The Last Utopia

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that 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. This book elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage.

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

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