Concepts like “freedom” and “exploitation” are grounded in material reality–as historically embedded attempts to express attitudes about certain institutional arrangements
This post opens a symposium on Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It).
Instead of asking whether to maximize or divide scarce resources, legal analysis should ask how law defines the “pie” of societal well-being.
That’s the title of a new article of mine, slated for publication in the Michigan Law Review. It’s more polemical than most of my work, and it aims to disrupt some of the tidy stories that organize modern administrative law. Although I hope it finds an audience across the political spectrum, its primary target is…
Contract is, of course, part of the core legal infrastructure that makes markets possible. But it is more than that. As an ideal type, it is at the core of all individualist social, moral, and political theories that seek to account for human sociality while avoiding social structure. Contract represents the ideal of being able…
The struggle over Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination for the US Supreme Court and the subsequent horrible spectacle of the Senate hearings brought about a “genuine question” by a leading economist, Dani Rodrik: “how do we prevent ‘the Supreme Court has always been political’ argument from morphing into ‘judicial independence and the rule of law are political…
Judge Brett Kavanaugh, now very close to controlling the decisive vote on the Supreme Court, resembles other candidates for high political office. He has a constituency–the Federalist Society, anti-abortion activists, everyone who hopes to see Obamacare weakened and affirmative action ended–and other constituencies in opposition. Lots of money is being raised and spent for and…
The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is on the knife’s edge. The stakes are higher than for the confirmation of any American judge in our lifetimes. For that reason alone, it is probably not a good time to stage a general debate whether and in what sense law is something more than…
Thursday’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing was a stomach churning, nauseating affair. Christine Blasey Ford laid her life on the tracks, knowing full well that trains delivering important men can rarely be stopped. That was enough, but then came the turn: Brett Kavanaugh, partisan warrior. He tore into Democrats for a process almost entirely dictated by…
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 or the present. And I want to cop to those, clearly, totally, and upfront.
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.
I read Moyn’s book as a break from my work as a judge in a human rights court. It was a treat, deliciously U.S.-centric, in spite of the author’s effort in mentioning “the rest of the world” so obviously excluded from the “we” which sometimes appears.
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.
