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…