The intellectual historian Samuel Moyn, Professor of Law and History at Yale, has become an influential explorer of our ideological moment. A scholarly and intelligent public figure, Moyn is an increasingly important thinker on the contemporary US Left, always interesting and provocative, regardless of whether or not one agrees with his positions. His broad erudition defies the narrow specialisation of the academy and he is refreshingly honest about his own socialist agenda. Some of his previous works, such as the The Last Utopia (2010) and Not Enough (2018), argued that human-rights doctrines are historically contingent and insufficient as a basis for politics. Although the minimalist requirements of human rights left them standing after the collapse of all other utopian ideological projects, Moyn believes that this success has come at the expense of more genuine or radical solutions to our problems.
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