Not Enough Quotes

“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”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“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.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“The welfare state shouldered the burden of provision for males above all, and ethnic and racial insiders among them. Women and children certainly mattered, but the welfare state’s schemes treated their plight as derivative, and its very generosity entrenched their subordination to the destiny of the male working nation, especially when welfare states took up natalist policies—a fact that the Universal Declaration’s prohibition of discrimination did shockingly little to affect for a long time.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“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.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“the welfare state.” It would differ from the mere “power state” that the German National Socialists had brought about, achieving redistributive policy and social security without destroying personal freedoms.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“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.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“Status equality matters fully as much as distributive equality.8”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“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.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“It was easier for market fundamentalists in America and elsewhere to obliterate whatever ceiling on inequality national welfare states had imposed and to vault the global rich higher over their inferiors than they had ever been. Meanwhile, the most visible ethical movement was struggling merely to build a global floor of protection for the worst off. As egalitarian ideals and practices died, the idea of human rights accommodated itself to the reigning political economy, which it could humanize but not overthrow.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“Worse, human rights lost their original connection with a larger egalitarian aspiration, focusing on sufficient provision instead.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“Human rights were cut off from the dream of globally fair distribution that the global south itself advocated during the 1970s.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“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.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“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.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“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.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“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.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“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.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

“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.”
― Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World