The Lives of Others

The Last Utopia:
Human Rights in History
by Samuel Moyn
Harvard University Press, 2010
344 pp., $27.95

HUMAN RIGHTS—the rights one holds simply because one is a human being—are a modern idea. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, shaped the contemporary consensus on human rights; but the Declaration drew on beliefs and practices that predated it: the ideas behind human rights did not simply appear, from nowhere, in 1948. Today, human rights occupy a privileged position in the language we use to make claims for equality and freedom, but, in 1948, rights took a backseat to the larger imperative of building a stable global order. Just when, and how, did human rights become the favored idiom used to demand a better world? How did the modern human rights movement develop? And when did the “responsibility to protect” citizens of other countries become, in fact, our responsibility?

These are important questions, and the appearance of several books in recent years suggests that historians have been hard at work to address them. In Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt, a distinguished historian of the French Revolution, examined cultural changes that allowed for the emergence of empathy—and, eventually, human rights—during the eighteenth century. Gary Bass, in Freedom’s Battle, recounted examples of early humanitarian interventions in the nineteenth century. And in A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights, Elizabeth Borgwardt identified the seeds of human rights in post-Second World War planning. These works have contributed to a still-developing narrative of how we arrived at the current awareness of human rights.

Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History is a critical reply to these books. 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. Historians need look no further than the 1970s, when international lawyers and nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International embraced them—and when human rights broke through to general public consciousness. The key to understanding the success of human rights in the 1970s is, for Moyn, disillusion with the radicalism of the 1960s and the collapse of socialism as an attractive politics. Discontent with communism meant that idealists in the 1970s (and after) needed a new political project. Human rights, “the god that did not fail,” stepped in. If other historians have focused on providing a deep history for rights, Moyn offers a vision of human rights circa 1977.

THE FIRST half of The Last Utopia focuses on why analyses that place the origins of human rights before the 1970s are wrong. Moyn begins with the notion that human rights began with Enlightenment universalism and democratic ...