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.
