Moving beyond False Binarisms: On Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia

Rarely in intellectual history has a concept fired the imagination of scholars across disciplines as divergent as law, philosophy, history, and cultural studies during the same period of time. But this is exactly what has happened with the concept of “human rights” in the last two decades. While it may be plausibly argued that the law could hardly ignore the concept—since it is a cornerstone of the modern system of the rule of law—it is nonetheless surprising that in political science and political theory, interest in human rights had waned radically after the late 1960s and was not revived until quite recently. Under the triple attacks of Marxism, some variants of feminism, and the charge of ethnocentrism levied by postcolonial theory, human rights had largely disappeared from view. Even John Rawls’s monumental work A Theory of Justice (1971) did not lead to a revival of this concept. Throughout the 1970s, Ronald Dworkin’s contributions remained nearly alone in urging all “to take rights seriously.”¹ This has changed radically.²

Along with that phenomenon referred to as “globalization,” the impact and influence of the international human rights regime has grown. By a “human rights regime,” I understand the collection of public treaties, covenants, and documents, as well as the institutions and organizations that are entrusted to measure, evaluate, and judge compliance with them, and also, norms of international customary law, such as jus cogens norms that bind even in the absence of formal treaties. Against the background of the rise of the international human rights regime, James Griffin’s On Human Rights and Charles Beitz’s The Idea of Human Rights are the most prominent philosophical works of the last decade discussing human rights.³

In contrast to philosophical accounts, the historiography of international human rights is distinguished through the more colorful dramatis personae introduced into the discussion by historians. Each historian has his or her heroes and heroines in telling the tale of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (udhr) and international human rights. For Mary Ann Glendon, this is Eleanor Roosevelt; for Samantha Powers it is Raphael Lemkin; for Jay Winter it is the French jurist René Cassin; for Marx Mazower it is the South African prime minister Jan Smuts, whose efforts ironically resulted in the condemnation of his own country by the un General Assembly for its treatment of “colored peoples.”⁴ As its hero, Johannes Morsink’s extremely instructive and philosophical reconstruction of the debates leading to the udhr has the Canadian jurist John Peters Humphrey.⁵

Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History is both an account of historical and political developments leading to the current prominence of human rights and, at the same time, a forceful and often polemical intervention into the expanding literature on the historiography and philosophy of human rights. Moyn casts a critical and jaundiced eye upon the increasing global influence of the politics of human rights.

I am not convinced. Indeed, Moyn’s historiography is impressive; however, the political theory implicit in his book is never articulated clearly. I find problematic and false the philosophical binarisms Moyn sets up between morality and politics, human rights and citizens’ rights, and human rights and democratic sovereignty. Some of these binarisms derive from Moyn’s desire to deconstruct, in the nontechnical sense of taking apart the elements of, a certain teleological way of writing the history of human rights, extending from the Stoic’s conception of the law of nature to the udhr. But some of his binarisms rest on his own unexamined normative assumptions.

Moyn’s Narrative Methodology

Joining the historian Marc Bloch in criticizing the “idol of origins” (we can also think of Walter Benjamin’s critique of certain forms of historical writing), Moyn refuses to see history as the tracing of antecedents or as the unfolding of a unified narrative out of a common source or origin.⁶ Human rights, he argues, are something new that has transformed old political currents beyond recognition (lu, 42). And the “true key to the broken history of...