Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

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. (20100920)

What are the origins of human rights? This question, rarely asked before the end of the Cold War,
has in recent years become a major focus of historical and ideological strife. In this sequence of
reflective and critical studies, Samuel Moyn engages with some of the leading interpreters of human
rights, thinkers who have been creating a field from scratch without due reflection on the local and
temporal contexts of the stories they are telling.

Having staked out his owns claims about the postwar origins of human rights discourse in his
acclaimed Last Utopia, Moyn, in this volume, takes issue with rival conceptions—including,
especially, those that underlie justifications of humanitarian intervention

Where do ideas fit into historical accounts that take an expansive, global view of human movements
and events? Teaching scholars of intellectual history to incorporate transnational perspectives into
their work, while also recommending how to confront the challenges and controversies that may
arise, this original resource explains the concepts, concerns, practice, and promise of "global
intellectual history," featuring essays by leading scholars on various approaches that are taking shape
across the discipline.

The contributors to Global Intellectual History explore the different ways in which one can think
about the production, dissemination, and circulation of "global" ideas and ask whether global
intellectual history can indeed produce legitimate narratives. They discuss how intellectuals and
ideas fit within current conceptions of global frames and processes of globalization and proto-
globalization, and they distinguish between ideas of the global and those of the transnational,
identifying what each contributes to intellectual history. A crucial guide, this collection sets
conceptual coordinates for readers eager to map an emerging area of study.

Modern European intellectual history is thriving as never before. It has recovered from an era in
which other trends like social and cultural history threatened to marginalize it. But in spite of
enjoying a contemporary renaissance, the field has lost touch with the tradition of debating why and
how to study ideas and thus lacks both a well-articulated set of purposes and a range of arguments
for exactly what it means to pursue those purposes. This volume revives that tradition.

Recalling past attempts to showcase the diversity and differentiation of modern European
intellectual history, this volume also documents how much has changed in recent decades. Some
authors are much readier to defend a history of ideas practiced over the long term - once the defining
sin of the field. Others go so far as to insist on how ideas are always open to reappropriation and
reevaluation beyond their original contexts - suggesting that it is an error to reduce the ideas to those
contexts. Others still argue that, under threat from trends like social history, intellectual historians
have forsaken any attempt to resolve for themselves how ideas are socially embodied.

The volume also registers old and new trends in history that have affected the study of ideas,
including the history of science, the history of academic disciplines, the history of psychology and
"self," international and global history, and women's and gender history.

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the human rights movement achieved unprecedented global
prominence. Amnesty International attained striking visibility with its Campaign Against Torture;
Soviet dissidents attracted a worldwide audience for their heroism in facing down a totalitarian state;
 the Helsinki Accords were signed, incorporating a "third basket" of human rights principles; and the
Carter administration formally gave the United States a human rights policy.

The Breakthrough is the first collection to examine this decisive era as a whole, tracing key
developments in both Western and non-Western engagement with human rights and placing new
emphasis on the role of human rights in the international history of the past century. Bringing
together original essays from some of the field's leading scholars, this volume not only explores the
transnational histories of international and nongovernmental human rights organizations but also
analyzes the complex interplay between gender, sociology, and ideology in the making of human
rights politics at the local level. Detailed case studies illuminate how a number of local movements—
from the 1975 World Congress of Women in East Berlin, to antiapartheid activism in Britain, to
protests in Latin America—affected international human rights discourse in the era as well as the
ways these moments continue to influence current understanding of human rights history and
advocacy. The global south—an area not usually treated as a scene of human rights politics—is also
spotlighted in groundbreaking chapters on Biafran, South American, and Indonesian developments.
In recovering the remarkable presence of global human rights talk and practice in the 1970s, The
Breakthrough brings this pivotal decade to the forefront of contemporary scholarly debate.

Contributors: Carl J. Bon Tempo, Gunter Dehnert, Celia Donert, Lasse Heerten, Patrick William
Kelly, Benjamin Nathans, Ned Richardson-Little, Daniel Sargent, Brad Simpson, Lynsay Skiba,
Simon Stevens.

Table of contents :
Content: The return of the prodigal: the 1970s as a turning point in human rights history / Samuel
Moyn --
The dystopia of postcolonial catastrophe: self-determination, the Biafran war of secession, and the
1970s human rights moment / Lasse Heerten --
The disenchantment of socialism: Soviet dissidents, human rights, and the new global morality /
Benjamin Nathans --
Dictatorship and dissent: human rights in East Germany in the 1970s / Ned Richardson-Little --
Whose utopia? Gender, ideology, and human rights at the 1975 World Congress of Women in East
Berlin / Celia Donert --
"Magic words": the advent of transnational human rights activism in Latin America's Southern Cone
in the long 1970s / Patrick William Kelly --
Shifting sites of Argentine advocacy and the shape of 1970s human rights debates / Lynsay Skiba --
Oasis in the desert? America's human rights rediscovery / Daniel Sargent --
Human rights and the U.S. Republican Party in the late 1970s / Carl J. Bon Tempo --
The Polish opposition, the crisis of the Gierek era, and the Helsinki Process / Gunter Dehnert --
"Human rights Are Like Coca-Cola": contested human rights discourses in Suharto's Indonesia,
1968-1980 / Brad Simpson --
Why South Africa? The politics of anti-apartheid activism in Britain in the long 1970s / Simon
Stevens --
The rebirth of politics from the spirit of morality: explaining the human rights revolution of the
1970s / Jan Eckel.

Error Report
Five leading thinkers on the concept of ‘rights’ in an era of rightlessness

Sixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, an exiled Jew deprived of her German
citizenship, observed that before people can enjoy any of the “inalienable” Rights of Man—before
there can be any specific rights to education, work, voting, and so on—there must first be such a
thing as “the right to have rights.” The concept received little attention at the time, but in our age of
mass deportations, Muslim bans, refugee crises, and extra-state war, the phrase has become the
center of a crucial and lively debate. Here five leading thinkers from varied disciplines—including
history, law, politics, and literary studies—discuss the critical basis of rights and the meaning of
radical democratic politics today.

“Hannah Arendt has captured the contemporary imagination by so often refusing orthodoxy, and
also defying the rules and strictures of political theory. The Right to Have Rights continues these
traditions, taking up one of her most disruptive ideas—‘the right to have rights’—and assigning a
different author to unpack each of its constituent elements. The result is a marvelous deconstruction
of a vexing concept, and a wonderful new way of doing theory. At once idiosyncratic and informative,
personal and impersonal, The Right to Have Rights has a gravitational pull that is nearly as
irresistible as the work of Arendt herself.” —Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind:
Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump

“‘The right to have rights’ is evoked so frequently that it has become a cliché. This important
collection restores to Arendt’s idea its critical dimension: rights alone are an insufficient basis for
democracy; rights alone provide no bulwark against forced migration, expropriation, and war. At a
time when global capitalism simultaneously recognizes and disavows all manner of rights, these
diverse and compelling essays clarify the stake of resistance.” —Jodi Dean, author of Crowds and
Party

“Five strikingly original thinkers return to Hannah Arendt’s account of the vulnerability of human
beings denied membership in a polity. What can it mean to speak of a ‘right to have rights’ when
citizenship is denied to some, eroded or undercut for others and, for still others, perverted into
nationalism? These essays underscore the urgency of getting the questions right.” —Jedediah Purdy,
author of After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene

Stephanie DeGooyer is assistant professor in the Department of English at Willamette University.

Alastair Hunt is associate professor in the Department of English at Portland State University.

Lida Maxwell is Associate Professor of Political Science & Women & Gender Studies at Trinity
College.

Samuel Moyn is professor of law and history at Yale University.

Astra Taylor is a writer, documentary filmmaker and activist.