At the outset it is important to note that Samuel Moyn’s thoughtfully provocative book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, is not much concerned with the connection between workers’ rights and human rights. Labor rights per se are only mentioned a few times in the course of Moyn’s argument. They are not central to his thinking. Even so, his book contains a range of insights of profound import for all who care about the recent past and possible future of workers.
Two insights stand out. The first involves the complex relationship Moyn describes between human rights and neoliberalism or “market fundamentalism,” terms he alternately employs to describe the political economy that arose in the last decades of the twentieth century. He does not blame rising inequality on the ascendancy of rights consciousness. “Conspiratorial accounts that view human rights as a dastardly accomplice of shifts in the global...
