NOT ENOUGH

Human Rights in an Unequal World

By Samuel Moyn

277 pp. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $29.95.

“Rights” is an inescapable word in modern politics. But asserting rights is easier than demarcating them. Should they be just political, or also social and economic? Must they rest on international or national laws, or do they embody “self-evident” truths? “We agree about the rights, but on condition no one asks us why,” said a participant in deliberations on the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Samuel Moyn’s “Not Enough” continues his effort to recast the history of the “human rights politics” that materialized in the 1970s with the Helsinki Accords and Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy. This new attention was, he argued in “The Last Utopia,” a consequence of decolonization, the Vietnam War’s end and the decay of Communist regimes. As older visions dissipated, “idealists,” some in Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, pursued a new “moral consciousness.”

But Moyn labeled this shallow utopianism because it made economic inequality secondary, at best. His new book elaborates on these arguments, looking back at the evolution of welfare states and the allied idea of “social citizenship” (rights to education, health care and housing), while targeting the neoliberalism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. By “neoliberalism,” Moyn (a professor of law and history at Yale) evidently means the global surge of “market fundamentalism” associated with Milton Friedman or the World Bank. Human rights ideology and neoliberalism were not twins, Moyn says, but both fostered a perception that social justice was passé or, worse, evocative of awful regimes. Democratic welfare states, meanwhile, were experiencing difficulties.