contingent was the birth of human rights and how fraught has been its passage from 1970s antipolitics to present-day political program. --David Armitage, author of The Declaration of Independence: A Global History Anyone who truly cares about human rights should confront this bracing account. --Jan-Werner Mller, Princeton University The triumph of The Last Utopia is that it restores historical nuance, skepticism and context to a concept that, in the past 30 years, has played a large role in world affairs. --Brendan Simms ( Wall Street Journal 20100908) The way the phrase human rights is bandied about it sounds like an age-old concept. In fact, it was coined in English in the 1940s. Samuel Moyn examines the myths of its historical roots; most explicitly, the conflation of human rights with the revolutionary French and American concepts of droits de l'homme . The latter implies "a politics of citizenship at home"; the former "a politics of suffering abroad." His book teases out the legal and moral implications of this difference, using country-specific and international examples, in a way that leaves little hiding space for the self-serving usages of foreign ministers, supranational institutions and pollyannaish charities. --Miriam Cosic ( The Australian 20101002) Moyn has written an interesting and thought-provoking book which will annoy all the right people. --Jonathan Sumption ( Literary Review 20101201) It is not hard to imagine how impatient Bentham would have been with the notion of "human rights" that has grown so prominent over the past few decades. Samuel Moyn's