Building on his prior historical studies of human rights (see here and here for prior posts at the Forum on his work), Yale Law professor Samuel Moyn has a new book that sounds similar human-rights-skeptical themes: Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard University Press). While in previous work, Moyn explored the early 20th century Christian elaboration of human rights, in this work, he seems to focus to a greater extent on the post-War period and the ways in which economic inequalities have been largely ignored (or worse) by human rights advocates and the human rights movement. Worth checking out as a kind of capstone to Moyn’s human rights trilogy.

The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. Even as state violations of political rights garnered unprecedented attention due to human rights campaigns, a commitment to material equality disappeared. In its place, market fundamentalism has emerged as the dominant force in national and global economies. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn analyzes how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of a broader social and economic justice.

In a pioneering history of rights stretching back to the Bible, Not Enough charts how twentieth-century welfare states, concerned about both abject poverty and soaring wealth, resolved to fulfill their citizens’ most basic needs without forgetting to contain how much the rich could tower over the rest. In the wake of two world wars and the collapse of empires, new states tried to take welfare beyond its original European and American homelands and went so far as to challenge inequality on a global scale. But their plans were foiled as a neoliberal faith in markets triumphed instead.

Moyn places the career of the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift from the egalitarian politics of yesterday to the neoliberal globalization of today. Exploring why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside enduring and exploding inequality, and why activists came to seek remedies for indigence without challenging wealth, Not Enough calls for more ambitious ideals and movements to achieve a humane and equitable world.

It is difficult to pinpoint precisely when the debate about religious accommodation became the single most important topic in academic and legal debates about religious freedom, but two things are nearly certain: (1) it has now decisively displaced the issue of religious displays and religion in public as the preeminent question in the field; (2) that displacement was driven by an American political, legal, and cultural turn against traditional forms of Christianity, which in turn drove traditional Christians to seek exemptions–something that was unheard of at an earlier period when law, politics, and culture were more aligned. Once legal exemptions might be used to accommodate those sorts of believers, exemptions became more controversial than ever before.

Here is a new collection whose essays explore the exemption question from a philosophical point of view: Religious Exemptions (OUP), edited by Kevin Vallier and Michael Weber.

Exemptions from legal requirements, especially religious exemptions, have been a major topic of political debate in recent years. For example, bakers in various states have sought the right to refuse to make wedding cakes for gay and lesbian couples, despite the Supreme Court’s validation of same-sex marriage. Many parents are granted exemptions from vaccinating their children, despite public health laws requiring otherwise. Various religious organizations as well as some corporations have sought an exemption from the requirement to provide contraceptive coverage in employee healthcare plans, as required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Religious exemptions have a long history in the United States, but they remain controversial. Exemptions release some people from following laws that everyone else must follow, raising questions of fairness, and exemptions often privilege religious belief, raising concerns about equal treatment. At the same time there are good reasons to support exemptions, such as respect for the right of religious freedom and preventing religious organizations from becoming too closely intertwined with government.

The essays in this volume represent valuable contributions to the complex debate about exemptions from legal requirements. In particular, they contribute to the moral dimensions of religious exemptions. These essays go beyond legal analysis about which exemptions are constitutionally appropriate, and ask instead when religious exemptions are morally required or morally prohibited.

In discussions of pluralism and difference, it is a common assumption that what is required of good citizens is a rather philosophically thick version of tolerance–not just discussion with others, but the sort of exchange of views, or “dialogue,” in which the parties are sympathetic and completely open to one another’s positions. But perhaps this version of tolerance is too demanding; indeed, perhaps its demands are such that parties with differing views on fundamental questions are driven not to talk at all, lest they fail to live up to the strictures of tolerance.

So seems to argue an interesting looking new book, Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics (OUP) by Douglas I. Thompson, which recovers Montaigne’s philosophically thinner and less demanding understanding of tolerance–one that emphasizes not deep moral commitments but particular political practices and dispositions of engagement. Perhaps this sort of tolerance may be more achievable in our own day of radical fracture.

At the heart of Montaigne’s Essais lies a political conception of religious tolerance that we have largely forgotten today. In contemporary popular and academic discourse, tolerance of religious and other differences most often appears as an individual ethical disposition or a moral principle of public law. For Montaigne, tolerance is instead a political capacity: the power and ability to negotiate relationships of basic trust and civil peace with one’s opponents in political conflict. Contemporary thinkers often argue that what matters most for tolerance is how we talk to our political opponents: with respect, reasonableness, and civility. For Montaigne, what matters most is not how, but rather that we talk to each other across lines of disagreement. In his view, any effective politics of tolerance requires actors with a sufficiently high tolerance for this political activity.
Using his own experience negotiating between warring Catholic and Huguenot parties as a model, Montaigne investigates and publicly prescribes a set of skills, capacities, and dispositions that might help his readers to become the kinds of people who can initiate and sustain dialogue with the “other side” to achieve public goods – even when respect, reasonableness, and civility are not yet assured. Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics argues that this dimension of tolerance is worth recovering and reconsidering in contemporary democratic societies, in which partisan “sorting” and multidimensional polarization has evidently rendered political leaders and ordinary citizens less and less able to talk to each other to resolve political conflicts and to cooperate on matters of common public concern.

There is arguably no greater influence on the direction and scope of religious freedom in the 20th and 21st centuries than the unprecedented growth of the American state. As I’ve written before, “[i]n a society in which the government assumes an increasingly large role in the life of the citizenry, more injuries are transformed into legally (and perhaps even constitutionally) cognizable rights. The number and type of state interests that qualify as “compelling” swell to match the new dignitarian and other harms caused by permissive religious accommodations. And the protection of rights becomes a zero sum game, as every win for religious accommodation is a legally cognizable, but unvindicated, loss for somebody else.”

Here is a book we are late in noticing that evinces cross-disciplinary study of the growth of the state: The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Activity and Social Control (CUP), edited by Kimberly J. Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff. Perhaps more such efforts will be in the offing, including some that explicitly include religion.

The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects.