Samuel Moyn and Marcel Gauchet on the Relationship Between Human Rights, Neoliberalism, and Inequality

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the acclaimed interconnections between human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism. I first turn to the thought of one of the most influential scholars on the question, historian Samuel Moyn. I unveil a hitherto unacknowledged shift in his historical-political approach to human rights: from a focus on what I shall refer to as a critique of ‘political minimalism’ in The Last Utopia (2010) to a focus on economic minimalism in Not Enough (2018). This is the article’s first, historical aim. The second aim is to criticize Moyn’s more recent position. I unpack my argument by drawing on one of Moyn’s most important sources of inspiration: French social philosopher Marcel Gauchet. Gauchet’s conceptualization of the role of human rights in late modernity (the 1970s and onwards) played a crucial role in Moyn’s first 2010 study; in his last publication, it plays a much more marginal role. I maintain that Gauchet’s analysis highlights the limits not only of Moyn’s latest publication but of the dominant strands in the current Anglophone debate on human rights and inequality more generally. The drawback of the debate, and thus Moyn’s intervention, is that it disregards the relationship between human rights and equality—in contrast to its great focus on human rights’ relationship to inequality—in late modernity. The strength of Gauchet’s approach is that it highlights the potentiality of taking the relationship between human rights and equality into consideration when attempting to conceptualize the relationship between human rights and neoliberalism.