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One of the key points of @samuelmoyn’s LAST UTOPIA (and also, tacitly, in NOT ENOUGH) is that the “human rights breakthrough” in the 1970s happens not despite but *because* discussion of social/economic rights discarded in favor of an almost exclusive focus on political rights
1970s/80s human rights’ campaigners choice to mute discussions of social/economic rights in favor of an exclusive focus on political rights made human rights “safe for capitalism” at the very moment when the neoliberal turn in capitalism was causing inequality to take off
To put this in business-school-speak: strategic focus (on political rights) is what allowed Human Rights to capture market share, but it did so at the cost of abandoning a crucial part of the addressable market (social/economic rights)
