Quotes from Samuel Moyn

Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every historian has to begin somewhere, but the fact that Israel begins with Spinoza, and then reduces most of what follows the philosopher to a footnote, leaves his account of the Enlightenment founded on something like immaculate conception.

It is neither cowardice nor betrayal to insist that the Enlightenment's main lesson is to be mindful of how much it has left its inheritors to figure out.

War is always a contest of words as well as of wounds.

Human rights politics and law went some way to sensitizing humanity to the misery of visible indigence alongside the horrific repression of authoritarian and totalitarian states—but not to the crisis of national welfare, the stagnation of middle classes, and the endurance of global hierarchy.

Focusing on sufficient protections, human rights norms and politics have selectively emphasized one aspect of social justice, scanting in particular the distributional victory of the rich. It is as if in our highest ethics, material gains for the poor were all that could matter, either morally or strategically, when human rights placed any stress on material injustice at all.

In the era of human rights, many (though by no means all) have become less poor, but the rich have been even more decisive victors. It follows that human rights must be kept in proper perspective, neither idolized nor smashed, to recognize the true scope of our moral crisis today and the melancholy truth of our failure to invent other ideals and movements to confront it. Human rights, focused on securing enough for everyone, are essential—but they are not enough.

It is also a matter of greater consensus than ever that the high and equal status of human beings entitles them to some basic political freedoms, such as the rights to speak and to be free from torture. When it comes to what share people ought to get of the good things in life, however, consensus is much harder to achieve.

But strictly speaking, human rights do not necessarily call for a modicum of distributive equality. And a concern for human rights, including economic and social rights, has risen as moral commitments to distributive equality fell.

Hadji Murat, Tolstoy's posthumous novella recounting the difficulties of maintaining imperial control in the face of Muslim terrorism, could not seem prophetic to Americans for decades. For a long time, his warnings about making war humane were inapplicable as

The human rights revolution of our time is bound up with a global concern for the "wretched of the earth," but not in the egalitarian sense that the socialist and postcolonial promoters of that phrase originally meant.

Human rights were cut off from the dream of globally fair distribution that the global south itself advocated during the 1970s.

Worse, human rights lost their original connection with a larger egalitarian aspiration, focusing on sufficient provision instead.

For the moment, at least, human rights history is worth telling because it reveals how partial our activism has become, choosing sufficiency alone as intractable crises in politics and economics continue to mount.

Human rights advocates can work to extricate themselves from their neoliberal companionship, even as others mark their limitations, in order to restore the dream of equality to its importance in both theory and practice. If both groups are successful, they can save the ideal of human rights from an unacceptable fate: it has left the globe more humane but enduringly unequal.

The very West European states that went furthest toward welfare were also the larger imperial states that excluded from their generosity the vast bulk of humanity in the empire's territories.

If human rights are treated as inborn, or long in preparation, people will not confront the true reasons they have become so powerful to-day and examine whether those reasons are still persuasive.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau doubted it, complaining that the rise of commerce expanded hierarchies of wealth that both morally enervated the rich and fed disorder, even if they left the poor better off.

We will do much more for the happiness of the lower classes," utopian socialist Victor Considerant wrote, "for their real emancipation and true progress, in guaranteeing these classes well-remunerated work, than in winning political rights and a meaningless sovereignty for them. The most important of the people's rights is the right to work.

Their extremism indicates, rather, that in the revolutionary era and especially during Jacobin rule, it became more and more the common sense that some sort of "reasonable" equality in the distribution of the good things in life was both feasible and necessary.18

War is always a contest of words as well as of wounds.