Human Rights and the Uses of History

There is a struggle for the soul of the human rights movement, and it is being waged in large part through the proxy of genealogy ... Samuel Moyn ... is the most influential of the revisionists. -Philip Alston, Harvard Law Review Praise for The Last Utopia : 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 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 A triumph of originality, scholarship, concision ... A genuinely thrilling account of the modern history of human rights. -S.N. Katz, Choice A major contribution to the history of twentieth-century human rights ... From now on taking rights seriously means reading Moyn seriously. -Bryan S. Turner, Contemporary Sociology From the Hardcover edition.