English · Chapter 17
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Samuel Moyn (born 1972) is an American historian and legal scholar who has taught at Columbia, Harvard and Yale. He is best known for The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), which traced the surprisingly recent rise of the human rights movement, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018), which develops the argument of this essay at book length. "Human Rights and the Age of Inequality" was written in the mid 2010s, when new research on the concentration of wealth had made inequality a central public issue. In the NEB Grade 12 course it is read as an argumentative essay that questions a widely admired movement without rejecting it.
Moyn opens by invoking Croesus, the fabulously wealthy king of Lydia described by Herodotus, and imagines a world named after him. In Croesus's world everyone is guaranteed the bare essentials of life while a few individuals tower over the rest in riches. His uncomfortable point is that the human rights movement, as it exists today, would have nothing to say against such a world. Its ideals could be completely satisfied there, because human rights aim at sufficiency, not equality.