Professor Moyn’s book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, makes an impassioned closing argument for the human rights movement to change its central focus to ending—or at least lessening—the great economic inequality between the richest and poorest among the world’s citizens. He urges us to “relearn the older and grander choice between socialism and barbarism” and to make advocacy for socialism the “global project it has rarely been.” Only in this way, he says, will human rights “return to their defensible importance.” His concern for achieving both “sufficiency and equality” is admirable and timely indeed, and working toward sufficiency for all is important both morally and politically, as he concludes.
I want to turn, though, to a broader point that he sometimes acknowledges but spends little time exploring in depth. Human rights as applied in practice, by local activists around the world, have been used successfully to...
