The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History - Softcover

Moyn, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674064348 ISBN 13: 9780674064348

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s 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. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future.

For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront.

It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

“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.”―Brendan Simms, Wall Street Journal

“Administer[s] electroshock therapy to a field imprisoned by its own Whiggishness.”―Benjamin Nathans, 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.”―Jordan Michael Smith, 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.”―Patrick William Kelly, 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

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0674064348
• ISBN 13: 9780674064348
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352