Abstract
Samuel Moyn, whose Last Utopia (2010) utterly transformed the study of human rights history, has once again given us a strikingly original, deeply researched, and dazzlingly written book. In these few short years he has also produced a remarkable array of scholarly and public pieces on the history of human rights and twentieth-century intellectual history, as well as two additional books: Human Rights and the Uses of History (2014), a collection of his penetrating and sometimes severe book reviews, and Christian Human Rights (2015), which identifies mid-twentieth-century Christian thought about human dignity as a surprisingly central source of contemporary human rights. In all of these, Moyn repeatedly demonstrates his ability to make arresting counterintuitive arguments, bring understudied historical episodes to life, and write normatively and politically engaged intellectual history that compels us to see the history of our present anew.
As Moyn himself points out, Not Enough covers, though with an altogether different focus, the same period as Last Utopia, the centuries from the French Revolution to the present (preceded by a capsule intellectual history of the prior two thousand years). The current book is a history of struggles over distribution, over “what share people ought to get of the good things in life” (3). Moyn frames his story around a tension between two aspirations, to sufficiency and to equality, in the distributive politics of the left: between calls for the provision of some absolute minimum of material welfare or “floor” for the poor, and commitments to equalizing people’s relative shares. If debates over sufficiency versus equality are familiar to contemporary moral philosophy, the choice to narrate history since the French Revolution in these terms is novel and illuminating. Moyn’s historical actors did not always understand themselves to be facing a choice framed in quite these terms, though he makes a convincing case that Thomas Paine, for one, “specifically defended sufficiency against equality” (24), and that in the wake of Paine’s choice it makes sense to track the history of distributive debates in terms of these distinct aims. For Moyn, the normatively compelling position is one that marries commitments to both goals and does not, with Paine, give up on equality in the name of entitlement to adequate provision. Far-reaching as this may sound, Moyn himself often ends up framing egalitarian ambitions more modestly as a “modicum of equality,” as constraints on inequality, or as a ceiling on wealth. Neither Moyn himself nor almost any of the characters in his historical story are Babeuvist absolute egalitarians.
Some readers will undoubtedly see Not Enough as a departure from the arguments of Last Utopia, most obviously in the sense that where Moyn made his name as a historian of radical discontinuity (against teleological histories that traced the “rise and rise” of human rights from the French Revolution to the present), the current book can be read as a story of a long continuity of debate since the French Revolution over the two distributional paradigms. But while Moyn’s argument has evolved in various important ways, Not Enough is more interesting as a fulfillment of some of the promissory notes of Moyn’s earlier work than as a departure from its method or premises. He had lamented that the antipolitical humanitarianism of human rights had come to replace more radical political struggle on the left; now we have a clearer sense of his own position within progressive politics. The new book also addresses questions and criticisms that arose in response to Last Utopia, above all the relative absence of political economy, and questions of poverty and economic inequality, though these could be glimpsed in the background. Moyn also offers fuller accounts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of anticolonial movements. While continuing to insist on the UDHR’s relative unimportance in its own time, Moyn now characterizes the declaration as a creature of its moment, in that, on his reading, it cast the welfare state as the vehicle for its transformative aspirations. Here, as in Last Utopia, Moyn strips away the accretions of the 1970s to reveal a document quite different from the internationalist manifesto we’ve come to assume it was. The UDHR, he argues, was a “charter for national welfare states,” and its form as an international agreement was largely irrelevant to the national settings in which the battle lines over the shape and extent of redistribution were already drawn. Moyn’s account of anticolonialism has also acquired further nuance: where Last Utopia depicted anticolonialism as above all a commitment to state sovereignty, in order to highlight its differences from post-1970s human rights, here Moyn stresses the global vision of anti- and postcolonial leaders. Drawing language from the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, Moyn summarizes their aim as a “welfare world,” a scaling up of the national welfare state to a world of extreme inequality.
In Moyn’s account, after the Jacobins institutionalized the combined ideals of sufficient provision and material equality, for the first time ever and however incompletely, that combination went dormant until the rise of the welfare state in interwar and postwar Europe. His nineteenth century is populated by liberals whose economic commitments enabled the rise of unprecedented inequality, and socialists for whom political equality and an end to class domination were more important than material equality. The Jacobin ideal of sufficiency plus equality was revived, Moyn argues, in the “reconciliationist welfare state” that emerged in Europe from political compromises between capital and labor and was consolidated in the 1940s. He is careful to note that both in practice and in the ideals of most of its European proponents, the national welfare state “was inclusionary and egalitarian for some while exclusionary in the extreme or at least patronizing and subordinating for others” (43). Meanwhile in the United States, the egalitarian ambitions of the New Deal, which was “racialized to the core” (71) due to the necessary role of southern Democrats in its passage, were waning by the end of the war, trampled by the relentless libertarianism of American political culture. Moyn’s postwar story is one of a decades-long struggle for a globalized distributive equality on the part of anticolonial states and postcolonial leaders such as the Senegalese premier Mamadou Dia and the Algerian president Houari Boumédiène, the defeat of that struggle by an array of first-world actors from US governments to World Bank economists, and the replacement of the egalitarian ideal with one of minimum provision for the world’s poorest.
Moyn’s historical narrative suggests a pattern, a trade-off between expansive scale and egalitarian ambition. Where redistributive ambitions were at their highest, with the welfare states of the 1940s, projects were limited to a national scale (in often imperial states) and even within nation-states they tended to exclude portions of the population. Where the scope was more ambitious, as in global justice theory, the egalitarianism was truncated, and progressives settled for sufficiency. The normative heart of the book lies with the few exceptions to this pattern, especially during the 1970s: proponents in the global south of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), and the socialists of Latin America and Eastern Europe who were committed to both robustly egalitarian global distributive agendas and the protection of civil and political rights. The latter are movingly evoked by Moyn in the book’s opening pages in the person of Zdena Tominová of the Czechoslovak dissident group Charter 77. These movements, though forces to reckon with at the time, were short-lived, their demise coinciding with the triumph of both neoliberalism and human rights.
Readers of The Last Utopia had reason to conclude that Moyn saw human rights’ ascent to normative hegemony as partly responsible for the failure of those more ambitious political agendas and as complicit with the rise of neoliberalism. Human rights, he wrote there, were central to a “new politics of humanity that has sapped the energy from old ideological contests of left and right.” 1 Here he distances himself from the claim that human rights contributed to the rise of neoliberalism, which he associates with left-wing intellectuals such as Naomi Klein and the international lawyer Susan Marks. Moyn argues rather that because human rights lack any commitment to material equality, they have been a “powerless companion of the explosion of inequality” (176): not complicit in neoliberalism’s pervasive injustices, but still all too accommodating of them. And yet Moyn’s fascinating chapter on the rise of the “basic needs” paradigm among first-world economists, philosophers, and humanitarians does suggest that, by the late 1970s and especially in the hands of Americans from the cynical Henry Kissinger to the earnest globalist Jimmy Carter, human rights had helped to quash more radically redistributive socialist and third-worldist programs, including the NIEO. And it was on the grave of such programs that neoliberalism arose. Moyn recounts the chilly reception of “basic needs” among members of the non-aligned movement, who saw international attention to the basic needs of individuals as a means of thwarting the sovereign prerogatives of less powerful states. And he notes the weary capitulation to the goal of poverty alleviation instead of global equality by some development economists from postcolonial states, such as the Pakistani World Bank official Mahbub ul Haq.
I would register one key reservation about the book’s choice of distribution as the organizing thematic principle: Moyn writes early on of the importance of attending to the “distributional imagination and political economy of human rights” (3), but distribution of goods is only one facet of political economy, and to dwell on distribution to the exclusion of its other aspects can make for an inadequate politics of the left. Diagnosing the causes of extreme inequality, redressing the exploitation that produces inequality, and empowering the poor and exploited are just as important to a leftist political economy. Positions framed strictly around the question of distribution may try to bracket such matters, but how we answer these questions shapes the kind of distributional politics we pursue.
In two of the historical cases Moyn cites as models of egalitarian politics – the national welfare state and the NIEO – these other dimensions are somewhat lost in Moyn’s telling, given his distributive framework (though his thoroughness and the efficiency of his prose mean there is seemingly no relevant dimension that he leaves out altogether). Mid-century welfare states involved not only more equal distribution of the national pie through progressive taxation and robust welfare schemes but also the empowerment of labor. Similarly, the NIEO was a movement not simply, or even primarily, in favor of a more egalitarian distribution of material goods around the world – a transfer of resources from rich to poor – but rather an assault on the colonial and neocolonial exploitation of the global south, on discriminatory trade and labor regimes and the theft of natural resources, and on what the Algerian jurist Mohammed Bedjaoui called, in his influential treatise on the subject, the “predatory economy” of the international order. Bedjaoui wrote in favor of “producer associations,” the “trade-unionism of the Third World States,” and “combative solidarity for the means to balance international power relations.” 2 For proponents of the NIEO, redistribution was just one piece of a radical restructuring of the world economy. Moyn’s interesting recounting of the response of Anglo-American academic political theory (especially of Rawlsians) to the NIEO may actually play into the dynamics of moralization and de-politicization that he criticizes: in rendering the NIEO a movement for egalitarian distribution he makes it sound more like an ethical imperative than a political movement for the empowerment of the dispossessed and the transformation of global economic, political, and legal structures.
A shift in emphasis toward these other aspects of political economy matters for a few reasons. Extreme inequality of wealth arises from, generates, and perpetuates inequalities of political and social power. The claim that more equal distribution is by definition more fair may be less compelling than the claim that vast inequalities are wrong because they result from exploitation. It is also less adequate to redressing that exploitation. Further, many of the drivers of both inequality and misery around the globe cannot be properly addressed through redistribution alone but require other strategies – including struggles against the exploitation of labor in global supply chains; the fight for affordable generic drugs in the global south against intellectual property claims by wealthy multinationals based in the global north; and attention to the vast inequities in the exploitation of natural resources and the production of planet-destroying waste. While such injustices could be understood as due to the unequal distribution of material goods – safe working conditions, medicine, oil and electricity – still, to press for better redistribution as the paramount agenda of the left can seem to leave in place the very structures that generate poverty and inequality.
Perhaps because he tends to isolate questions of material distribution from structural injustice and unequal power understood more broadly, Moyn sometimes pits distributive equality against “status equality,” presenting these as historically having operated as alternatives, though he supports both. In so doing he understates the degree to which movements for status equality, such as the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, were also efforts for material equality, in part precisely because they were movements for more egalitarian power relations. Just as Moyn draws on Tominová and Charter 77 to insist that the apparent choice between socialism and human rights is a false one, we should conclude not that “status equality” is a distraction from a robust material egalitarianism, but rather that we must refuse the blackmail of any supposed choice between the politics of recognition and those of redistribution.
The brief parable of Croesus with which Moyn concludes the book – the picture of a world dominated by an unimaginably wealthy humanitarian, in which the worst off are, at least, not destitute – reinforces the impression that his attention to distribution effaces these other dimensions of exploitation and inequality. There’s no account of where Croesus’s untold wealth comes from; his wealth is objectionable simply because he has so much more of it than anyone else, not because he came by it through exploitation of others or even because he uses it to deprive them of political agency. Two features, then, seem to lie outside Moyn’s “distribution” paradigm: the unjust causes of inequality, and the unjust consequences of inequality for political power (with downstream effects such as environmental degradation, among other evils).
Central to Moyn’s searching and provocative histories has been a powerful critique of human rights’ tendency to moralize what should be political. In de-emphasizing the structural causes of poverty and inequality, Moyn takes an approach to distributional politics that is as much ethical as political (he notes, in contrast, Marx’s rejection of “the search for ethical principles like distributional ideals” [28]). In part this cleaving to an ethical principle may have to do with his desire to command agreement with the widest possible set of readers. Moyn does not say how much equality is enough but, as noted earlier, settles for a “modicum of equality” and a “ceiling on wealth” as egalitarian aims. Nor does he advance a political program in the sense of calling for the overthrow of existing power relations or even proposing mechanisms that would enable a more egalitarian distribution. Moyn’s recuperation of the egalitarianism of the Jacobin state, the mid-twentieth-century welfare state, and the NIEO leads to a valuable political argument against the temptation to sequence sufficiency before equality: we must, he insists, pursue both simultaneously. But this is perhaps his most pointedly political intervention in a book dedicated more to reviving what he sees as an ailing ethical ideal.