TY  - BOOK
AU  - Moyn,Samuel
TI  - Last utopia : human rights in history: human rights in history 
SN  - 9780674048720 
AV  - JC571 .M88 
U1  - 323.09 22
PY  - 2010///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
KW  - Human rights
KW  - History
KW  - Moral aspects
N1  - Includes bibliographical references (p. [311]-321) and index; Humanity before human rights -- Death from birth -- Why anticolonialism wasn't a human rights movement -- The purity of this struggle -- International law and human rights -- Epilogue: The burden of morality
N2  - Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today's idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. Here, historian Samuel Moyn elevates that transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal's troubled present and uncertain future. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.--Publisher information
ER  -