Are Human Rights Neoliberal? An Historical Account

This talk will offer the framework for current work in progress on the history of social rights, and their relationship to the parallel history of egalitarian aspiration. It is claimed that this history helps sort out – as some fervently deny while others adamantly insist – whether contemporary human rights advocacy and law are reducible to the neoliberal political economy that has accompanied them across their lifespan.

Samuel Moyn, currently Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History at Harvard University, has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (HUP 2010) and Christian Human Rights (UPP 2015), and edited or coedited a number of others. His areas of interest in legal scholarship include international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, in both historical and current perspective. He is a co-editor of the journal Humanity and serves on the editorial boards of other publications.

This event is part of a series co-organised by TORCH, the Centre for Global History and the Modern European History Research Centre, Rethinking the Contemporary: The World since the Cold War.