Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn
Moyn in 2018
Born	Samuel Aaron Moyn
Title	Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, previously Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence
Academic background
Education	Washington University in St. Louis (BA) University of California, Berkeley (PhD) Harvard University (JD)
Academic work
Discipline	Historian
Sub-discipline	Intellectual history, political theory, legal history
Institutions	Columbia University Harvard Law School Yale University
Website	Personal website

Samuel Aaron Moyn (born 1972) is the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, previously the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and professor of history at Yale University, which he joined in July 2017.

He was a professor of history at Columbia University for thirteen years and a professor of history and of law at Harvard University for three years.

His research interests are in modern European intellectual history, with special interests in France and Germany, political and legal thought, historical and critical theory, and Jewish studies.

Academic career

Samuel Moyn at a conference with New America

After attending University City High School in St. Louis, Missouri, Moyn earned his A.B. degree from Washington University in St. Louis in history and French literature (1994). He continued his education, earning a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley (2000) and his J.D. from Harvard Law School (2001).

In 2007, Moyn received Columbia University's Mark Van Doren Award and its Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for "unusual merit across a range of professorial activities".

He is also a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

He was appointed head of Grace Hopper College at Yale in 2024.

Personal life

Moyn was married to Alisa Annah Berger in 2003. His parents are Anita Hutkin of St. Louis and John Moyn of Newark, Delaware. Moyn is Jewish.

Publications

Books

• Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (2005, Cornell University Press)
• A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (2005, Brandeis University Press)
• Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future (2006, editor Samuel Moyn, Columbia University Press)
• The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010, Harvard University Press)
• Human Rights and the Uses of History (2014, Verso Books)
• Christian Human Rights (2015, University of Pennsylvania Press)
• Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018, Harvard University Press)
• Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021, Macmillan)
• Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023, Yale University Press)
• Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth―and What to Do About It (2026, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Articles

• "Imperial Graveyard" (review of George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, Cape, 2019, 592 pp., ISBN 978 1 910702 92 5), London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 3 (6 February 2020), pp. 23–25.
• "The Road to Hell" (review of Samantha Power's The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir), American Affairs Journal Vol. IV, Spring 2020 pp. 149–160.
• "Michael Ratner's Tragedy, and Ours" (essay adapted by the author from his 2021 book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War), The New York Review of Books, September 1, 2021.
• "Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential" (guest essay), The New York Times, April 21, 2026.

Further reading

• David Runciman, "The Cult of Longevity" (review of Samuel Moyn, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth, and What To Do About It, FSG, 2026, 269 pp., ISBN 978 0 374 60764 7), London Review of Books, vol. 48, no. 13 (23 July 2026), pp. 9–12. "[In the United States of America] the elderly, who have the most to spend, get to spend the least of what they have on everyone else, and everyone else has to pick up the tab. ... The American Association of Retired Persons, founded in 1958, [is now] one of the biggest and most powerful lobbies in American history. It ... has an annual operating budget of nearly $2 billion, nearly ten times that of the National Rifle Association. (p. 10.) ... [O]n current trajectories Medicare and Medicaid look like they could soon bankrupt the federal government. ... Moyn [writes that] the solution to the problem of gerontocracy in America is the expropriation of the assets of older citizens who have far more than they need. (p. 11.) ... [T]his is an argument for socialism. ... Old age is naturally semi-socialised anyway. ... Gerontocracy in America is rooted in the unequal distribution of political influence. The money shores up the power and the power shores up the money. ... Economic inequality is exceptionally difficult for democratic systems to remedy in the absence of a massive structural shock [such as] war, revolution, famine, plague. ... During the Second World War income tax on higher earners in the UK reached 98 per cent and taxes on excess corporate profits were at 100 per cent. [T]he postwar Labour government, though effectively broke, was nonetheless able to construct an extensive welfare state, including a national health service, that persists in some form to this day. [T]he rest of the [21st] century looks wide open ... to the possibility of ... upheavals, whether geopolitical, climatic, technological, biological or something else." (p. 12.)

External links

• Top Young Historians: Samuel Moyn on History News Network
• New York-area Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History
• The Court is not Your Friend,Samuel Moyn,Dissent Magazine, Winter 2020