Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World is a follow-up to Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), in which he argued that the rise of an international human rights discourse began neither with the Enlightenment or the French and American Revolutions nor, significantly, in the aftermath of World War II. Rather, he sees the idea of human rights as a moral force, arising in the 1970s, as a largely depoliticized response to the crisis of socialism and disillusionment with the idea of transformative revolution.
In this new book, Moyn expands his argument by setting the explosion of human rights ideology and politics in the context of the transition “from the era of the welfare state to that of neoliberal economics” (x). Or, to put it another way, human rights arose just at the moment when the welfare state promise of some, however limited, distributive equality,...
