Human Rights and the Age of Inequality by Samuel Moyn
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
In “Human Rights and the Age of Inequality,” Samuel Moyn deals with the
drastic gap between the egalitarian crisis and the human rights remedy that
demands not a substitute but a supplement. He points out that the human
rights regime and movement are simply not equipped to challenge global
inequalities. The writer breaks new ground in examining the relationship
between human rights and economic fairness. If we don’t address the growing
global phenomenon of economic inequality, the human rights movement as we
know it cannot survive or flourish.
Croesus/ˈkriːsəs/ was an ancient Greek historian and the king of Lydia from 585 to 546 BC. He governed from 585 BC until his defeat by the Persian king, Cyrus the Great in 546 BC.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights-1948
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR, is a milestone document in
the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal
and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was
proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December
1948.
Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and
rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards
one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2: Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set
forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race,
color, sex, language, religion, political or another opinion, national or
social origin, property, birth, etc.
Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of
person.
Article 4: No one shall be held in slavery.
Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman,
or degrading treatment or punishment.
………………………..
Article 30: Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as
implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity
or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and
freedoms set forth herein.
NHRAP-National Human Rights Action Plan
The protection and advancement of human rights as outlined by the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the Constitution of the Kingdom of Nepal, 1990,
and other national and international instruments is a priority for His
Majesty's Government of Nepal. The United Nations convention on human
rights, which was convened in Vienna in 1993, urged member countries to
foster a culture of respect for human rights and urged the creation and
effective implementation of national programs to safeguard and advance these
rights. NHRAP covers the following areas:
- Education and Culture
- Health
-
Environment and sustainable development
-
Indigenous, ethnic, Dalit, specially-abled, and senior citizens
-
Women’s empowerment, gender equality and equity, and women’s rights
- Children's rights and development
- Law reform
- Justice administration and management
- Prison management and reform
- Labor and Employment
- Conflict management
-
Institutional strengthening.
Constitution
Ø Constitution is a legal & coded document.
Ø It’s a written document that provides power to different legal bodies.
Ø Constitution is supreme because it is called the father of law and the guardian of people.
Ø It divides the power among a legislature, executive and judiciary.
Cold War
Cold War, the post-World War II competition between the US and the Soviet
Union and its allies, was an open but restrained conflict. There was little
use of actual weapons throughout the Cold War; instead, it was fought on
fronts of politics, economics, and propaganda. The word was first used by
the English writer George Orwell in an article published in 1945 to allude
to what he prophesied would be a nuclear standoff between two or three
monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of
people can be wiped out in a few seconds. In a speech at the State House in
Columbia, South Carolina, in 1947, American businessman and presidential
advisor Bernard Baruch used it for the first time in the country.
Near the end of World War II, in May 1945, Nazi Germany submitted, and the
tense alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States that had been
formed during the conflict started to fall apart. In the nations of Eastern
Europe that the Red Army had freed by 1948, the Soviets had erected
left-wing regimes. The Soviet Union's enduring control over Eastern Europe
and the possibility of communist parties with Soviet influences gaining
power in Western Europe's democracies were fears shared by the United States
and the United Kingdom. On the other side, the Soviets were adamant about
keeping hold of Eastern Europe in order to protect themselves from a
potential resurgence of German aggression. They were also adamant about
establishing communism globally, partly for ideological reasons. By 1947 to
1948, when the Marshall Plan brought Western Europe under American influence
and the Soviet Union had established openly communist regimes in Eastern
Europe, the Cold War had become more entrenched.
Heroic Age
Ø
The heroic age refers to the time in Greek history and
folklore that occurred before the Trojan War and its immediate
aftermath.
Ø
British Heroic Age, characterised by a re-centering of Celtic
culture, lasted from the fourth to the seventh centuries AD, after the
withdrawal of Roman armed forces from Britain and before Anglo-Saxon (and
ultimately Norman) supremacy over the majority of the island. The King
Arthur legend and other characters who would eventually participate in this
legendary system first appear during this time period.
Ø
Greek mythology refers to the time between the arrival of the
Greeks in Thessaly and their departure from Troy as the Greek Heroic Age,
during which semi-divine and human heroes are thought to have existed in one
of the Five Ages of Man, according to some.
Ø
Germanic heroic poetry reflects early historic or
quasi-historic events that occurred in the fourth and fifth centuries
AD.
Ø
From 1895 through 1917, the Antarctic continent was the focus
of international exploration activities during the "Heroic Age of Antarctic
Exploration."
Ø
Heroic Age of Medicine, roughly 1860–1910, when forceful
medicinal methods were employed.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Ø
Roosevelt, who was born in 1882 and passed away in 1945,
studied at Columbia Law School and Harvard University. In 1905, he wed
Eleanor Roosevelt.
Ø
He serves as the country's 32nd president.
Ø
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took office in the midst of the
Great Depression, aided the American people in regaining their
self-confidence. He offered encouragement by promising quick, forceful
action and declaring in his inaugural speech that "the only thing we have to
fear is fear itself."
Ø
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and
Roosevelt oversaw the mobilization of the nation's resources and personnel
for war.
Ø
He spent a lot of time thinking about the creation of a
United Nations, in which he wanted to resolve international conflicts
because he believed that the future of the world's peace would depend on
relations between the United States and Russia.
Ø
The "human security" paradigm in social science and economic
development was foreseen by Roosevelt, who supported a larger human right to
economic security. He brought it to the brand-new United Nations he was
creating and added the phrase "freedom from fear" in regard to national
aggressiveness.
Gunnar Myrdal
Gunnar Myrdal, an economist and Nobel laureate, was born in Sweden in 1898. In 1923, he received his law degree from Stockholm University, and he started practicing law while still a student there. In 1927, he earned his juris doctorate in economics and was named a political economy docent.
Even though his writings frequently gave a negative depiction of the socioeconomic condition, Myrdal's optimism in the prospects for the quality of life and happiness of the global populace is evident in this passage. “The rationalism and moralism which is the driving force behind the social study, whether we admit it or not, is the faith that institutions can be improved and strengthened and that people are good enough to live a happier life. With all we know today, there should be the possibility to build a nation and a world where people’s great propensities for sympathy and cooperation would not be thwarted. FindingJuris the practical formulas for this never-ending reconstruction of society is the supreme task of social science. The world catastrophe places tremendous difficulties in our way and may shake our confidence to the depths. Yet we have today in social science a greater trust in the improvability of man and society than we have ever had since the Enlightenment.”
About Humanity
Ø
In the modern and current world, humanity is a reflection of
human rights, humanitarianism, and development. It includes
interdisciplinary subjects like politics, anthropology, law, literature,
history, and the law.
Ø
The human rights movement and regime are ill-equipped to
confront widespread inequality. The stark incompatibility between the human
rights solution and the egalitarian issue calls for a supplement rather than
a replacement.
Ø
The human rights movement and regime are simply ill-equipped
to combat the world's disparities, but they can make a contribution to the
ongoing discussion on economic inequality and human rights.
Ø
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as
judicial systems and social movements, do not uphold the value of
distributive equality, which appears to exist in a gap between the wealthy
and the poor. Recent efforts to think about the issue have recognized
extreme poverty and human rights.
Ø
All people are born free and with an equal standing in terms
of their rights and dignity, according to the founding text of human rights.
In a world destroyed by the heinous acts of prejudice and genocide, it might
be real. However, all rights come at a price, particularly economic and
social rights.
Ø
If one man owned everything, an absolute overlord, he would
not breach the current system of human rights, provided that everyone's
fundamental rights were upheld.
Human rights in the age of national welfare
v After the Great Depression and World War II, practically
everyone felt that an update to citizenship rights was necessary and
desirable, and this is how the Declaration of Human Rights came to be. The
year before he passed away, Franklin Roosevelt made his now-famous proposal
for a "second bill of rights" that would include socioeconomic protections.
Roosevelt, however, really downplayed the actual egalitarian ambitions that
every variant of welfarism professed by promising "freedom from want" and
visualizing it "anywhere in the world." To ensure a more equal society than
previously, these went far beyond a low bar against deprivation. His
speech's most important pledge was to put a stop to "special privilege for
the few" and therefore to inequality, not to provide a minimum level of
safety for the general populace.
v However, only nationally, and largely in North Atlantic
states, and even then, partially, did the battle against abjection and the
demand for equality succeed in achieving their complementary aims. Any
progress that was achieved on either front, however, was subject to severe
restrictions, particularly the geographical modesty that the human rights
idiom has now successfully overcome. Indeed, it appears as though the
renunciation of the requirement of local equality was rewarded in some way
by the globalization of basic protection standards.
This connection was rarely altered by the world's decolonization, which the new governments themselves adopted despite being unanticipated at the time of the Universal Declaration, which was written to suit the imperial powers of the day. What would happen next was a pressing concern, especially given the global south's inability to spread national welfare and the income disparity that still exists today between rich and poor countries.
From national welfare to neoliberal globalization
Ø
It was possible to pursue the protection and limit on
inequality established internally by some countries by globalizing
welfareism. Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist, suggested this option, for
instance. However, his goals did not materialize, much like those of the
southern global "New International Economic Order" that emerged in the
1970s. Instead, we got global market fundamentalism, which historian Mark
Mazower mordantly refers to as "the genuine new world economic system." In
the end, a compromise was reached, and Myrdal and Friedrich Hayek shared the
Nobel Prize in economics for 1974.
Ø
However, while one of them was forgotten, the other had his
dreams come true. States cut back on social provision in the 1970s,
beginning in the UK and the US—as well as in the southern cone of Latin
America just before and in authoritarian form—and politicians were elected
(or, in Latin America, took power—setting out to undermine the national
welfarist consensus for which human rights had offered a modest and optional
synonym three decades earlier.
Ø
There is presently a lot of discussion on why and how
"neoliberalism's" practical win happened. If a justice utopia ever existed,
it was minimum and universal, allowing for the condemnation of the worst
state abuses while, in the socioeconomic sphere, it envisioned a level of
protection without a cap on inequality.
Ø
Regardless of its theoretical promise, the human rights
regime and movement adjusted in reality to the changing environment. One
reason is that during its heroic era, the concept of human rights developed
in tandem with the political economy's scalar leap from the country to the
world. The rights of people to be safe from harm and to have a minimal level
of government that, at best, avoided calamity and misery were prioritized
rather than the agency of governments to initiate and administer public
welfare. This was especially true in the socioeconomic sphere when failing
welfare governments simultaneously abandoned the goal of social equality as
a yardstick. Higher degrees of redistribution within national settings had,
undoubtedly, been made possible by the base in national and usually ethnic
unity, but there had also been built-in exclusions. However, the emergence
of human rights abandoned any egalitarian pressure in theory and practice in
exchange for its inclusivity and even cosmopolitanism.
Ø
The human rights movement must admit its limitations in the
face of distributive inequity. Somebody else will have to step in. Contrary
to certain Marxists, I believe it is absurd to attribute the rise in
inequality in our time to human rights, even though the latter started to
get international recognition at the same time the former did.
Neoliberalism, not human rights, is to blame for neoliberalism, to put it
crudely. The true issue is that the legal frameworks and plans of action
that have been developed around socio-economic rights to date have reduced
them to the status of powerless bystanders of market fundamentalism rather
than empowering agents or frightening enemies.
Do we need another human rights movement?
Ø
Could a new version of human rights be used to address this
error than the current legal systems and movements? I have my doubts. To be
clear, this is not meant to undermine the moral importance or even
historical success of human rights when it comes to their primary
applications in preventing political repression and curtailing excessive
violence, but whenever inequality in human affairs has been contained, it
has never been on the sort of individualistic, and frequently anti-statist,
basis that human rights do in fact share with their market fundamentalist
acceptor.
Ø
The key instruments of the human rights movement's most
well-known and probably effective campaigns, the criticism of state
repression and the amelioration of war tragedies, are simply unsuitable for
application in the socioeconomic arena when it comes to the necessary
mobilization complement to any program. The human rights movement has been
doomed to offer no substantive alternative and, most definitely, no
significant danger to market fundamentalism since it is not up to the task
in any of the tasks to which it has self-assigned.
Ø
The popularity and prestige of human rights today, combined
with the paucity of other political ideologies, have led some people to make
the error of treating everything as a nail when they only have a hammer at
their disposal. The stark incompatibility between the human rights solution
and the egalitarian issue calls for a supplement rather than a
replacement.
Ø
The wealthy have benefited the most from the era of human
rights. A commitment to material equality vanished when official breaches of
political rights received increased exposure as a result of human rights
initiatives. Fundamentalism of the market has replaced it as the driving
force behind national and international economies. In this thought-provoking
book, Samuel Moyn examines how and why we choose to elevate human rights to
the status of our highest values while ignoring the needs of larger social
and economic justice.
Ø
In a groundbreaking history of rights dating back to the
Bible, welfare governments of the twentieth century determined to meet their
inhabitants' most basic needs without neglecting to keep in check how far
the wealthy may tower over the rest. Following the end of two world wars and
the dissolution of empires, new states attempted to expand the scope of
welfare beyond its original American and European origins and even went so
far as to combat inequality on a worldwide basis. However, their schemes
were thwarted as neoliberalism's faith in free markets took hold.
Ø
Moyn situates this unsettling change from the egalitarian
politics of the past to the neoliberal globalization of the present in
connection to the history of the human rights struggle. Investigating why
the expansion of human rights coincided with persistent and growing
inequality and why campaigners began to look for solutions to poverty
without attacking the status quo of riches.
Precise Form of the Essay
Ø
The author addresses the stark disparity between the human
rights solution and the egalitarian dilemma, which calls for an addition
rather than a replacement. He makes the case that the human rights movement
and regime are ill-equipped to confront widespread inequality.
Ø
By investigating the connection between economic fairness and
human rights, the author creates new ground. The human rights movement as we
know it cannot endure or grow if we do not address the expanding worldwide
phenomena of economic inequality.
Ø
Offering the wealthy Lydian king Croesus as an example, he
dreamed of being the happiest person by achieving human life and continued
to yearn for a way to set his subjects free and provide them with luxury and
security. He did not invest in his money accumulation, and it was stolen as
he lost the battle. King Cyrus, The Grateful of Persia. The author uses the
unfairness of the current universe, which is caused by the unequal
distribution of the available means and resources, as an example of
this.
Ø
Every year on December 10th, Moyn claims, we celebrate
universal human rights, but nothing is done to ensure that the rich and the
poor have equal access to rights and property everywhere. He claims that
distributive equality can certainly aid in the mitigation of such issues,
but that it appears to be impractical in everyday life.
Ø
The author highlights that in order to write the history of
human rights in relation to political economy, there are two major steps
that must be taken. The first is the heroic period of post-second world war
national welfare, and the second is the expansion of the political economy
outside of the nation in the 1940s.
Ø
Roosevelt released the second charter of rights, which
included socioeconomic protection in the USA but omitted important
information like Provincial America's participation in the New Atlantic
Agreement, which promised freedom from want and made use of it globally.
Ø
After 1940, when the cold war began as a result of partiality
and the division of US-led democratic nations and USSR-led communist
countries, human rights suffered greatly.
Ø
Furthermore, since these regimes prioritized economic
efficiency over promoting equal rights for all people, decolonization of the
world during the post-World War II period could not lead to desirable
development and human rights. The author makes the following argument
regarding the necessity for a new human rights movement. The author then
uses Herodotus' history to illustrate truth and reality regarding the push
from the wealthy to the poor to redistribute global socio-economic justice,
but it is also difficult to do so in a realistic manner.
Ø
Thus, original, fruitful, and authentic freedom and rights
cannot be granted within the current system of human rights. As a result,
the development of an egalitarian society around the globe appears to be
unrealistic and unfit for use in the real world. In the end, the wealthy
have access to everything, while the underprivileged dislike Croesus's
civilization.
Thank -You