What rawls hath wrought.

• Author: Gray, John
• Position: 'The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History' - Book review

Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), 352 pp., $27.95. people think of history in the long term, but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing." This observation from one of Philip Roth's novels applies with particular force to the contemporary cult of human rights. Most people today believe that the prominence of rights is the almost-inevitable conclusion of a long process of moral development. Originating in Greco-Roman philosophy and Judeo-Christian religion, so the story goes, the idea of human rights expressed a cosmopolitan vision of universal humanity, which went on to find expression in modern times in the English Civil War, the French and American Revolutions, various antislavery movements, the Second World War, and the struggles against colonialism and racism. The history of the West is a continuous unfolding of this majestic idea, and if contemporary Western societies are superior to others, past and present, it is because of their respect for personal liberties.

Cited at the beginning of The Last Utopia by Samuel Moyn, professor of history at Columbia University, Roth's observation encapsulates the central theme of Moyn's brilliantly illuminating book. For anyone who reached adulthood in the United States and other Western countries during the past ten or twenty years, human rights are an immemorial inheritance, only now properly developed, which provides the only possible framework for moral and political thought. Over the last few decades, Moyn writes:

a new field has crystallized and burgeoned. Almost unanimously, contemporary historians have adopted a celebratory attitude toward the emergence and progress of human rights, providing recent enthusiasms with uplifting backstories. According to this now-deeply-entrenched view, the journey toward our present state of virtue and enlightenment was a long but straight road:

In recasting world history as raw material for the progressive ascent of international human rights, [many contemporary historians] have rarely conceded that earlier history left open diverse paths into the future, rather than paving a single road toward current ways of thinking and acting. This was not just a way of reading (or misreading) history. The focus on human rights had large practical consequences. From Jimmy Carter onward, this tenet came to be invoked as "the guiding rationale of the foreign policy of states." Almost never used in English before the 1940s, "human rights" were mentioned in the New York Times five times as often in 1977 as in any prior year of the newspaper's history. By the nineties, human rights had become central to the thinking not only of liberals but also of neoconservatives, who urged military intervention and regime change in the faith that these freedoms would blossom once tyranny was toppled. From being almost peripheral, the human-rights agenda found itself at the heart of politics and international relations.

In fact, it has become entrenched in extremis: nowadays, anyone who is skeptical about human rights is angrily challenged to explain how they can condemn Nazism--as if the only options that exist in political thought are rights-based liberal universalism or out-and-out moral relativism. The fact that those who led the fight against Nazism understood the conflict in quite different terms, with Winston Churchill seeing it simply but not inaccurately as a life-and-death struggle between civilization and barbarism, is not considered relevant.

The contemporary human-rights movement is demonstrably not the product of a revulsion against the worst crimes of Nazism. For one thing, the Holocaust did not figure in the deliberations that led up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in 1948. As Moyn notes, "In real time, across weeks of debate around the Universal Declaration in the UN General Assembly, the genocide of the Jews went unmentioned in spite of the frequent invocation of other dimensions of Nazi barbarity." And Raphael Lemkin, the moving spirit in promoting the convention against genocide that was adopted a day before the Universal Declaration, was fully aware that at the time, genocide was by and large considered separate from (and perhaps less important than) human rights. Contrary to received history, the rise of human rights had very little to do with the worst crime against humanity ever committed.

Indeed, the primacy of this ideal is very recent. In the late 1970s, clearly a full thirty years after World War II, it all came about quite abruptly. And the ascendancy of rights as we now understand them came as a response, in part, to developments in the academy. As Moyn astutely notes, "In a tiny bibliography on rights composed by political theorists in 1978, next to no authors treated 'human rights' as such." My own experience confirms the accuracy of this observation. When I began teaching political philosophy in Britain in the early seventies, rights theory was only one among several traditions, and by no...