Event details

Book talk with Samuel Moyn, Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University on his latest book “Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It.”

In Gerontocracy in America, the historian and social critic Samuel Moyn offers a piercing diagnosis of our age divide and its consequences. Even apart from the presidency, in legislatures, businesses, and the courts, the average leader’s age has risen dramatically. The elderly predominantly fund campaigns and dominate their agendas, often with the intent to block any challenge to their status. The tax code is rigged on their behalf, as is an economy geared to sheltering financial and housing assets. But it doesn’t need to be this way. With understanding and wit, Moyn shows how elder power can be dismantled.

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 “Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It.” He is also the author of “Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times” (Yale University Press, 2023), based on the Carlyle Lectures 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 History” (Harvard University Press, 2010); “Christian Human Rights” (Penn Press, 2015), based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014; “Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World” (Harvard, 2018); and “Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), which came 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 constitutionalism and democracy, legal theory, and the Vietnam War. Moyn is a fellow of the new Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 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.