Human Rights and the Uses of History: Expanded Second Edition

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

An intensely readable journey. -- Phillipe Sands * Financial TImes *
A penetrating, provocative look at philosophical and political phrases that pepper current political discourse, such as "human dignity" and "humanitarian intervention." * Publishers Weekly *
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) "The most important work on the history of human rights yet to have been written." -- Paul Kahn, Yale University
(Praise for The Last Utopia) "Moyn has written an interesting and thought-provoking book which will annoy all the right people." * Literary 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 *
(Praise for The Last Utopia) "A most welcome book, a clear-eyed account of the origins of 'human rights': the best we have." -- Tony Judt
(Praise for The Last Utopia) "A genuinely thrilling account of the modern history of human rights." -- S.N. Katz * Choice *
(Praise for The Last Utopia) "The perfect history of human rights for the post-Bush era." * Dissent *

Author Bio

SAMUEL MOYN is professor of law and history at Harvard University. He is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, and Christian Human Rights (2015), among other books, as well as editor of the journal Humanity. He also writes regularly for Foreign Affairs and The Nation.