The discourse of human rights has become hegemonic in recent decades and it is hardly surprising that a new field of scholarship has appeared, dedicated to exploring how this happened. The ‘history of human rights’ has now generated a vast literature, identifying pioneers and theorists, tracing influences and anatomizing legal practices. A central question here is to determine the relation between Enlightenment doctrines of the Rights of Man—or, indeed, earlier conceptions of human universalism, from the Stoics to the authors of the New Testament—and contemporary notions of human rights: continuity or rupture? A further problem is historical: how to explain the emergence and extraordinary predominance of human-rights discourse in the second half of the 20th century? Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia represents a trenchant intervention in these debates. Moyn stresses the very recent emergence of human-rights discourse, disputing attempts to root it in the early post-war world, let alone the 18th century. In his view, the contemporary historiography of human rights has been compromised by its ‘celebratory attitude’, a tendency to offer ‘uplifting back stories’ and to recast world history ‘as raw material for the progressive ascent of international human rights’. The quest for ancestors has resulted in a teleological approach such that any emancipatory movement in history is interpreted as an anticipation of, and step towards, the discourse of human rights, ‘much as church history famously treated Judaism as a proto-Christian movement simply confused about its true destiny’. For Moyn, the history of human rights has been loth to acknowledge that the discourse is ‘only one appealing ideology among others’.

The Last Utopia is particularly scathing about attempts to recruit the ‘Rights of Man’ proclaimed by American and French revolutionaries as precursors of human rights: the former were aimed at state construction, while the specifically modern discourse of ‘human rights’ is a critique of state repression—‘another conception altogether’. As Moyn puts it: ‘Of all the glaring confusions in the search for “precursors” of human rights, one must have pride of place. Far from being sources of appeal that transcended state and nation, the rights asserted in early-modern revolutions and championed thereafter were central to the construction of state and nation, and led nowhere beyond until very recently.’ It is anachronistic, he argues, to attribute modern notions of ‘human rights’ to anyone in the 18th century, even when we find the term—which is not that often. The more common expression was ‘rights of man’ or occasionally ‘rights of humanity’ (the latter notably occurs in the opening pages of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy). In the case of the American Declaration of Independence, for example, the claim is for the right to self-determination of a whole people and not for individual rights, except in so far as the latter arose in the context of founding a new state. (This helps to explain both how slaveholders could appeal to ‘unalienable rights’ and why there were such modest anti-slavery results—and such blatant disregard for the native peoples—from the leaders of the Independence struggle.)

Moyn also pours cold water on what might be called the Ignatieff School, which sees human rights as ‘an old ideal that finally came into its own as a response to the Holocaust’—‘the most universally repeated myth about their origins’. This is the view that has underwritten the ideological ascendancy of human rights since the 1990s:

It became commonplace to assume that, ever since their birth in a moment of post-Holocaust wisdom, human rights embedded themselves slowly but steadily in human consciousness in what amounted to a revolution of moral concern. In a euphoric mood, many people believed that secure moral guidance, born out of shock about the Holocaust and nearly incontestable in its premises, was on the verge of displacing interest and power as the foundation of international society.

Moyn shows, however, that though the 1948 un Declaration of Human Rights was undoubtedly an important document, it did not in itself enshrine the discourse as a hegemonic ideology: ‘In real history, human rights were peripheral to both wartime rhetoric and post-war reconstruction, not central to their outcome. Contrary to conventional assumptions, there was no widespread Holocaust consciousness in the post-war era, so human rights could not have been a response to it.’ Moyn argues that few directly cited the 1948 un Declaration in the subsequent couple of decades. Indeed the New York Times barely mentioned the term ‘human rights’. The un itself arose as a concert of great powers and a staunch defender of state sovereignty. The struggles of the anti-colonial and Third World liberation movements of the 1950s and 60s, he suggests, were for the ‘self-determination of peoples’ rather than for individual human rights, while the 68ers criticized the Soviet bloc in the name of a ‘better, purer’ communism. Campaigns for human rights were largely restricted to Christian efforts on behalf of co-religionists, especially in the Communist world—‘outmoded, wordy and hypocritical’.

The Last Utopia makes a strong case for seeing 1977 as the ‘breakthrough year’ for human rights discourse. Ideologically, the doctrine served as a replacement for ‘those whose God had failed’, whether that of socialism or of Third World liberation in the era of the crisis of indebted post-colonial states. The evidence here is largely French: André Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers and Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Barbarism with a Human Face both appeared in 1977. Organizationally, Amnesty International already offered a model of local chapters campaigning for individual victims of persecution by lighting candles and writing letters to governments to plead for their release. Amnesty’s founders came from a Christian humanitarian background and its first ‘prisoners of conscience’ were fellow-believers in the Communist bloc, but in the 1970s it began to take up the cases of torture victims in Latin America. It opened a Washington office in 1976 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. But for Moyn the crucial catalyst is Carter’s championing of human rights as the basis for a new, anti-détente us foreign policy in his 1977 Inaugural Address: ‘Our commitment to human rights must be absolute’. He demonstrates how the doctrine could unite both left and right wings of the Democratic Party, yoking Carter’s born-again moralism to a post-Watergate ethical renewal. Strategically, at the same time, it served to launch a new ideological offensive against the Soviet Union—internationally isolated by the success of the Nixon–Kissinger China policy—that presaged the start of what Fred Halliday would term the ‘Second Cold War’. Moyn argues that it was the discourse’s combined function as substitute utopia and superpower strategy that launched its hegemonic ascendancy.

It is the utopian element that Moyn appears to object to most: ‘In and through their emergence as the last utopia, after predecessors and rivals collapsed . . . human rights were forced to take on the grand political mission of providing a global framework for the achievement of freedom, identity and prosperity.’ Moyn is wary of the increasingly ambitious agenda of rights. He believes that: ‘Instead of turning to history to monumentalize human rights by rooting them deep in the past it is much better to acknowledge how recent and contingent they really are.’ These reflections lead to a suggestion that human rights have lost their way. Moyn believes that there may still be time to get back on the right track: ‘it may not be too late to wonder whether the concept of human rights, and the movement around it, should restrict themselves to offering minimal constraints on representative politics, not a new form of maximal politics of their own.’ A more restricted role for human-rights interventions—confined simply to preventing catastrophes, perhaps—would make room for ‘the contest of genuinely political visions for the future’.