Samuel Moyn and Marcel Gauchet on the Relationship Between Human Rights, Neoliberalism, and Inequality

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the acclaimed interconnections between human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism. I first turn to the thought of one of the most influential scholars on the question, historian Samuel Moyn. I unveil a hitherto unacknowledged shift in his historical-political approach to human rights: from a focus on what I shall refer to as a critique of ‘political minimalism’ in The Last Utopia (2010) to a focus on economic minimalism in Not Enough (2018). This is the article’s first, historical aim. The second aim is to criticize Moyn’s more recent position. I unpack my argument by drawing on one of Moyn’s most important sources of inspiration: French social philosopher Marcel Gauchet. Gauchet’s conceptualization of the role of human rights in late modernity (the 1970s and onwards) played a crucial role in Moyn’s first 2010 study; in his last publication, it plays a much more marginal role. I maintain that Gauchet’s analysis highlights the limits not only of Moyn’s latest publication but of the dominant strands in the current Anglophone debate on human rights and inequality more generally. The drawback of the debate, and thus Moyn’s intervention, is that it disregards the relationship between human rights and equality—in contrast to its great focus on human rights’ relationship to inequality—in late modernity. The strength of Gauchet’s approach is that it highlights the potentiality of taking the relationship between human rights and equality into consideration when attempting to conceptualize the relationship between human rights and neoliberalism.

When the conditions are equal, each person voluntarily isolates within herself and forgets the public world.If the legislators among democratic peoples do not make any effort to counterbalance this fatal tendency, or foster it with the intention to redirect the citizens from political passions and thus divert them from revolutions, it might be that they end up producing the evil that they wanted to avoid […] 1 Within the larger debate known as the historical turn in human rights, with its focus on historiography, a subcurrent has emerged throughout the last decade, concentrating on the relationship between human rights and the increased economic inequality in late modernity.Contra the claim that human rights have served as a political counterpoise to the neoliberal movement, 2 a growing number of scholars explore the possible links between the neoliberal political order, with its combination of trickle-down economics and reforms serving to create new markets, and the new role of non-governmental human rights organizations from the 1970s onwards. 3In both debates-the much broader field of the historical turn and the more recent subcurrent-the US-American historian Samuel Moyn has played a key role.
With his controversial work The Last Utopia (2010), Moyn sparked the debate that would evolve into the historical turn.Against Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights  (2007), which emphasized the continuity between the first declaration of 1789 and the political usages of human rights today, Moyn is the most influential representative of the revisionist school.From the Age of Transatlantic Revolutions up until the 1970s, Moyn insisted, human rights were intimately bound up with an idea of national self-governance and more popular influence over political life.But since the 1970s, they have first and foremost been mobilized to protect individuals against the state. 4As such, human rights are primarily a manifestation of the crumbling of more comprehensive political visions. 5 Eight years later, in Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018), Moyn tackles the claim that the late modern practice of human rights is intertwined with neoliberalism. 6He contends that this is exaggerated: human rights did not 'abet its [neoliberalism's] victories directly'; rather, 'the human rights revolution went along with a crisis of ambition in the face of an increasingly neoliberal political economy and the distributive injustice it wrought, which determined the guise of reform and how far it went'. 7In other words, in the ways in which human rights have been vindicated since the end of the Cold War, the discourse has had little to say about the increased distributive inequalities during the same period.'Focusing on sufficient protections', Moyn writes, 'human rights norms and politics have selectively emphasized one aspect of social justice, scanting in particular the distributional victory of the rich'. 8Respectively, the two books address and criticize what I shall refer to as two forms of minimalism: political minimalism (the study from 2010), and economic minimalism (the study from 2018).
With 'political minimalism', a term which Moyn does not use, I refer to a political condition limited to the here and now, where politics is confined to resolving immediate issues without any elaborated historization of the situation or future-oriented vision.'Economic minimalism', a concept Moyn does use in his 2018 publication, defines the ideal of securing an economic threshold for everyone, in contrast to more comprehensive redistributive conceptualizations of equality.
To shed light on the issues at stake in the more recent debate regarding human rights and inequality, this article will explore the historical-political implications of Moyn's shift from one minimalism to another.In order to unveil this overlooked shift in his thought, I will draw on one of his most important sources of inspiration when writing The Last Utopia: French philosopher and historian Marcel Gauchet.9I will argue that in Not Enough Moyn downplays the importance of Gauchet's thought.Tracing the shift in Moyn's thought is the first purpose of my study.
With this historical comparison as a background, my second, political-theoretical aim is to argue that the shift discloses one of the main political-theoretical contributions of The Last Utopia.I assert that Gauchet's conceptualization of the role of human rights, his emphasis on the problems related to political minimalism in late modernity (1970s onwards) that underlies Moyn's 2010 book, highlights the limits not only of Moyn's 2018 publication, but of dominant strands in the current Anglophone debate on human rights, neoliberalism, and inequality more generally.Specifically, I emphasize that Gauchet's analysis of the relationship between human rights and a particular form of equality, distinct from the focus on distributive inequality in the current Anglophone debate, elucidates the ambiguous effects of human rights in late modernity, and how this relationship ties in with the neoliberalization of society during the past four decades.To highlight this, I will demonstrate that Gauchet's reactivation of Alexis de Tocqueville and what the latter refers to as égalité imaginaire can shed light on the new role of human rights. 10In fulfilling these two aims, the paper contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the relationship between human rights, (in)equality, and neoliberalism in late modernity.
The study is divided into five parts.I open by giving an overview of the field referred to as the historical turn in human rights studies and Moyn's critique of political minimalism in The Last Utopia.In the second section, I draw on the arguments presented in Not Enough and explore Moyn's critique of economic minimalism.Additionally, I examine the Anglophone debate concerning the interplay between human rights, neoliberalism, and distributive inequality.In the third part, I present Gauchet's analysis of human rights and point out the similarities between his work and Moyn's.The fourth part considers Gauchet's appropriation of de Tocqueville and the differences between Gauchet's position and that of Moyn and the other participants in the Anglophone debate regarding human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism.In the fifth and concluding section, I bring together my findings and point to their further implications.
I. The historical turn and Moyn's critique of political minimalism While Moyn's The Last Utopia sparked what would come to be known as the historiographical debate, he was not the first to highlight the historiography of human rights.The first historical studies to influence the ensuing historiography of human rights appeared towards the end of the 20th century.The characteristic of that first wave of attempts to write the history of human rights is the assumption of a slow yet discernible transformation toward their maturity as a global ideal in late modernity. 11hen, with the 9/11 attacks on the US and the ensuing invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, that brief period with dreams of an 'end of history' ended.With the War on Terror and its ambiguous relationship to human rights, with the US and its allies' flagrant violations of human rights coexisting with their attempts to appropriate the human rights discourse in their fight against an 'Axis of Evil', the historiography of human rights entered a new phase.Alongside the seminal attempts of historians Kenneth Cmiel and Reza Afshari to sketch out the historiography of human rights, thinkers like Wendy Brown warned that human rights as a political project at that time could risk cementing the lack of more substantial political visions, as: it is in the nature of every significant political project to ripple beyond the project's avowed target and action, for the simple reason that all such projects are situated in political, historical, social, and economic contexts with which they dynamically engage. 12 a period of international military interventions and neoliberal economic reforms, Brown argues, the emphasis on human rights risks further bolstering the militaristic and neoliberal political agenda.Yet it was only with the publication of Lynn Hunt's ground-breaking Inventing Human Rights in 2007 that a broader debate, including far more scholars, was initiated.Reading Hunt's book was also the catalyst that prompted Moyn to write The Last Utopia, which in turn inspired an incessant stream of studies.The core of Hunt's historical-political argument is that the specific combination of the content of rights and the solemn forms of the first declarations-the US Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789))-set an example which contained a propensity to reproduce itself; rights questions, Hunt notes, 'revealed a tendency to cascade', 13 testifying to an 'inner logic'. 14he modern notion of rights, Hunt continues, 'opened up an unpredictable space for discussion, conflict and change.The promise of those rights can be denied, suppressed, or just remain unfulfilled, but it does not die.' 15 Polemicizing against the many attempts to write a deep genealogy of human rights, Moyn has stressed the contrasting roles played by the state in the original breakthrough towards the end of the 18th century and in human rights from the 1970s onwards.The notion of the rights of man, or les droits de l'homme, served to bring about a reconstruction of the state, founded on some form of popular control, where the rights of political subjects would be respected.Rights were 'from the beginning part of the authority of the state, not invoked to transcend it'. 16he late modern ideal of human rights, on the other hand, was articulated as a defence of the individual against the state.Variations of this claim echo throughout Moyn's early book, in formulations such as 'the morality of the globe' against the 'politics of the state', and the idea that human rights' 'new appeal depended here, too, on the failure of more maximal visions of political transformation and the opening of the avenue of moral criticism in a moment of political closure'. 17The same dependence on the role of the state holds for the symbolically important UN Declaration of 1948-an order founded on the basis, and in support, of strong state sovereignty.In 'real history', as Moyn puts it, 'human rights were peripheral to both wartime rhetoric and post-war reconstruction, not central to their outcome'. 18Nor did they play any crucial role in the decolonization movement or, more generally, in the Third World movements of the post-1945 period; chief among the goals directing these movements were instead collective self-determination, independence from the two superpowers, and economic development. 19nother key tenet in Moyn's account is the emphasis he puts on comprehending how the human rights discourse developed out of a wider political perspective, as a substitute for much more ambitious political projects such as socialism and the experiments of the post-1945 welfare states, which were crumbling in the 1970s.It was only then, Moyn maintains, that a 'genuine social movement around human rights' appeared on the international scene, 'seizing the foreground by transcending official government institutions, especially international ones'. 20Disillusionment following the Cambodian Genocide (1975-79) and problems emerging in the postcolonial states after the wave of successful liberation struggles in the 1960s led to the transnational ideal of human rights emerging as a baseline for moral hope in a politically disenchanted world, an alternative after the 'collapse of other, prior utopias, both state-based and internationalist'. 21While more comprehensive and demanding utopias had 'promised a free way of life', they had 'led 16 Moyn (n 5) 7. 17 ibid 43, 141. 18ibid 7. 19 ibid 84-119.This claim has, rightly, been widely challenged by scholars arguing that revisionist historians such as Moyn, who emphasize the 1970s as the breakthrough moment for human rights, overlook the connections between triumphant notions of human rights and suspended attempts to create a decolonized world order, as seen in, for example, the efforts to create a 'new international economic order'.into bloody morass, or offered emancipation from empire or capital, but suddenly came to seem like dark tragedies rather than bright hopes'. 22rucially, Moyn points to a constitutive paradox out of which human rights as we know them emerged.They surfaced in the vacuum created in the wake of the crumbling 'grand narratives', which hitherto had served as sources of inspiration for political movements for well over a century. 23Human rights were now vindicated as an 'alternative to grand political missions-or even as a moral criticism of politics', as a 'minimalist … utopia'. 24Yet, amid the flux of events that had sapped credibility from and demobilized more substantial, future-oriented utopias, human rights were soon expected to 'assume the very maximalism they triumphed by avoiding'. 25And by 2010, when Moyn was writing, the historical experiences that rendered possible the oxymoron of a minimalist utopianism were 'long since gone'. 26aving emerged out of the void left behind by the decomposition of more substantial political utopias, advocates of human rights are thus, Moyn contends, left with a choice.One possibility is to accept that, as a movement, they are working to secure a decent minimum for everyone and that they leave room for 'the contest of genuinely political visions'. 27Another option is 'to expand its [the movement's] horizons so as to take on the burden of politics more honestly', take a stand in a number of controversial issues and move in a distinct political direction, inspired by constructive visions of the future, and by implication prepare to confront political adversaries, since humanity is 'still confused and divided about how to bring about individual and collective freedom in a deeply unjust world'. 28Politics, he stresses, is 'emphatically visionary but also necessarily divisive', defined by conflicts and mutually exclusive notions of the good life.To the degree that human rights activists do not recognize this, they will misrepresent and distort our political self-perception as individuals and collectives. 29So much for the political minimalism underlying Moyn's 2010 book.

II. Economic minimalism: neoliberalism, inequality, and human rights
As indicated, a more narrowly defined field of scholarship has emerged out of the broader discussion with a particular focus on the relationship between the human rights movement, increased economic inequality, and the neoliberal political order that took shape around the same time.Among those who envisage human rights as opposing neoliberalism are scholars such as Kathryn Sikkink and Micheline Ishay. 30They argue that human rights movements must be understood as continuing a much longer tradition of progressive political movements. 31Human rights are here conceptualized as a stronghold against neoconservatism and various forms of religious extremism as well as neoliberalism.These authors criticize their adversaries for failing to discriminate between the (benevolent) form of individualism that focuses on individual well-being and the (malevolent) neoliberal form of individualism, 'which focuses on the individual as a rational, self-maximizing actor in a model where self-interest provides the motivation for economic production'. 33gainst their appraisal of human rights as a bulwark against an expanding neoliberal order, a number of critics assert that human rights are related to the emergence of the neoliberal order.Within this camp, various historical-political positions are discernible.Firstly, there are those who conceptualize the neoliberalization of society in strictly economistic terms, claiming that neoliberalism is first and foremost built on the idea of homo economicus; the late modern discourse on human rights is an ideological symptom of this order. 34nother line of argumentation is that the emergence of the neoliberal order has been undergirded by a form of 'morals of the market': a depoliticizing, authoritarian form of moralism that has sapped the possibilities for reproducing and creating new collectively based subjectivities that could have served as counterforces to the neoliberal wave. 35As Brown writes, the human rights discourse organizes political space, often with the aim of monopolizing it.It also stands as a critique of dissonant political projects, converges neatly with the requisites of liberal imperialism and global free trade, and legitimates both as well. 36 the same lines, both Jessica Whyte and Quinn Slobodian assert that the vocabulary of human rights has been a crucial tenet for some of the most prominent members of the 'neoliberal thought collective'. 37oyn's 2018 book represents a third position.In contrast to The Last Utopia, with its critique directed toward deep genealogists like Ishay, Sikkink, and Hunt, Not Enough concentrates on and challenges the claim that human rights have abetted neoliberalism. 38gainst the 'Marxist' claim that there exists a mutually strengthening connivance between human rights, neoliberalism, and rising inequality, Moyn asserts that the crucial connection is a missed connection: precisely because the human rights revolution has at its most ambitious dedicated itself to establishing a normative and actual floor for  protection, it has failed to respond to-or even allowed for recognizing-neoliberalism's obliteration of the ceiling on inequality. 39man rights have had little, if anything, to offer against the neoliberal social order that emerged in the 1970s, since they 'simply have nothing to say about material inequality'. 40s Moyn reiterates from the 2010 book, the problem is that at the foundation of human rights is a critique of the state, supported by non-governmental organizations as well as parties within existing states promoting a limited state.The 'selective attention of human rights politics toward a minimum provision of the good things in life has made them unthreatening to a neoliberal movement' that 'has devoted itself most unerringly to the intensification of material hierarchy'. 41Therefore, Moyn continues, the hope of changing our current predicament by transforming the human rights movement is futile.Historically, all attempts to create a society based on critical levels of both sufficiency and equality have been based on a 'strong state-built with interventionist capacities, funded by high taxes, and able to call forth the zeal of its people'. 42here are a number of constants in The Last Utopia and Not Enough: the scepticism vis-à-vis anti-statist political movements, often referred to as a shift from politics to ethics; the criticism of a political landscape lacking visionary ideas for the future; and a conflict-oriented perspective.Thus, although the problem is framed differently in the two books and they draw on very different empirical material, a clear continuity in Moyn's approach is discernible.An essential difference between the two works, however, is the explicit focus on economic inequality in the later publication.Although the criticism of political minimalism was not dropped entirely in Not Enough, it came to be overshadowed by a call for greater distributive equality.
As much as I sympathize with the main thrust of Not Enough, particularly in light of the rampant economic inequalities of recent decades, I believe there is a risk that its emphasis on distributive inequality-an emphasis shared by the other participants in this Anglophone debate-eclipses the problem on which Moyn's first book focused, namely political minimalism.To properly grasp the impact and role of human rights in late modernity, I maintain, it is crucial to analyse how they are intertwined with political and economic minimalism, rather than focusing exclusively on the latter, as the recent debate on distributive inequality and human rights has tended to do.
To illustrate the importance of taking political minimalism into consideration when examining the role of human rights in late modernity, and why Moyn thus neglected a crucial perspective in Not Enough, I will now turn to Gauchet's analytical construct égalité imaginarie and demonstrate how it can shed light on the contemporary debate on human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism.transmutations of recent decades.Yet, in contrast to how the relationship between neoliberalism and human rights has been analysed in the ongoing Anglophone debate, with its emphasis on the interconnections between economic inequality and human rights, Gauchet contends that the impact of human rights, and their role in the neoliberalization of society, must be understood as the upshot of a distinct form of individual-centred equality.

III. Marcel Gauchet, human rights, and imaginary equality
To elucidate the specificity of Gauchet's de Tocqueville-inspired notion of equality, I start by comparing it with three other influential conceptualizations of equality.After that, I turn to how Gauchet contends that it interlocks with the role of human rights in late modernity.
In the modern tradition of Western political thought, it is common to distinguish between two ways of envisaging equality: a 'formal' and a 'real' form of equality.The former, 'bourgeois' conceptualization of equality is appositely described-including what it conceals-in Karl Marx's answer to Bruno Bauer in 'On the Jewish Question': The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions based on birth, social rank, education, occupation when it declares that birth, rank, education and occupation, are non-political distinctions […] Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education and occupation, to act in their way, i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special nature.Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being. 43 Marx clearly indicates, ever since the Atlantic Revolutions (1765-1838), this formal notion of equality has been contrasted with some form of real equality, where 'real' alludes to the distribution of some good.Early support for this form of equality appeared in the Conspiracy of the Equals, which emerged in 1796 during the French Revolution.In the Le manifeste des égaux, Sylvain Maréchal famously declares: 'We consent to everything for it [equality], to make a clean slate so that we hold to it alone.Let all the arts perish, if need be, as long as real equality remains!' 44 The characteristic feature of this ideal-typical form of equality is that the paramount aim of political action is to defend an equal distribution of resources.
It is around this focus on distributive equality that the current debate on human rights, neoliberalism, and inequality has revolved.To Maréchal, it implied equal distribution of material goods.However, the ideal is not reducible to material goods.During the post-1945 period, it was developed to include the distribution of virtually any form of what we, after Pierre Bourdieu, might refer to as 'capital'-whether economic, cultural, or social.
Here the crucial question is access to resources and equivalence in the outcome. 45longside the formal and the real, a third notion of equality is the ancient close relationship between sortition/selection by lot and equality, originally inseparable from the democratic regime.Here, the emphasis is on how the sortition principle is the only principle for selecting political officials that harmonizes with political equality properly understood. 46Just like the previously mentioned conceptualizations of equality, this principle is concurrently a historical practice and a theoretical ideal.Among other notions of equality that have emerged, I would like to highlight the ways in which Gauchet has furthered the French proto-sociologist de Tocqueville's notion of modern equality. 47In the second book of Democracy in America (1835-40), de Tocqueville discusses how the emerging democratic society was propelled by a form of 'imaginary equality', strong enough to counter the 'wealth and poverty, command and obedience [that] accidentally put great distances between two men', since 'public opinion, which is based on the ordinary order of things, brings them closer to the common level and creates between them a kind of imaginary [imaginaire] equality, in spite of the real inequality of their conditions'. 48n Gauchet's appropriation of de Tocqueville's notion, what engenders equality between individuals is the 'socially defined way in which they meet and situate one against the other', emerging out of 'the structure of a relation that determines them'. 49t is as such not 'discernible in itself, within each and every one of them [the individuals]'. 50Thus, in contrast to the three classical notions of equality presented above, simultaneously analytical and empirical categories, imaginary equality is not an ideal that we find explicitly articulated, manifest in the archives.It does not speak the language of formal equality and inclusion nor of distributive equality and access to resources.Nor does it refer to equality as a political principle and focus on each citizen's equal access to the public realm and joint rule of the polity, in the classical period closely related to isegoria. 51Rather, it is a social force asserting the conviction that everyone has the equal right to be seen and recognized in accordance with their self-perceived specificity, i.e., as the individual envisages herself, by virtue of being an example of humankind.Visibility and recognition are the main problems with which the imaginary, or emotional, form of equality is concerned, and its point of departure is the individual. 52In Gauchet's analysis of the role of human rights in political life since the 1970s, this analytical construct plays a crucial role.
His analyses of human rights and imaginary equality in late modernity are both embedded in a more comprehensive historical-political attempt to analyse the emergence and development of modern democratic society.In this broader analysis, the crumbling of revolutionary socialism in the 1970s was the last remnant of a political order based on what Gauchet refers to as a heteronomous or religious structure, where the ends of politics were considered exogenous to political life.A typical example of this is the modern belief in a future emancipated from the structures that stoke hostility and conflict, as in some forms of revolutionary utopianism.
Yet, while celebrating the waning of eschatological thought in political life, early on Gauchet worried that politics would now be reduced to an engineering of the immediate necessities of our everyday lives, the mere unmediated satisfaction of individual interest. 53It was in this conjuncture that the new role of human rights emerged and thrived, and one of the foremost forces driving these transmutations was the individual-centred form of equality. 54ue to their lack of any comprehensive social-historical vision for how to transform the state in order to bring about a better future, modern human rights movements since the 1970s have reinforced and reproduced the distorting conceptualization of the individual as a rights-bearer by virtue of being an unqualified individual.The impetus driving this process politically is not primarily claims of distributive equality, as the rampant economic inequality that has emerged in parallel with the rights-based society clearly testifies.One of the driving forces is rather the process by which every individual expects to be seen and acknowledged by virtue of being an abstract equal to everyone else, that is, what de Tocqueville referred to as imaginary equality (égalité imaginaire). 55olitically, this conceptualization has been promoted by the liberal right, with their defence of property rights and the individual's right to choose, thereby respecting 'bourgeois' equality in the face of the law.The left has simultaneously contributed to the consolidation and appreciation of this trend by consistently pushing for new rights of recognition and the expansion of social rights.Despite their different foci, both the left and the right have implicitly aimed at eliminating the fetters seen as denying individuals their 'right to equivalence through [individual] differences'. 56he problem, as Gauchet sees it, is not that rights as such play a key role in political life; the emergence and expansion of individual rights is, as I elaborate below, one of the foundational pillars on which modern society is founded. 57Since the 1970s, however, the vindication of rights by political movements in the West has become detached from more substantial, historically anchored political visions pointing out directions into the future.Gauchet refers to this recent vindication of human rights as a maximalist conceptualization, as contrasted with the typically modern, minimalist vindication of human rights as a limiting framework for political action, rather than its exclusive aim.In late modernity human rights have thus strengthened a political imaginary in which the individual is conceived of as separated from the territorial state, despite the fact that it is ultimately through the modern state that our individual rights are defended.To be precise, the problem with the maximalist vindication of human rights, where rights are disembedded from more comprehensive political imaginaries-historically anchored visions pointing 53 Marcel Gauchet, 'Les droits de l'homme ne sont pas une politique' (1980) 7 Le Débat.This concern was something he shared with a number of people tied to the group around Furet, in particular those who started the journal Le Débat.See, for example: Pierre Nora, 'Que peuvent les intellectuels' (1980) 1 Le Débat; Krzysztof Pomian, 'Crise de l'avenir' (1980) 7 Le Débat. 54Gauchet (n 53); Marcel Gauchet, La démocratie contre elle-même (Gallimard 2002); Marcel Gauchet, Le nouveau monde: L'avènement de la démocratie 4 (Gallimard 2017). 55Gauchet, Le nouveau (n 54) 551. 56Gauchet (n 49) 365. 57Marcel Gauchet, La révolution de droits de l'homme (Gallimard 1989); Gauchet, Le nouveau (n 54).
into the future-is that they reproduce and reinforce the illusion of the individual as an ahistorical and pre-political rights-bearing individual.
This critique adds little to Marx's classical critique of the atomizing effects of human rights in 'On the Jewish Question'.Gauchet's contribution is his connection of this atomistic tendency in modernity to what he refers to as imaginary equality, as manifest in several spheres in society (the healthcare system, the military, the family) but none as clearly as in the educational system. 58he impulse referred to as imaginary equality is closely related to the never-ending regress with which the ideal of emancipation/liberation is intertwined.The imaginary equality is realized when and where each individual is addressed in their abstract individuality; when and where the individual is fully emancipated from any prejudgements and limiting structures imposed by her surroundings.Yet when fully realized, little seems to be left of this stripped individual.Without all the-limiting and empowering-traits that make us human, the fully emancipated individual appear more like a liberal dystopia than an ideal to strive for. 59To counterbalance this impasse, many modern political movements have succumbed to the temptation of assuming some transcendental foundation, an assumed terminus for politics, such as a perfectly equal classless society.This latter option is what Gauchet claims as explaining the phenomenon of totalitarianism: the flight from the ambivalence characterizing modern representative democracies into an assumed safe and firm ground beyond uncertainties and conflicts. 60o Gauchet, the overemphasis on individual rights, the tendency to deal with political problems in juridical terms, has created an imbalance between what he takes as the three structuring poles of a modern democratic society: the territorial state (le politique); the social-historical or temporal orientation (le social-historique); and the pole of individual rights (le droit).However, contrary to the long tradition of reactionary critique of human rights, he has consistently pointed to the crucial role played by human rights in bringing about an institutional framework that serves the ideals of individual and political freedom. 61From the Age of Revolutions up until the 1970s, he argues, the impact of human rights was counterbalanced by the equally strong influence of the two other poles of modern society: the social-historical dynamic and the power of the territorial state.
Due to the disproportionate emphasis on the individual and her rights, in late modernity the third pole has tended to render opaque the institutional preconditions for our freedom and foment the illusion that I as an individual am the primary originator of my individual freedom. 62Human rights have thus transmuted from being vindicated as part of a greater political project-what Gauchet refers to as the minimalist conception of human rights-to the current maximalist ideal where they alone form the basis for political life. 63As Gauchet puts it, society may well extend the prerogatives of individuals in society; the more it is successful, the more the figure of togetherness of the society of individuals evades its coherence; the less it is possible to govern itself. 64e late modern practice of human rights is incapable of carrying the burden imposed on it, since it is 'founded on the reactions of situations and specific cases', and not the historically anchored projection into the future that politics proper is about. 65Therefore, the late modern practice of human rights within the West is incapable of explicating and constructively mediating the institutional framework through which we might exercise and practice our individual freedoms. 66The issue lies not with the concept of human rights per se, but rather with the political vindication of these rights since the 1970s, devoid of historically grounded visions that point towards new directions for the future.
As for the neoliberal regime, Gauchet contends that this is the logical outcome of a social order in which the individual-centred form of equality is not countered by the social-historical and the central power [le politique].These mediating poles-between the individual and the collective (the territorial state), and our relationship to the past, present, and our possible futures (the social-historical)-have both been weakened.With the decomposition of totalitarian ideologies as a challenger to liberal democracies, the latter has entered a period of disorientation.The utopian promises of a future liberated from conflicts forced liberal, conservative, and social democratic movements to anchor their analyses of society historically; the weathering away of the totalitarian threat has left the remaining political imaginaries disoriented.It was in this limbo, where the condemnation of totalitarian attempts to 'achieve history' rendered suspicious any attempt to give society a direction into the future, that human rights were transformed from a minimalist into a maximalist political ideal.
To break the spell of neoliberalism, Gauchet contends, we need political imaginaries that are better balanced between the three poles, capable of explaining why the pole of rights has been ascribed such an outsized role in late modernity-precisely like the work done by imaginary equality in his own work.Political movements proclaiming to criticize the ideal of homo economicus without taking this into consideration risk, he argues, plunging Western societies even deeper into the neoliberal maelstrom in 62 Gauchet, La démocratie (n 54); Gauchet, Le nouveau (n 54). 63Gauchet (n 53); Gauchet, Le révolution moderne (n 59); Gauchet, Le nouveau (n 54). 64Gauchet (n 49) 381. 65Gauchet, Le nouveau (n 54) 603. 66Needless to say, Moyn is not unaware of the role played by what he refers to as 'status equality', but nowhere in his oeuvre does he subject its role in the emergence of human rights as a last utopia to closer examination.When briefly touching upon the theme, he does so by referring to how "status equality" entitles everyone to "some basic political freedoms, such as the right to speak and to be free from torture", Moyn (n 6) 3.
which they have been caught for the past four decades or so.Let us now turn to a closer analysis of the relationship between Gauchet and Moyn.
IV. Moyn, Gauchet, and the Janus face of modern equality Gauchet willingly admits that the language of individual rights has offered and continues to offer a powerful source of critique against abuses, for example, in the early modern monarchies, as well as in the vast majority of states where individual rights are not respected today. 67Yet within liberal democracies the primordial challenge is not how to resist power, but rather to comprehend how we might envisage and transform power to bring about a 'fair, equal and free society'. 68The current emphasis on human rights as a means to resist power should be contrasted with the revolutionaries' original attempt to articulate the declaration of human rights as a strategy to reconstruct and seize power during the French Revolution.Simply put, the problem with contemporary human rights movements (in the West) is that they have little to say about how power might be transformed into a productive force to serve new political ends.Prefiguring Moyn's much later argumentation in The Last Utopia, Gauchet conceives of the late modern practice of human rights as an effect of the anti-totalitarian spirit of the 1970s, with its critique of utopianism and of substantive, future-oriented political visions.The transformation of the political scene is thus primarily a manifestation of the retreat of the political and the social-historical as counterbalancing poles. 69This is the core of Gauchet's conceptualization of the late modern, 'maximalist' form of human rights, detached from more comprehensive political imaginaries.
Gauchet's critical evaluation of the emergence of political 'minimalism', the negatively driven politics aimed at limiting the effects of power abuses, ties in neatly with Moyn's oft-repeated criticism of minimalist moral aims in The Last Utopia.Variations on this theme pervade his 2010 book through the formulations referenced in section 1 above.Yet, Moyn adds, while human rights' promise of minimalism was congenial to the anti-totalitarian moment during the 1970s, this was only a fleeting moment in history, 70 now long since gone.His argument here fits with Gauchet's: like the latter, Moyn emphasizes the difference between the state-centred notion of the rights of man in the modern revolutions, serving to bring about a reconstruction of the state with the aim of strengthening popular control over it, and the late modern ideal of human rights with its emphasis of the individual against the state. 71 Similarly, Moyn argues that the very conditions which allowed for the success of human rights as a minimum requirement are precisely what makes them incapable of serving as a sufficient political imaginary in the longer term. 72This ties in with Gauchet's claim that the 'invisible' side of the modern rights-based regime (the state) is withdrawing to let the 'visible' side of individual rights-the abstract individual subject-take centre stage. 73As Gauchet puts it, this is the lesson of the Gulag, of the totalitarian experience: always mistrust power, in whichever guise it appears. 74et where the historian Moyn focuses on the history of human rights as such, the social philosopher Gauchet concentrates on theorizing their role in contemporary society by analysing the interplay between them, the territorial state, and the social-historical orientation in Western liberal democracies, from the emergence of the modern world until today.Crucially, while Moyn primarily stresses the historiography of human rights, Gauchet's critique centres on how human rights as a political form structures the temporal orientation of liberal democracies.
Having emphasized the most important parallels between the thought of Gauchet and Moyn's The Last Utopia and its focus on political minimalism, while drawing attention to the difference between Moyn's more historical approach and Gauchet's more theoretical, social-philosophical take, I now turn to their differences.In doing this, I will show how Gauchet's analysis offers new perspectives to the Anglophone debate on human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism.
As we saw in the presentation of Moyn's work in section 1, he contends that human rights have had little, if anything, to offer against the neoliberal social order that emerged in the 1970s, since they 'simply have nothing to say about material inequality'. 75Human rights movements and activists have focused mainly on state abuses and the goal of providing everyone with a material minimum.But where Moyn sees human rights as a 'powerless companion', due to their 'selective attention […] toward a minimum provision of the good things in life', 76 Gauchet contends that: in reality, the emphasis on the market form obeys reasons that go well beyond efficiency.It is the only form of collective coordination conceivable and admissible from the moment on which it is posed that the collective is constituted of individuals free to maximise their interests safe from any tutelage from above.This is why its role does not limit itself to regulating the sphere of market transactions; it has a vocation to expand to the entirety of social life; it provides a generalisable model for relations between untied individuals. 77om Gauchet's point of view, then, human rights have profoundly contributed to bringing about the neoliberalization of society throughout the last four decades, in stark contrast with Moyn's claim that they have been a powerless companion.By contributing to the strengthening and reproduction of the individual as, first and foremost, a rightsbearing entity, the late modern practice of human rights has distorted the social-ontological conditions of the human in society.In this respect, he contends, one can justifiably speak of 'an ideology of human rights'. 78They are ideological because, without the counterweight of the social-historical and the political, they reproduce the social-ontological illusion of individual and society as two separate and mutually hostile entities. 79his strand of critique is not unique to Gauchet; it is shared by a number of Anglophone scholars. 80So what can Gauchet's approach bring to the Anglophone debate?
What does he add of analytical relevance, besides the fact that he has inspired one of the most influential participants in the field? 81hat is unique to Gauchet is his focus on the internally generated political tensions stemming from the modern, individual-centred force of imaginary, or emotional, equality.To him, the triumph of a 'maximalist' practice of human rights from the 1970s and onwards, as Moyn rightly shows in his 2010 book, forms part of a more complex historical-political conjuncture. 82Yet in Moyn's more recent reflection from 2018, with its emphasis on the relationship between human rights and economic inequality, that (Gauchet-inspired) historical-political focus is overshadowed by his insistence on distributive inequality.Where Moyn sees human rights as a powerless companion, Gauchet conceives of their new role since the 1970s as a force contributing to the transformed political landscape, propelled not least by what he refers to as the individual-centred form of equality; by undermining the political and the social-historical, thereby sapping the ground for the emergence of more visionary political imaginaries, the late modern practice of human rights has nourished the simplistic ideal of homo economicus promoted by free-market enthusiasts across the globe.
In contrast to scholars such as Brown, who have argued that the juridification of political life is the upshot of liberal imperialism and global free trade, Gauchet emphasises the Janus-faced effects of modern individual-centred equality, and its contribution to the disproportionately strong role of human rights within late modernity. 83He contends that the relationship between neoliberalism and human rights is incomprehensible without taking into consideration the social impact of imaginary equality. 84To better grasp the current predicament, we need to break out of the 'economistic hypnosis because this state of hypnosis only keeps our thinking trapped in this […] neo-liberal framework'. 85o discern the closer ties between the neoliberal order and human rights, it is crucial that we instead account for the 'infrastructural role of the political', and how it has interacted with the juridification process, of which the new role for human rights is a manifestation.To Gauchet, the economism at the centre of neoliberalism is, put differently, a symptom, not a cause; a focus on the manifestations of the neoliberal order 'is not enough'. 86o comprehend the emergence of neoliberalism and the role played by human rights within it, it is necessary to take seriously the ambiguous effects of the modern individualcentred form of equality.By pointing to the necessity of countering this force with the poles of the political and the social-historical, Gauchet embeds the debate regarding human rights, neoliberalism, and (in)equality in a bigger historical-political framework.And given how well acquainted Moyn is with Gauchet's critique of political minimalism, it is surprising-and disappointing-that he doesn't address how he conceives of the 81 Wedin (n 9). 82Conceptually, it should be noted that whereas Gauchet refers to human rights as a maximalist ideal, Moyn stresses the political minimalism-a basic level of rights assured to everyone-of which they are symptomatic.Both writers, however, examine how the meaning and political effects of human rights were transformed throughout the 1970s. 83Brown (no 3) 461. 84Gauchet's analysis of neoliberalism forms part of his conceptualization of autonomy as a modern ideal and its emergence in history.In order to delimit the present study, I decided to leave aside this aspect of relationship between the political minimalism in The Last Utopia and the economic minimalism in focus in Not Enough. 87o further expound on the specificity of Gauchet's approach, it is illustrative to relate it to a recent article by German philosopher and theologian Heiner Bielefeldt in which he criticizes Moyn's thought for ideas that the latter has partly inherited from Gauchet. 88 Bielefeldt asserts that: Rather than functioning as a 'minimalist utopia of anti-politics', they [human rights] open up the space for peaceful political competition, the articulation of minority concerns, political critique and opposition, new societal visions, artistic experimentation, mass mobilisation, the recruitment of new members for political parties or the foundation of new civil society organisations. 89 and large, Bielefeldt repeats the argument of Gauchet's former teacher Claude Lefort as formulated in his seminal article 'Droits de l'homme et politique' from 1979 (subsequently repeated by various scholars).Lefort argues that human rights have served as a driving force for political action in modern society. 90As demonstrated above, the fact that human rights have had these effects since they were first declared, throughout the emergence of democratic society from the Atlantic Revolutions and onwards, is not something Gauchet disputes.There can be little doubt that human rights have enabled political mobilization in modernity, and have served as an important source of inspiration in the long, drawn-out struggles out of which representative democratic societies have emerged.Gauchet would also agree with Bielefeld that: Human rights cannot replace political utopias, just as they cannot replace religious creeds, salvation ideologies, cultural identities or the fully fledged programmes of trade unions and political parties. 91at Gauchet claims-and criticizes-is the political effects of the maximalist vindication of human rights.
The challenge of today is thus of a different character than the totalitarian temptation of 'salvation ideologies', to paraphrase Bielefeldt, during much of the twentieth century. 92uring that phase, human rights played an essential role in curbing the exuberance of reified visions of the future vindicated by totalitarian ideologies. 93The situation was thus, in many respects, the inverse of our current predicament.The period between 1945 and 1975 is an example, according to Gauchet, of when the three poles-individual rights as manifested in human rights, the social-historical, and the state-interacted in such a way that human rights as a political form undergirded the construction of democratic society, then under pressure from the totalitarian temptation to bring about final 87 See in particular his article comparing Gauchet's approach with the approach of his former teacher Claude Lefort to human rights in: Samuel Moyn, 'The Politics of Individual Rights: Marcel solutions. 94In contrast, and partly as a direct consequence of the fear of secularized eschatologies in the twentieth century, the late modern challenge to liberal democracies is rather the incapacity to envisage the future as different at all, to conceive of the future as qualitatively different from the present. 95

V. Concluding remarks
In light of the alarming rise of distributive inequality in recent decades, the interest in inequality and how it interrelates with other salient phenomena of late modernity is surely warranted.There is no doubt that the Anglophone debate on human rights, distributive inequality, and neoliberalism is an important contribution.However, as I have attempted to illustrate in this paper, conspicuous material inequality must not inhibit us from analysing the ambivalent effects of imaginary equality in modern society, in particular when grappling with the interconnections between human rights and neoliberalism.
In line with recent trends in human rights studies, Samuel Moyn has redirected his focus towards the relationship between human rights and inequality.Given the evident coincidence of human rights as a 'last utopia' and rising economic inequality, this focus appears justified.When so redirecting the debate, however, it is crucial that scholars interested in the effects of human rights in late modernity do not lose track of what I have referred to as political minimalism.In light of his familiarity with Gauchet's thought on the topic, which inspired The Last Utopia, it is surprising that Moyn doesn't elaborate on how he conceives of the relationship between the political minimalism in focus of that book and the economic minimalism of Not Enough.
The strength of Gauchet's analysis is that it offers an in-depth examination of a crucial component in the dynamic undergirding the phenomena singled out by Moyn in The Last Utopia.By reactivating de Tocqueville's analytical construct of imaginary equality, Gauchet shifts attention from the relationship between distributive inequality and human rights to the relationship between human rights and the individual-centred form of equality that takes centre stage in his analysis.He highlights the social-ontological challenges that the ideal of an entirely emancipated individual triggers.Specifically, he points to how human rights in late modernity in Western democracies have bolstered a conceptualization of the individual as a self-sufficient rights-bearing entity, as something ontologically antecedent to the social institutions on which our individual independence inevitably hinges.They have thus contributed to the social-ontological impasse where the abstract ideal of the self-defining individual saps the social-ontological preconditions for the exercise of our individual freedom.To curb this atomistic drift, the pole of rights needs to be counterbalanced by institutional arrangements that are capable of situating the individual spatially (the political) and temporally (the social-historical).
With regard to the economic minimalism that Moyn criticizes in Not Enough, Gauchet's approach highlights the limits of merely considering the relationship between 94 ibid. 95 distributive inequality and human rights.Through the analytical construct of imaginary equality, his perspective has the advantage of stressing the politically ambiguous effects of the modern individual-centred force of equality, something which the debate on human rights and neoliberalism so far has neglected.Gauchet does so by emphasizing how the economism characterizing neoliberalism is the political imaginary that remains in a social order where the balancing forces of the social-historical and the political have lost ground to the pole of individual rights.Without constructive, historically anchored political imaginaries capable of uniting individuals and inspiring them to project themselves into the future, politics is reduced to the satisfaction of individual rights-negative as well as positive.In this respect, Gauchet argues, neoliberalism is the upshot of the right-based order, not its cause. 96To gain a thorough comprehension of the genesis and development of neoliberalism, it is necessary to acknowledge the force of modern individual-centered equality.This entails considering not only the great possibilities it presents, but also the potential hazards that may result.

French
social philosopher Marcel Gauchet has consistently argued that the ways in which human rights have been vindicated since the 1970s have directly affected societal 39 ibid 149. 40Moyn (n 6) 216. 41ibid xii. 42ibid 219.
).36Brown (n 3) 461.In an earlier text on rights, included in the essay collection States of Injury, she articulates a similar critique, emphasizing that the ways in which rights are vindicated in late modernity 'are more likely to become sites of the production and regulation of identity as injury than vehicles of emancipation', see: Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press 1995) 134. 37Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press 2009).Within this strand of critique we also find scholars zeroing in on the specific role played by key actors-states, international organizations, and individuals-in the older imperialist powers in intentionally mobilizing a depoliticizing, individualistic, and moralistic understanding of human rights in the 1970s as part of a strategy to undermine the political alliances seeking to bring about substantial self-determination to the recently decolonized world and construct a New International Economic Order.See: Anghie (n 19); Brier (n 19); Duranti (n 19); Jensen (n 19); Moses, Duranti, and Burke (n 19); Slaughter (n 19); Whyte (n 3). 38Samuel Moyn, 'A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism' (2014) 77 Law and Contemporary Problems.
Gauchet's project and focus on what is necessary for my arguments here. 85Marcel Gauchet, 'Neo-liberal Ideology and the New World: An Interview with Marcel Gauchet', Marcel Gauchet interviewed by Natalie J. Doyle (2022) International Journal of Social Imaginaries Gauchet. 86ibid.