Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia

...When it finally came, the Universal Declaration was "less the annunciation of a new age than a funeral wreath laid on the grave of wartime hopes...

...Responding to this knowledge was one of the imperatives of human rights...

...Mythbusting is only one half of The Last Utopia's mission...

...Early in The Last Utopia, he says, "I wrote this book out of intense interest in—even admiration for— the human rights movement...

...The Nuremberg trials and the Genocide Convention were statements for a world in which people would not be killed because of their group identity...

...Du Bois) agitated for a more prominent role for rights language...

...Did historians "set out to provide back-stories" for faddish politics...

...And when did the "responsibility to protect" citizens of other countries become, in fact, our responsibility...

...A clue appears in a 2007 review of Inventing Human Rights, published in the Nation, in which Moyn observes that, "the enterprise of writing the history of human rights has become a widespread activity only in the last decade...

...How did the modern human rights movement develop...

...Their promise was to move "from the politics of the state to the morality of the globe...

...This may be true to a point, but unless historians give up on endowing history with any meaning at all, they inevitably make arguments about how event X led to event Y. History writing is not about sublimely ignoring the temptation to make causal arguments...

...Plans for the United Nations drawn up at Dumbarton Oaks and ratified in the Treaty of San Francisco rested on the principles of state sovereignty and Great Power balance, not the enshrinement of human rights...

...At around the same time, dissidents in the Soviet Union developed a "legalist" approach that tried to hold the regime accountable by domestic legal standards and, eventually, international ones...

...But some of its members were also reimagining rights as inherent in the individual and applicable to vastly more people than had ever enjoyed them before...

...When the French National Assembly asserted the "natural and imprescriptible rights of man" in their declaration, they no doubt believed these rights would be protected by the nation-state...

...Locke and Burlamqui would never have seen rights as an argument to circumscribe sovereignty...

...Oxford political scientist H.G...

...Rather, human rights took shape gradually and responded to various imperatives—stopping torture (Amnesty International), monitoring rights in the Soviet Union (Helsinki Watch, later Human Rights Watch...

...Moyn begins with the notion that human rights began with Enlightenment universalism and democratic revolution in the eighteenth century...

...But do eighteenth-century arguments about rights really have nothing to do with modern human rights...

...If other historians have focused on providing a deep history for rights, Moyn offers a vision of human rights circa 1977...

...This description is problematic...

...Discontent with communism meant that idealists in the 1970s (and after) needed a new political project...

...To banish this connection is to lose something important in the history of human rights...

...Precisely because of the need to absorb the world's latent idealism, the human rights movement "was forced to draw up plans to remedy a crisis-ridden world...

...What are the still-unfolding effects of the decline of state socialism (and what about the possibility for other forms of socialism, of the democratic kind...

...The story of human rights after the war, then, is that they were parochial (adopted only by Maritain and his colleagues) and negligible (a footnote to the grand narrative of realpolitik...

...Human rights were trumped by power politics in the postwar order...

...But the twentieth century had, in a way unique in human history, revealed the capacity for cruelty and mass murder...

...The events we associate with this development—1789, 1948, or the 1970s— influence our view of the present...

...This is decisive because "the one implied a politics of citizenship at home, the other a politics of suffering abroad...

...He lives in San Francisco...

...French republicans and American revolutionaries did not envision the full set of beliefs today associated with human rights...

...In the event, the Universal Declaration was, of course, only declaratory...

...The Last Utopia next turns to the idea that human rights originated in the aftermath of the Second World War...

...Moyn is right to draw our attention to discontinuities in the history of rights...

...In dismissing the relevance of Lemkin and the Genocide Convention, Moyn seems to believe that the understanding of the historical actor is paramount...

...This tradition culminated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, the French National Assembly's statement of the principles to guide a new order during and after the French Revolution, which in Hunt's words, "transformed everybody's language virtually overnight...

...Should we really skip the forties on the way to the seventies when looking for the origins of human rights...

...But the vine withered as the fruit ripened...

...Human rights were not a direct, in the sense of "immediate," response to the Holocaust or other genocides...

...However, this ignores the ability of historians to look back and see the larger shape of historical movements forming in a way unavailable to people who lived at the time...

...Jimmy Carter's January 20, 1977, inaugural, in which he declared, "Our commitment to human rights must be absolute," confirmed the incorporation of human rights into mainstream Democratic politics...

...Moyn has provided his own set of precursors—a "backstory" for the decon-struction of human rights as ideology...

...According to Moyn, the project of human rights was born when other plans for how to realize a better world, notably socialism, died...

...But it was also a statement of underlying changes in beliefs about human rights...

...Historians need look no further than the 1970s, when international lawyers and nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International embraced them—and when human rights broke through to general public consciousness...

...By the end of the year, in the unusual step of making the award to an organization, the Nobel Committee chose Amnesty International to receive its Peace Prize...

...Soon, Eleanor Roosevelt was spearheading the campaign to recognize the Universal Declaration...

...So, what story is The Last Utopia telling...

...The key to understanding the success of human rights in the 1970s is, for Moyn, disillusion with the radicalism of the 1960s and the collapse of socialism as an attractive politics...

...Gary Bass, in Freedom's Battle, recounted examples of early humanitarian interventions in the nineteenth century...

...In refocusing our attention on the near history of human rights, The Last Utopia asks new and fertile questions...

...The sad fact is that historiography has not caught up with history, and even the professionals—especially the professionals—are still providing the prologue to Clinton-era idealism...

...Rights were a "hardy, minimalist utopia," able to survive when the Left's romance with socialism had collapsed...

...A posture of suspicion toward human rights is now considered a sign of sophistication—on the Left and the Right...

...They championed the notions that rights originate in the inherent dignity of the individual and that people are entitled to legal protection because of these rights...

...The state was the "space of inclusive citizenship" within which claims for rights could be made and defended...

...What mattered most for the emergence of human rights, Moyn writes, "was the collapse of prior universalistic schemes, and the construction of human rights as a persuasive alternative to them...

...Perhaps another plausible way to describe the same phenomenon is that historians wrote history books—in this case histories of human rights, a topical subject...

...Most important, human rights activism succeeded in giving meaning to lives of political commitment...

...And in A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights, Elizabeth Borgwardt identified the seeds of human rights in post-Second World War planning...

...Human rights, although sidelined, were embraced by a cohort of Christian personalists and conservative Europeans such as the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who gave an anticommunist cast to human rights in the postwar period...

...International lawyers such as Hersch Lauterpacht worked to advance human rights but, Moyn contends, his work was marginal...

...The repression of dissent, most visible in the Prague Spring, made reform communism less and less palatable...

...In Europe, the "New Philosophers," led by Andre Glucksmann and Bernard Henri-Levy, railed against totalitarianism and the dogmas of the Western Left...

...Above all, Amnesty International pioneered a mode of advocacy that bypassed the state and worked on, in the words of Columbia University philosopher Arthur Danto, "saving the world one individual at a time" (Amnesty's Riverside chapter held its early meetings in Danto's living room...

...For Moyn, "the central event in human rights history is the recasting of rights as entitlements that might contradict the sovereign nation-state from above and outside rather than serve as its foundation...

...Natural-rights theorists would not have recognized all of the facets of human rights today, but ideas build on other ideas, and their arguments set the stage for the French declaration's recognition that "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights...

...Hunt and others have traced human rights to a new culture of empathy there, which converged with the ideas of early legal theorists such as Jean-Jacques Burlamqui and exponents of natural rights, such as John Locke...

...The debt owed by modern human rights to this thought is displayed in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which begins by referencing "the inherent dignity and...the equal and inalienable rights" of all human beings...

...A conference celebrating the Universal Declaration's twentieth anniversary crystallized this frustration...

...Human rights, "the god that did not fail," stepped in...

...appropriated by disparate causes...

...In Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt, a distinguished historian of the French Revolution, examined cultural changes that allowed for the emergence of empathy—and, eventually, human rights— during the eighteenth century...

...Just when, and how, did human rights become the favored idiom used to demand a better world...

...Daniel Patrick Moynihan embraced rights...

...The Last Utopia leaves the human rights movement on an uncertain note: infected by mission creep...

...Whereas human rights advocates today envision a world in which human rights, in some cases, supersede state sovereignty, Moyn argues that eighteenth-century writers viewed the state as inseparable from the concept of rights...

...Violent reprisals against left-wing movements in Latin America reinforced the sense that "maximal" visions of social transformation were unworkable...

...Memory of the Nazi crimes was absent as a motivating force in the history of human rights, he argues, until the 1990s, when outrage over ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia propelled the identification of genocide prevention with human rights...

...and, most of all, subject to a mistaken understanding of its own roots...

...Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson used rights talk to agitate on behalf of the Jewish population of the Soviet Union...

...This also means that histories that portray eighteenth-century rights as identical to today's human rights oversimplify a complicated story...

...As Moyn points out, human rights, as never before, provide a framework for engaging with the lives of others...

...The negative slant is, of course, due to the association with "Clinton-era idealism"—what Moyn views as the flawed thinking of liberal internationalism...

...Moyn writes, "History...is not about tracing antecedents...

...Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History is a critical reply to these books...

...Lemkin may not have used the language of human rights or understood his work to be related to the Universal Declaration, but historians, who can see the link between what once seemed to be disparate trends, can tease it out...

...The effort to define norms, such as the "responsibility to protect," that supersede the nation-state is something new, and should be reckoned with as such...

...Moyn, of course, does not try to do this—historians cannot do away with the need to tell a story...

...The first half of The Last Utopia focuses on why analyses that place the origins of human rights before the 1970s are wrong...

...Held in Tehran, it became a forum for denunciations of imperialism and Israel, and activists despaired of the UN's ability to act as a human rights body...

...These works have contributed to a still-developing narrative of how we arrived at the current awareness of human rights...

...The postwar moment has been a popular time to locate the roots of human rights for obvious reasons: it was then that a new architecture for multilateralism took shape around the United Nations, and when the Nuremberg trials enshrined the principle that individuals could be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity...

...Today, human rights occupy a privileged position in the language we use to make claims for equality and freedom, but, in 1948, rights took a backseat to the larger imperative of building a stable global order...

...The Last Utopia, instead of seeing these events as moves toward a nascent human rights movement, only views as significant their enfeeblement by more powerful political considerations...

...The postwar moment belonged to the realists...

...These are important questions, and the appearance of several books in recent years suggests that historians have been hard at work to address them...

...The minimalist promise of human rights, Moyn argues, was short-lived...

...similarly it is geared to appeal to the young searching for an ideal...

...but the Declaration drew on beliefs and practices that predated it: the ideas behind human rights did not simply appear, from nowhere, in 1948...

...Dissidents such as George Konrad proclaimed the virtues of "antipolitics," while Vaclav Havel made the case to "oppose morality to a politics that had failed...

...The Helsinki Accords of 1975, a security agreement between the superpowers, had, as a byproduct of minor provisions intended to solidify a way for families to communicate across the Iron Curtain, institutionalized a means to make human rights claims (Henry Kissinger famously remarked of the human rights provisions that they could be written "in Swahili for all I care...

...Moyn is clear that he views his book as an antidote to the pernicious tendency of historians to impose false meaning on past events in the misguided attempt to ratify the present status of human rights...

...The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, shaped the contemporary consensus on human rights...

...Not least, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights created a common standard of achievement around rights...

...He continues, The current wave of human rights history is the tardy fruit of the fashion of human rights in politics, and contributors to the genre clearly set out to provide backstories to the vogue of human rights just a few years ago, when they exercised a literally millennial appeal...

...The criticism of historians who distort the past to suit the present— what has been called "the Whig interpretation of history"—is a venerable tradition, and with good reason...

...The Left saw in human rights the salvation of pragmatism and, Moyn argues, what was at first a strategic choice became a governing philosophy...

...Moyn unearths a fascinating quote from Amnesty founder Peter Beneson, who wrote in 1961 that his organization's goal was to find a common base upon which the idealists of the world can co-operate...

...But a contrary observation is almost as venerable...

...The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is linked to such projects in its defense of the inherent dignity of the human individual, and its desire to respond to "barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind...

...But a real movement to advance human rights ideals did exist...

...If books like Inventing Human Rights were a late prologue to the early 1990s, Moyn is up-to-the-minute with the Zeitgeist: post-Bush-era pessimism...

...What does it mean that social hope today is expressed most often in the pragmatic and legalist language of human rights...

...The mood of the 1970s imprinted human rights with an antitotalitarian, pragmatic, yet idealistic style...

...Since 1948, advocates have been frustrated by the state-bound machinery of the United Nations...

...Genocide activists, democracy promoters, campaigners for economic equality, and others all learned to speak the language as human rights moved from "antipolitics to program...

...The breakthrough year for human rights was 1977...

...Matt Moore is a recent graduate of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs...

...Finally, how do we measure the good—and the bad— that results from the involvement of transnational activists in other societies...

...The Democratic Party rediscovered human rights in an effort to define a new approach to foreign policy...

...Rights advocates and organizations shifted their focus away from the UN...

...Herbert Butterfield, who literally wrote the book (The Whig Interpretation of History—published in 1965), cautioned that "it cannot be said that all faults of bias may be balanced by work that is deliberately written with the opposite bias...

...Moyn argues that the origins of human rights are not in the places historians have traditionally looked—the French Revolution or postwar idealism—but in more recent developments...

...But emphasizing these events, Moyn argues, exaggerates the actual importance of human rights at the time...

...It is designed in particular to absorb the latent enthusiasm of such idealists who have, since the eclipse of Socialism, become increasingly frustrated...

...Egerton Richardson, the Jamaican ambassador to the UN, said of the Tehran conference, "Tehran was our moment of truth, when we came face to face with the nature of our beast—when we saw what it means to be promoting the cause of Human Rights by working mainly through governments...

...The attraction to Amnesty International, Moyn writes, "depended on leaving behind political utopias and turning to smaller and more manageable acts...

...BOOKS The Lives of Others MATT MOORE The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History by Samuel Moyn Harvard University Press, 2010 344 pp., $27.95 Human rights—the rights one holds simply because one is a human being—are a modern idea...

...Campaigners for the 1948 Genocide Convention such as Raphael Lemkin are minimally important for the history of human rights because they saw their project as separate from "human rights" and the drafting of the Universal Declaration...

...State sovereignty overshadowed human rights in the UN Charter, but nongovernmental organizations such as the International League of the Rights of Man and the American Jewish Committee and individuals (notably W.E.B...

...It also promises to explain why human rights finally did emerge, and Moyn's insight into the play between the need for social hope and human rights adds an original and constructive dimension to the study of rights...

...Moyn has written the perfect history of human rights for the post-Bush era, but it is not the only possible one...

...Nicholas echoed this in the 1970s, when he lamented "the inherent absurdity of an organization of governments dedicating itself to protect human rights when, in all ages and climes, it is governments which have been their principal violators...

...This is the work of a time in which one declares admiration for the human rights movement in a digression, because its author does not assume that others share such admiration...

...Moyn is also hostile to what he calls "the most universally repeated myth" about the origins of human rights: that they were a "direct response" to the Holocaust...

...Moyn regards the effort to link early modern democrats to contemporary human rights as misleading...