Dirk van Zyl Smit and Catherine Appleton, Life Imprisonment: A Global Human Rights Analysis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019, xvi + 447 pp, hb £36.95.
| Published date | 01 January 2020 |
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
| Author | Alison Liebling |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12481 |
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Samuel Moyn,Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World,Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018, 276 pp, hb £21.95.
Samuel Moyn’s latest book makes the powerful argument that human rights are
‘not enough’ to address social and economic inequality. According to Moyn,
human rights, and in particular social r ights, have catered to the distribution
imperative of sufficiency, but they are ill-equipped to address the imperative
of equality. This distinction is of paramount importance for the central thesis
of the book. Sufficiency means having ‘enough’ in relation to some mini-
mum degree of provision, while equality is a relative term and concerns how
far apart individuals are from one another regarding their possession of good
things in life. Not unlike Thomas Paine’s defence of sufficiency against equal-
ity, – ‘I care not how affluent some may be, so long as none be miserable
in consequence of it’, – human rights have focused on providing a ‘floor of
protection’ against insufficiency but have been unable to guarantee a ‘ceil-
ing’ on inequality. Contrary to this sufficiency minimalism, the per iod that
saw inequality most restrained was that of the interventionist ‘Welfare State’
in the aftermath of the Second World War. Moyn, therefore, suggests that
it is an institutional design, rather a list of entitlements and judicial enforce-
ment, which can create conditions of equality within societies. Moyn con-
cludes with a thought experiment of an all-owning and benevolent Croesus;
even if Croesus would offer everyone a generous floor of protection against
insufficiency, the inequality and subsequent hierarchy would persist. Indeed,
‘surprising though it may seem, there turns out to be no contradiction be-
tween drastic material inequality and fulfilment of basic provision’ (213). For
the purposes of this review, I will first briefly summar ise the contents of each
chapter and then I will selectively address some issues of contextualisation and
critique.
The first chapter traces the roots of the welfare state to the interventionism,
social services provision, and planning of the Jacobin state during the French
Revolution. It was in the eighteenth century that distributive justice within
political order became first conceivable. The Jacobin vision of material equality
might not have questioned private property, but it was a concrete attempt to
undermine the material hierarchy of the Old Regime. This was a centralised
response to distributional issues, rather than an approach inspired by a sense
of individual entitlement. From this starting point, Moyn suggests, later pro-
grammes of social justice in Europe in the nineteenth century commenced
from an understanding of ‘society’ as a collective unity, rather than from an
individualistic understanding of rights, which were mostly identified with free
enterprise and property.
In continuation of this anti-individualist trajectory, Moyn argues in the
second chapter, the essence of social citizenship in the post-war national Welfare
C2019 The Author. The Modern Law Review C2019The Modern Law Review Limited. (2020) 83(1) MLR 229–253
Reviews
State was not rights, but a principle of equality. Even the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights should be read in the context of the rise and empowerment of
the welfare state, having little to do with non-governmental action or judge-led
reforms. Social rights might have been enshrined in constitutions, but they were
rarely slogans for political mobilisation and they were not considered standards
for judicial enforcement. They were the concretisation of class compromise and
regulatory guidelines for the state to provide top-down citizen welfare. More
important for the impulse of social equality were the policies of nationalisation
of industry, antitrust laws, higher taxation, and generosity in unionisation and
bargaining rules.
The third chapter shifts the focus to the United States and Franklin
Roosevelt’s ‘Second Bill of Rights’. Opposing Cass Sunstein’s account linking
Roosevelt’s speech with contemporary understandings of social rights and judi-
cial enforcement, Moyn underlines that the original ambitions of the advocates
of the Bill were ‘egalitarian hopes and interventionist tools’ (71); essentially,
an institutionalist approach to political economy. Even though the force of
resistance by business interests was such that the institutionalist scheming of the
New Deal era did not manage to flourish after the end of the war, Moyn warns
against a revisionism that confines the political aspirations of state intervention
and planning, including the ‘Second Bill of Rights’, to a list of entitlements
aiming solely at sufficiency and minimum provisions.
As far as global distribution was concerned, to which Moyn turns in the
fourth chapter, this was a challenge without precedent, considering that politi-
cal economy was nationalist. As the gap between developing and rich countries
grew instead of shrinking, the idea of globalising the welfare state gained
ground in the years of early decolonisation. Beyond theoretical endeavours in
that direction, the new post-colonial states concretely pursued a new economic
order outside the conceptual and institutional framework of human rights.
As the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights did
not contain a commitment to cross-border social justice, a new institutionalist
approach emerged in 1974: that of the New International Economic Order
(NIEO). NIEO proposals aimed at equality among states through a diversity
of policies that went well beyond the vindication of individual entitlements.
Against the backdrop of the failure of NIEO to eventually alter global dis-
tribution in the context of the global debt crisis of the 1980s, Moyn dedicates
Chapter 5 to the rise of the concept of ‘basic needs’ and its relation to human
rights. The humanitarian concer n that came to replacemore ambitious goals of
the NIEO centred on individuals and their direct needs, rather than on national
growth and development. Therefore, while human rights organisations like
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch promoted a type of activism
that abandoned hopes of broader socio-economic transformation and focused
on small-scale goals of ‘naming and shaming’ abuses of state power, develop-
ment economists shifted their priority from equality among states to the much
more modest goal of poverty alleviation. As the US under the Carter adminis-
tration embraced basic needs as part of its human rights policy and the NIEO’s
more egalitarian demands were not endorsed, human rights transited from
principles of an egalitarian welfare package to aspirations of global sufficiency.
230 C2019 The Author. The Modern Law Review C2019The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2020) 83(1) MLR 229–253
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