For the past decade, Samuel Moyn has been rewriting the history of human rights. He emphatically rejects equating them with all good things and decries the histories of their purported progressive unfolding, histories that discover rights’ antecedents in seemingly every major world religious and philosophical tradition. In Not Enough, Moyn seeks to further disabuse readers of this timeless, transcendent understanding of human rights. His overarching ambition has been to persuade human rights historians to “turn away from ransacking the past as if it provided good support for the astonishingly specific international movement of the last few decades” (Human Rights and the Uses of History, 2014, p. xiii).

I share Moyn’s frustration with the familiar story. Treating human rights as universal moral principles practically requires bad histories to substantiate the politically suspect and certainly anachronistic claims frequently made on their behalf. Purging human rights history of its Whiggish tendencies brought a much-needed correction, in which Moyn’s work has been instrumental. However, Moyn badly overcorrects by reading out the deep, if also problematic, connection of human rights with democratic, emancipatory, and egalitarian political movements altogether. His narrow conception of human rights actually entails this misreading.

In this book, his most recent, Moyn argues that human rights offer little promise in combating the rampant and deleterious inequalities engendered by neoliberalism. It chronicles how social and economic rights emerged during the French Revolution in fraught alliance with the egalitarian agenda of the Jacobins, were subordinated to the laissez-faire political economy of the nineteenth century, reached a flawed apogee in the highly gendered and racialized but still unprecedentedly egalitarian national welfare states of the postwar period, and then focused increasingly on global basic needs and sufficiency as they allied with development and antipoverty discourses beginning in the 1970s. This last turn occurred precisely when formerly colonized states, having realized that independence had cut them off from their erstwhile oppressors’ wealth, were demanding a new international economic order (NIEO) to redistribute resources (and power) more justly. Around the same time, Moyn asserts, political philosophers also began to prioritize sufficiency over equality (though he never persuasively connects the dots between these parallel developments).

This focus on sufficiency, Moyn insists, makes human rights conceptually and politically inadequate for challenging inequality. He argues that because a floor need not imply a ceiling, the rapid, inequality-producing growth distinctive of neoliberalism might actually help in meeting the minimum, as China’s example seems to suggest (pp. 175, 213). There was thus little reason, he maintains, for human rights to take on neoliberalism and inequality directly. In the face of market fundamentalism’s apparent success, he concludes, the “real trouble about human rights” is that they are “unambitious in theory and ineffectual in practice. . . . Neoliberalism has changed the world, while the human rights movement has posed no threat to it” (p. 216).

Moyn strangely anthropomorphizes human rights throughout the book, often attributing acts, intentions, and omissions to “human rights” rather than to the specific actors employing them in particular contexts. It is thus hard to know just where he thinks the blame for “human rights’” failure to address skyrocketing inequality should lie. He depicts human rights as feckless bystanders to neoliberalism’s ascendency: They are “prisoners of the contemporary age of inequality” (p. 6) that “surely did not bring the neoliberal age about” but, rather, “conform[ed] to their neoliberal ambiance” (p. 175). While “not to blame for causing or distracting from neoliberal assumptions,” human rights “turn[ed] a blind eye to galloping material inequality” (p. 176); they “had no commitment to material equality” and so could “[coexist] with a political economy of hierarchy they didn’t disturb” (p. 193), even if they did try to make neoliberalism more humane (p. 194). Yet Moyn still cannot “avoid the conclusion that rights and needs were really attempts to ethically outflank the more ambitious global equality that postcolonial states” proposed in the NIEO (p. 121): “A human rights movement focused on sufficiency reset the limits of optimism for what proved to be a neoliberal age” (p. 146). It was thus “no accident” that the rise of human rights “coincided with the ‘last utopia’ of neoliberalism” (p. 174).

It is curious that neoliberalism now figures as the “last utopia.” Moyn once bestowed that dubious honorific on human rights themselves, in an attempt to capture the generalized distrust of utopia, coupled with the ongoing desire to have utopia anyway, that in his view enabled their emergence in the 1970s (The Last Utopia: Human Rights and History, 2010, p. 120). This abbreviated and rather dismal historical view is informed by Moyn’s narrow understanding of human rights. In The Last Utopia, he claimed to have shown that human rights are a recent and historically peculiar idea. Yet he did not so much show this as stipulate it; that is, he defined human rights as international legal protections for individuals and the human rights movement as one of international nongovernmental organizations engaged in naming and shaming states that violate these protections that emerged in the 1970s.

Of course, once human rights are defined this way, it is both easy and tautological to show that they did not emerge before the 1970s. For example, Moyn’s earlier work reads the French Revolution, Chartism, abolition, women’s suffrage, the labor movement, Civil Rights, and anticolonialism completely out of the history of human rights because none of them was about international legal protections for individuals. For Moyn, human rights are only human rights if they point beyond the state (Last Utopia, pp. 26–33). In this respect, they embody a shift from political utopias to smaller, more manageable moral acts, through which they promise a (limited) transcendence of politics (ibid., pp. 147, 213). But, as he argues elsewhere, this means that human rights do not actually intervene in power politics; they are merely “an ornament on a tragic world which they do not transform” (Human Rights and the Uses of History, pp. 142–43).

Not Enough essentially recycles this claim for the era of neoliberalism: Human rights, in their present configuration at least, lack political and theoretical ambition and cannot effectively challenge inequality (pp. 217–18). Their signature strategy of stigmatizing government proves ineffective in this regard. Moyn calls for a worldwide egalitarian political movement—a new utopia—to challenge neoliberalism, arguing that it must be premised on enthusiasm for government, not rejection of it (p. 219). Such a movement must thus either abandon or completely reformulate human rights.

In earlier work, Moyn sketched what such a reformulation might look like: a mobilizational politics operating beyond the legal domain and seeking direct influence and control over state policy through a human rights discourse no longer privileging individualistic norms and civil and political rights (Human Rights and the Uses of History, pp. 143–46). Ironically—as numerous outraged online commentators have pointed out—this is precisely what human rights politics already looks like in much of the world, from the farms and favelas of the Global South to the neglected cities and forgotten rural communities of North America. Moyn has simply ignored the grassroots human rights politics happening all around him. He ignores their invocations of human rights against inequality (think of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers) and ignores the rights-based transnational political solidarity emerging in opposition to neoliberalism (think of the World Social Forum process). The author dismisses—without consideration—this work as ineffective and misguided, and ultimately as an obstacle to the very emancipation for which those engaged in it are struggling. This strikes me as both impudent and counterproductive, given his stated political commitments (which, by the way, I happen to share).

What is needed now is a correction to Moyn’s overcorrection: a history of modern human rights struggles that draws out their explicitly political character. Such a history would build on the many valuable insights of Moyn’s work—showing, as he argued previously, that the international human rights movements of the 1970s represented an apolitical or antipolitical turn and, as he shows in Not Enough, that their emphasis on sufficiency is a mistake (from an egalitarian perspective). Such a history would also show that human rights are tools that can be used for many purposes, not all of them laudable. Most importantly, however, it would show that whether human rights can be used effectively in challenging neoliberalism is a political question, not one that historians (or philosophers, for that matter) can decide.