RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThis marvelous book is a history of one of the hardest things to explain: why something did not happen ... In this case, the non-event that Samuel Moyn describes...is the institutionalization of a political ethic of material egalitarianism ... Moyn argues that ... [t]he failure to establish egalitarianism as the foundational ethic of the welfare state at the moment of its creation...left the door open for the vengeful return of inequality starting in the 1970s. And by then, the now-truncated conception of human rights was simply not enough to hold back the revanchism of financialized and globalized capitalism that would engulf the last quarter of the 20th century ... the point is that the conception of human rights was fundamentally unhelpful not just for defending egalitarianism later on but even for justifying welfare states in the first place ... Moyn ends his book with the faint hope that perhaps the ethos of egalitarianism not only can but should be revived to address the galloping inequality that has been the fruit of neoliberalism and that lies at the root of the global flowering of populist nationalisms.
