Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World Spiral-Bound |

Samuel Moyn

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“No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights.”
—Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal


“Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”
—George Soros


The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality has quietly disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization has emerged as the dominant force. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn considers how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of broader social and economic justice.

Moyn places the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift and explores why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside exploding inequality.

“Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse… Sure to provoke a wider discussion.”
—Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal

“A sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana… Consistently bracing.”
—Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books

“Moyn suggests that our current vocabularies of global justice—above all our belief in the emancipatory potential of human rights—need to be discarded if we are work to make our vastly unequal world more equal… [A] tour de force.”
Los Angeles Review of Books

Publisher: Harvard University Press
Original Binding: Paperback
Pages: 296 pages
ISBN-10: 0674241398
Item Weight: 0.6 lbs
Dimensions: 5.7 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights than Samuel Moyn…In Not Enough, Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse…This book, like the author’s last, is the rare academic study that is sure to provoke a wider discussion about important political and economic questions. -Adam Kirsch / Wall Street Journal
Samuel Moyn is Professor of Law and Professor of History at Yale University. His interests range widely over international law, human rights, the laws of war, and legal thought in both historical and contemporary perspective. He has published several books and writes in venues such as Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, New Republic, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.