The Last Utopia

For many historians involved in the exciting debates about how to write human rights history, Samuel Moyn's book is an anticipated publication. A professor of modern European intellectual history at Columbia University, Moyn has already secured a respected place in human-rights circles, partly through his timely reviews in The Nation and editorship of the new University of Pennsylvania journal, Humanity. In this book, he interweaves intellectual and literary histories with wide readings in European (and global) high politics to write a remarkably novel interpretation of the human-rights revolution in which history matters a great deal. There is urgency to his analysis because he is determined to write an accurate account of the complex, contingent, and unexpected ‘origins’ of human-rights thought. As he puts it on several occasions, ‘correctly identifying the historical origins of contemporary human rights aspirations is the only way to reckon with the profound dilemmas human rights continue to face as a utopian ideal and movement’ (p. 214). So wide-ranging and erudite are the arguments that historians—and scholars more widely—will undoubtedly need to confront, digest, and grapple with his interpretations, even if they, as I, do not fully subscribe to the limiting framework within which he develops his case

Environmental ethics · Face (sociological concept · Human rights · Humanity · Ideal (ethics · Intellectual history · Interpretation (philosophy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Utopia · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Human Rights and Development · Law · Philosophy

• Transnational militancy in Cold-War Europe

  Margarite Poulos•European Review of History Revue…•2016

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