The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.

AuthorBanerjee, Kiran
PositionBook review

Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2010).

In The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Samuel Moyn offers a compelling counter-history or genealogy of the genesis of human rights, one that upsets commonplace assumptions about this now ubiquitous concept. While many recent studies have offered careful reconstructions of the historical origins of human rights, The Last Utopiaboldly proclaims that the genesis of human rights is not to be be traced to the ancient doctrine of stoicism nor to the revolutionary fervour of 1789 or even to the articulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after World War II. (1) Rather, human rights as we understand them today emerged far more recently, only entering our broader conceptual vocabulary a generation ago.

To understand the central arguments of the book, we need to step back for a moment to look at its foundations, for at the core of The Last Utopiais an oft neglected methodological insight that bears repetition. At the bottom of Moyn's account is a Nietzschean refashioning of our historical sensibilities that emphasizes the role of contingency and accident as the catalysts for the emergence of concepts. This view of history as discontinuity, shared by thinkers as diverse as Michel Foucault and, apparently, Jorge Luis Borges, compels us to view human rights within a context of "warring tendencies and dead projects" (20) rather than of gods and demons and to give up the presumption that there was anything inevitable about the rise of human rights as our dominant utopian paradigm. The need for this approach lies in our all too frequent inclination to refashion history through our present, to construct past events into fitting precursors, contingent outcomes into necessities, and to indulge in mythologies of "deep roots" for our present ideals--habits replete in the contemporary historiography of human rights. Yet these habits have the troubling outcome of turning authentic history into the celebration and triumph of the present, while masking the fractures in, and limits of, our concepts. Thus, an important contribution of Moyn's work is to engage us in the project of critical history or genealogy and, in doing so, to bring forth a surprising counter-narrative for one of our most cherished ideals.

The findings of Moyn's study are striking. Not only do human rights have no true pre-twentieth-century precursors, but, as...

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