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The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

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Of potential interest to any readers with an interest in political theory or intellectual history: The Association for Political Theory has created a blog for the purposes of a virtual reading group on Samuel Moyn’s 2010 book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.  My copy of the book just arrived yesterday, so I’m only getting started. Moyn’s project is primarily an intellectual and social history of human rights. What appears to be his central controversial claim is that “human rights” as we know it today is essentially a new movement, born in the 1970’s. (This diverges sharply from what has become the standard story, which finds more concrete connections between contemporary human rights today and various historical antecedents). For more on the book, here’s a review link-farm. In a few weeks I’ll be providing a couple of posts on chapter 3, “Why Anticolonialism Wasn’t a Human Rights Movement”.

Update: Ari Kohen makes the case that Moyn understates the significance of the 40’s. He also links to this 2010 Nation piece in which Moyn lays out what appear to be some of the central arguments of the book.

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