On the Last Utopia

This is a fascinating monograph. In it, the author argues that “human rights” did not exist until the 1970s. Surely there was the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 and discourse about “rights” (“natural” rights during the Enlightenment, but the “natural” was later dropped), but, in Moyn’s conception, these are not “Human Rights.” Instead, “human rights” did not emerge until the 1970s, and it emerged as a result of lost promises from socialism, social democracy, liberalism, anticolonial nationalism, and so on. To Moyn, the distinction that separates calls for rights or “humanitarianism” and “human rights” is that protection of human rights is a program that requires a people to transcend the state for support. Historically, rights have been protected by states (the Bill of Rights in the US constitution is one example of this), whereas human rights are to be safeguarded by the international community.

Moyn is well aware that there was a declaration of Human Rights by the UN in 1948 in response to the Holocaust, but Moyn argues that this fell on deaf ears. Moyn also discusses the relationship between “human rights” and national liberation (take Ho Chi Minh’s invocation of the American Declaration of Independence, for example), but he finds that these are not human rights because decolonization was not about individuals but about national communities.

Now, I must say that I don’t entirely agree with the author’s argument. For example, appeals were made to the Great Powers on behalf of Ottoman subjects in the nineteenth century (see: Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815-1914: The Emergence of a European Concept and International Practice). Because the British and French intervened, transcending the power of the Ottoman state, should Britain and France be considered states that safeguarded human rights? Frankly, I’m not sure. In any case, there’s a lot of good material here and it’s worth mulling it over.