Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of History at Yale University. Among his books are The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History in 2010, Human Rights and the Uses of History in 2014, Christian Human Rights in 2015, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World in 2018. Moyn has also written for Jacobin, Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New Republic, the Nation, the New York Times, and Dissent.

Most recently, Moyn has focused on examining the legacy of social rights, pointing to their complex relationship to human rights in the modern era. While human rights have been central to the liberal global order since the 1990s, he suggests that they have not been particularly effective vehicles for egalitarian politics. Under today’s conditions of growing economic inequality and capitalist crisis, demands for economic justice and redistribution have become more prominent. In this moment, Moyn’s work encourages us to recover a conception of social rights that can reorient us for a more egalitarian future.

Rafael Khachaturian recently interviewed Moyn about the politics of human and social rights from the postwar years to the present. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.