,
8 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Gráinne de Búrca (forthcoming, @ICONnect_blog): "First, ... the suggestion that the concerns of status equality have become broadly a matter of consensus today is breath-taking in either its naïveté or disingenuousness ... ."
“Secondly, ... I doubt that activists … would … understand issues of status equality as being in any meaningful way separable from issues of economic injustice and material inequality. …” /2
“Thirdly, … [m]any lives have been lost by courageous human rights and environmental defenders challenging precisely the kind of corporate power and economic interests that Not Enough sets itself against. …“ /3
“… To provide fuel for an argument that infers that these and many other … practitioners and activists … are engaged in a human rights anti-politics placed beyond political economy seems both careless and wrong. …” /4
“Fourthly, what solution or alternative, if any, does the book offer? … [I]t is interesting to note that some of the actually existing attempts to promote democratic socialism in the United States at present, far from rejecting the human rights movement …” /5
“… include a wholehearted embrace of the indivisibility of civil and political rights and economic social and cultural rights. … Moyn offers no reason why these ideals are not suitable to underpin a political system which is committed to redistribution …” /6
“The book concludes with the observation that for human rights activists and lawyers ‘there ought to be some shame in succeeding only amid the ruins of materially egalitarian aspiration at every scale’ (p 217).” /7
“But some might say the real shame lies with those advancing provocative but somewhat artificial and exaggerated critiques, which attract the attention ... but do not seek to identify viable alternative strategies to confront the challenges of extreme inequality.” /8
