A most welcome book, The Last Utopia is a clear-eyed account of the origins of "human rights": the best we have. -- Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 In this profound, important, and utterly original book, Moyn demonstrates how human rights constituted a new moral horizon and language of politics as it emerged in the last generation, a novel and fragile achievement on the wreckage of earlier dreams. A must read. -- Nikhil Pal Singh, author of Black is a Country With unparalleled clarity and originality, Moyn's hard-hitting, radically revisionist, and persuasive history of human rights provides a bracing historical reconstruction with which scholars, activists, lawyers and anyone interested in the fate of the human rights movement today will have to grapple. -- Mark Mazower, author of No Enchanted Palace: The End of Imperialism and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations The Last Utopia is the most important work on the history of human rights yet to have been written. Moyn's search for origins reads like a great detective story as he carefully sifts the evidence of where and when human rights displaced alternative political ideals. -- Paul Kahn, Yale University Human rights have always been with us--or so their most zealous supporters would have us believe. With surgical precision and forensic tenacity, Moyn reveals how recent and how contingent was the birth of human rights and how fraught has been its passage from 1970s antipolitics to present-day political program. -- David Armitage, author of The Declaration of Independence: A Global History Anyone who truly cares about human rights should confront this bracing account. -- Jan-Werner Muller, Princeton University
Samuel Moyn is Professor of Law and Professor of History at Yale University. His interests range widely over international law, human rights, the laws of war, and legal thought in both historical and contemporary perspective. He has published several books and writes in venues such as Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, New Republic, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.
A most welcome book, The Last Utopia is a clear-eyed account of the
origins of "human rights": the best we have.
*Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since
1945*
The triumph of The Last Utopia is that it restores historical
nuance, skepticism and context to a concept that, in the past 30
years, has played a large role in world affairs.
*Wall Street Journal*
Administer[s] electroshock therapy to a field imprisoned by its own
Whiggishness.
*New York Review of Books*
In his erudite new book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History,
Samuel Moyn...argues that it was only in the 1970s, when other
utopian ideologies—socialism, anti-colonialism, and
anti-communism—fell by the wayside that human rights assumed its
stature as the ultimate moral arbiter of international conduct.
*Slate*
[H]ighly successful and endlessly controversial… In the place of
celebratory treatments of a centuries-long, relentless progression
of human rights, Moyn proposed a radically new paradigm… The Last
Utopia threw shots across the bow of myriad scholarly camps, from
political science to anthropology, sociology to philosophy; its
impact reverberated far beyond the academy… The Last Utopia was one
of those rare and brilliant books that compelled readers to
reexamine their most cherished beliefs. It fundamentally changed
the tone and tenor of human rights history, vaulting Moyn into the
ranks of the country’s leading public intellectuals.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
In this profound, important, and utterly original book, Moyn
demonstrates how human rights constituted a new moral horizon and
language of politics as it emerged in the last generation, a novel
and fragile achievement on the wreckage of earlier dreams. A must
read.
*Nikhil Pal Singh, author of Black is a Country*
With unparalleled clarity and originality, Moyn's hard-hitting,
radically revisionist, and persuasive history of human rights
provides a bracing historical reconstruction with which scholars,
activists, lawyers and anyone interested in the fate of the human
rights movement today will have to grapple.
*Mark Mazower, author of No Enchanted Palace: The End of
Imperialism and the Ideological Origins of the United
Nations*
The Last Utopia is the most important work on the history of human
rights yet to have been written. Moyn's search for origins reads
like a great detective story as he carefully sifts the evidence of
where and when human rights displaced alternative political
ideals.
*Paul Kahn, Yale University*
Human rights have always been with us--or so their most zealous
supporters would have us believe. With surgical precision and
forensic tenacity, Moyn reveals how recent and how contingent was
the birth of human rights and how fraught has been its passage from
1970s antipolitics to present-day political program.
*David Armitage, author of The Declaration of Independence: A
Global History*
Anyone who truly cares about human rights should confront this
bracing account.
*Jan-Werner Müller, Princeton University*
The way the phrase human rights is bandied about it sounds like an
age-old concept. In fact, it was coined in English in the 1940s.
Samuel Moyn examines the myths of its historical roots; most
explicitly, the conflation of human rights with the revolutionary
French and American concepts of droits de l'homme. The latter
implies "a politics of citizenship at home"; the former "a politics
of suffering abroad." His book teases out the legal and moral
implications of this difference, using country-specific and
international examples, in a way that leaves little hiding space
for the self-serving usages of foreign ministers, supranational
institutions and pollyannaish charities.
*The Australian*
Moyn has written an interesting and thought-provoking book which
will annoy all the right people.
*Literary Review*
It is not hard to imagine how impatient Bentham would have been
with the notion of "human rights" that has grown so prominent over
the past few decades. Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia provides a
succinct narrative of how that idea came to occupy the centre stage
of so much international political discourse and activism. But the
book also challenges the hegemony of human-rights-speak in ways
that are nearly as combative as Bentham's polemical flights, though
far more subtle and telling...There is a power and elegance to this
book that my survey of it cannot convey. Over it hangs the question
of whether the notion of human rights may still have a future, or
if some other set of aspirations will take its place. Moyn stops
well short of speculation. But it is a problem some activist or
philosopher (or both) may yet pose in a way we cannot now
imagine.
*The National*
[A] brilliant and bracing new book...Richly researched and
powerfully argued, this volume will be the starting point for
future discussions of where human rights have been, why they look
like they do, and how to think about them down the road.
*Democracy Journal*
Moyn argues that the origins of human rights are not in the places
historians have traditionally looked--the French Revolution or
postwar idealism--but in more recent developments...In refocusing
our attention on the near history of human rights, The Last Utopia
asks new and fertile questions...As Moyn points out, human rights,
as never before, provide a framework for engaging with the lives of
others. The events we associate with this development--1789, 1948,
or the 1970s--influence our view of the present. Moyn has written
the perfect history of human rights for the post-Bush era.
*Dissent*
As Samuel Moyn reminds us in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in
History, it is really just a few decades since human rights became
the world's preferred vocabulary for talking about justice. In
dating the birth of human rights, as an ideology and a movement, to
the mid-1970s, Moyn is deliberately bucking a trend...Moyn argues
convincingly, however, these attempts to create a "usable past" for
human rights, well-intended though they are, actually distort the
truth. To understand the real strengths and limitations of the idea
of human rights, he argues, it is necessary to see it not as an
ancient tradition but as "the last utopia" which emerged "in an age
when other, previously more appealing utopias died."...The Last
Utopia will shed important light on the actual history of our new
global faith.
*Barnes and Noble Review*
[A] brilliantly illuminating book...Moyn's account of the utopian
origins of the contemporary human-rights movement is impressively
worked out and largely convincing...Human rights are not the last
utopia--just the one we must presently live with. The pursuit of
the impossible is too much a part of the modern Western tradition
ever to be truly renounced. The idea that utopianism will disappear
is itself a utopian dream. The most that can be hoped for is that
the piety which surrounds human rights will be tempered from time
to time with a little skeptical doubt. It is hard to think of a
better start than Moyn's seminal study
*National Interest*
[A] provocatively revisionist history.
*Foreign Affairs*
Moyn is a highly intelligent, markedly astute commentator. No
possible viewpoint eludes his vigilance. He gives the impression of
being suave in nature and comprehensive in awareness. This book, as
a result, is a bravura performance by a leading light in an
apparently crowded and busy field.
*Taipei Times*
There is a sense in which the conception of human rights that Moyn
documents in this important book is already obsolete. Many of the
worst human rights violations of recent years have not been
perpetrated by sovereign states. Instead, they are the work of
non-state actors: terrorists, militias, or simply criminal
gangs...Moyn's contribution is to prove that human rights are not a
fixed truth awaiting discovery, but rather an ideology subject to
periodic renovation. If the idea of human rights is to survive, it
must help us meet the challenges of our own time. Otherwise, it
will join other utopian ideologies as the relics of the twentieth
century.
*New Criterion*
Myth-busting.
*Times Higher Education*
[Moyn] argues elegantly and forcefully that the dominance of the
nation-state in rights thinking made it impossible for the creators
of the UN, the protagonists of the Cold War, and the participants
in decolonization to conceptualize a world built on individual
rights. This view emerged only in the 1970s, creating an entirely
new, morality-based utopianism that was unimaginable until
previously existing utopian notions no longer seemed plausible. The
book, a triumph of originality, scholarship, concision, and bold
conceptualization, has a superb bibliographical essay and will be
wonderful to teach. A genuinely thrilling account of the modern
history of human rights.
*Choice*
The Last Utopia supplies a detailed, subtle, and in many ways
convincing account of the human-rights "surge." Moyn's case for a
1970s turning-point is a strong one and occupies the best chapters
in the book.
*New Left Review*
Samuel Moyn's book is an erudite and impressive intellectual
history, portraying the core principle of contemporary human
rights--that individual rights transcend state sovereignty--as a
strikingly recent invention. Moyn shows that this moral conception
contradicts many of the ostensible roots from which conventional
accounts see human rights growing...Moyn's reassessment is
groundbreaking and insightful.
*American Historical Review*
Moyn's revisionist history is an argument for looking at the
concept of human rights as a fairly new phenomenon, dating to the
1970s. While discounting the idea's role in shaping society in
earlier centuries, he provides a great primer on the evolution of a
revolutionary idea.
*The Week*
Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia is a major contribution to the
history of twentieth-century human rights, but at the same time a
salutary inquiry into the tensions between the rights of citizens
as members of sovereign nation-states and the post-national or
extra-national rights claims of humans. Moyn has produced a rich,
fertile and challenging study of the modern history of
rights...Moyn has shown that the history of human rights was a
precarious, contingent, protracted and uneven development...If
natural rights died as a consequence of secularization, can human
rights decline with the erosion of Western liberalism and the
securitization of the modern state? With the rise and fall of
utopian dreams, academic opinions about the prospects of human
rights may differ--however, from now on taking rights seriously
means reading Moyn seriously.
*Contemporary Sociology*
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