Whose Utopia?: Human Rights, Development, and the Third World

In this provocative and stimulating book, Samuel Moyn boldly states that his intention is to provide a “true history of human rights” in order to “confront their prospects today and in the future.”¹ Moyn’s basic argument is that international human rights is a relatively new invention. Whereas other histories have insisted on seeing human rights as a manifestation and refinement of a set of ideas that could be traced back to natural law and the French and American Revolutions, Moyn insists that it was not until 1977, when Jimmy Carter embraced human rights, making it an integral part of US foreign policy, that international human rights law emerged in its distinctive modern form (lu, 155). In pursuit of this project, Moyn outlines a non-teleological reading of human rights that focuses on the “real conditions for historical developments” that led to the emergence of modern human rights law (lu, 12). He explores how human rights became the central language of moral authority for the expression of international idealism and the management of world affairs. He seeks to distinguish between human rights and other “distinctive globalisms and internationalisms” (lu, 14). Further, and most interestingly for me, Moyn argues that this modern version of human rights emerged in the context of what he asserts was a “crisis of utopianism” (lu, 9).²

On reflection, Moyn’s work powerfully elaborates upon and explores an intuition that I suspect many human rights scholars and activists have shared but rarely pursued: the intuition that the distinctiveness of contemporary human rights lies in the prominence it now enjoys in international relations and international law and, more broadly, in theorizing about the character of international justice. It is telling that virtually every major initiative in recent times has in some way or another claimed an affiliation with the language of human rights. Entities such as the International Labor Organization and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees have a long history of promoting human rights, but in more recent times, even unlikely entities that once sought to distance themselves from any connection with human rights have now claimed to promote them, as is the case with the World Bank.³ Environmental issues, labor issues, and economic issues are presented in terms of rights or, otherwise, at least asked to justify themselves in terms of their impact on rights. A large amount of literature deals with the issue, for instance, of whether the World Trade Organization violates human rights. But this in itself suggests that human rights is central to any global initiative, whether as legitimation or justification, on the one hand, or else resistance, on the other. The tendency in recent times is to present every sort of claim in the language of rights—we now have first-generation rights, second-generation rights, and third-generation rights (among the latter is the “right to peace”). As Professor Louis Henkin, who features prominently in this book, asserts, “Ours is the age of rights. Human rights is the idea of our time, the only political-moral idea that has won universal acceptance.”⁴ Moyn’s work can be read as an attempt to understand how the situation that his distinguished predecessor at Columbia outlined came to be.

In this attempt, it seems to me, Moyn makes at least two important arguments: the first has to do with the emergence of a distinctive model of human rights, and the second is a broad claim that this distinctive model emerged as a result of the exhaustion of all alternative concepts of utopia, hence the title, The Last Utopia. One of the most striking features of Moyn’s argument is its skillful presentation of a history of human rights that persuasively challenges conventional narratives and relationships—for instance, the orthodoxy that the campaign against genocide was an integral aspect of the human rights movement. My interest, then, lies in outlining the particular character of Moyn’s approach, the paradigm he uses to present a fresh vision of the history of human rights. For these purposes I will contrast his historical approach with...