Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, where he also serves as head of Grace Hopper College.

Trained in modern European intellectual history, he works on political and legal thought in modern times and on constitutional and international law in historical and current perspective. His most recent book is Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times¹ (Yale University Press, 2023), based on the Carlyle Lectures² in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford.

He spent a decade writing some books about the history of international law and human rights: The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History¹ (Harvard University Press, 2010); Christian Human Rights³ (Penn Press, 2015), based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014; Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World⁴ (Harvard, 2018); and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War⁵, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), which is out in a paperback edition in 2022 with Picador in the United States and Verso in the United Kingdom.

Currently he is working on (different) projects on aging and politics constitutionalism and democracy, and the Vietnam war.

Moyn is a fellow of the new Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft⁶. Over the years he has written in venues such as The Atlantic, Boston Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Dissent, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.