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…
In the preface to Not Enough, Sam Moyn obliquely acknowledges the dramatic contrast between the new book and his breakthrough work on the history of human rights, the Last Utopia: “What makes the study of history exciting is that its infinity of sources and our change in perspective can allow two books on the same…
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…
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…
Samuel Moyn’s new book begins, with an echo of Christopher Hill, by noting that history has to be revised and rewritten to meet the demands of the present. From this, Moyn sets out to provide us with a historical account of the relationship between human rights and inequality, in order to shed some light on…
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 goods for all) with more egalitarian conceptions of national…
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 ideological and…
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 Europe, when hopes for economic equality languished and…
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…