![]() ![]() In Moyn’s view, the founding of the United Nations and the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1940s did not profoundly modify the agendas of the Western powers or establish a truly internationalised human rights regime. These involve the collapse of the legitimacy of earlier competing political utopias: revolutionary communism, anti-colonial nationalism and Christian socialism the moral shift of the West towards a universalism of human rights and the ideological loosening of the legalistic claim of nation-states to absolute sovereignty, previously, the foundational principle and framework of international law for centuries.’ He credits the transformative impact of events and contemporaneous forces in the late 1960s and 70s. Moyn’s thesis dismisses the conventional source attributions to Greek philosophy and monotheistic religion European natural law American and French republican revolutions the American anti-slavery civil war and the horror of the Holocaust. Human rights offers a moral universalism drawing upon the authority of international law and using the machinery of alliance with, and sanction against, the nation-states, the principal constituents in international law and of international institutions. The book traces the complex and contested history of human rights origins and argues that its rise to prominence in the 1970s is very recent and its approach as a modern commitment to the “cause of justice” is very novel, in each case, among utopian visions. This utopianism ‘evoke hope and provoke action’.” ![]() Samuel Moyn, a professor of History at Columbia University (New York), in the prologue, maintains that “The phrase implies an agenda for improving the world and bringing about a new one … It is a recognizable utopian program … that has not yet been called into being. ![]() What constitutes the content and the scope, however, becomes problematic, controversial and difficult to articulate, save some basic precepts or norms. The expression “human rights” conjures the highest moral values and political ideals to most people. Publisher: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2010) ![]()
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