Bøker av Samuel Moyn

A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humaneIn the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war, with the United States exercising dominion everywhere. In Humane, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical-to ban torture and limit civilian casualties-have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier?To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics and law of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed-and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes.In the post-9/11 era, the U.S. military embraced the agenda of humane war, driven by both the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle moved from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but the war's foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends have only accelerated since. Even as the Obama and Trump administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the "forever" war.Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars become more protracted, they are also becoming more humane. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.

"[A] brilliant new book . . . Humane provides a powerful intellectual history of the American way of war. It is a bold departure from decades of historiography dominated by interventionist bromides." -Jackson Lears, The New York Review of BooksA prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humaneIn the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war. With little debate or discussion, the United States carries out military operations around the globe. It hardly matters who's president or whether liberals or conservatives operate the levers of power. The United States exercises dominion everywhere.In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical-to ban torture and limit civilian casualties-have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed-and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences.The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. By that time, the US military had embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but its foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Even as the two administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the "forever" war.Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.

A provocative study of a French Holocaust controversy of the 1960s and the dynamics of postwar memory.

The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. As state violations of political rights garnered attention, a commitment to material equality disappeared and market fundamentalism emerged as the dominant economic force. Samuel Moyn asks why we chose not to challenge wealth and neglected the demands of a broader social and economic justice.

In Christian Human Rights, Samuel Moyn asserts that the rise of human rights after World War II was prefigured and inspired by a defense of the dignity of the human person that first arose in Christian churches and religious thought in the years just prior to the outbreak of the war.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. This book elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage.

The French-Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) is today remembered as the central moralist of the twentieth century and remains a major presence in the contemporary humanities. In this book, written in lucid and jargon-free prose, Samuel Moyn...