Are human rights enough?

an article by Samuel Moyn published in Eurozine (originally in Vikerkaar)

The Universal Declaration between welfare state and neoliberal globalization

Imagine that one man owned everything. Call him Croesus, after the king of ancient lore who, Herodotus says, was so ‘wonderfully rich’ that he ‘thought himself the happiest of mortals’. Impossibly elevated above his fellow men and women, this modern Croesus is also magnanimous. He does not want people to starve, and not only because he needs some of them for the upkeep of his global estate. Croesus insists on a floor of protection, so that everyone living under his benevolent but total ascendancy can escape destitution. Health, food, water, even vacations, Croesus dispenses them all.

In comparison with the world in which we live today, where many do not enjoy these benefits, Croesus offers a kind of utopia. It is the one many believe was foreseen in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and it has become our own, with the rise in the past half-century of the international human rights movement – especially now that this movement has belatedly turned its attention to the economic and social rights that the declaration originally promised. In this utopia, it is no longer a matter of haves versus have-nots. The worst-off have enough. But they are in a yawning hierarchy, far beneath the have-mores.

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