at “thinking large” about reconstructing the…
Most years, I teach an introductory course on International Trade Law. And every year since I began I’ve included a session on the international financial architecture, on the view that this architecture is intimately bound up with the functioning of the trade regime. I begin the course predictably enough with a series of sessions on…
How might we come to better understand the complex, multilevel, and interdependent world in which we live? This is a particular challenge for international and global legal scholars whose methods of analysis typically are confined to empirically observable legal phenomena in the form of international conventions, treaties, custom, and the like. In this post, I…
