A book review
"In one of No Enough's most important insights, Moyn suggests that the gradual abandonment of equality in favour of a minimalist focus on securing a basic minimum has made human rights unthreatening in a neoliberal age. Moyn’s account of the compatibility of human rights and neoliberalism is powerful and astute. Human rights did little to alter the course of neoliberal reform, offered no real alternative to it, and did not demand egalitarian distribution either at the national or transnational level, he argues. Moreover, human rights and what he terms their “economic rival” shared the same moral individualism and the same suspicion of collectivist projects such as nationalism and socialism. Consequently, even social and economic rights became adjuncts to humanitarian philanthropy, which viewed global poverty through the lens of humanitarian suffering, not structural inequality.
Moyn provides a strikingly original account of the ways in which demands for a ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO) were taken up in sanitised form by philosophers of ‘global justice,’ who increasingly shifted the emphasis from permanent sovereignty over natural resources to individual rights. He also suggests that the human rights movement was compatible with neoliberalism in part because it resisted rights to development and self-determination, which it saw as shields for state sovereignty. Yet, far from simply being compatible, sections of the human rights movement found common cause with neoliberal thinkers and organisations in combatting post-colonial economic demands."
Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World by Samuel Moyn
"In one of No Enough's most important insights, Moyn suggests that the gradual abandonment of equality in favour of a minimalist focus on securing a basic minimum has made human rights unthreatening in a neoliberal age. Moyn’s account of the compatibility of human rights and neoliberalism is powerful and astute. Human rights did little to alter the course of neoliberal reform, offered no real alternative to it, and did not demand egalitarian distribution either at the national or transnational level, he argues. Moreover, human rights and what he terms their “economic rival” shared the same moral individualism and the same suspicion of collectivist projects such as nationalism and socialism. Consequently, even social and economic rights became adjuncts to humanitarian philanthropy, which viewed global poverty through the lens of humanitarian suffering, not structural inequality.
Moyn provides a strikingly original account of the ways in which demands for a ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO) were taken up in sanitised form by philosophers of ‘global justice,’ who increasingly shifted the emphasis from permanent sovereignty over natural resources to individual rights. He also suggests that the human rights movement was compatible with neoliberalism in part because it resisted rights to development and self-determination, which it saw as shields for state sovereignty. Yet, far from simply being compatible, sections of the human rights movement found common cause with neoliberal thinkers and organisations in combatting post-colonial economic demands."
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