rights Dec 21 2010 By Nils Gilman - Published on Amazon.com Format: Hardcover It is rare one has the pleasure to read a book which both has a sharp, iconoclastic thesis, and in which the author is obviously working out, right before you, his own moral ambivalences about the subject he is writing about. The Last Utopia is just such a book. Moyn's argument is simple: that the idea of individual "human rights," far from being an ancient tradition harkening back to the French Revolution, or even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is a phenomenon of much more recent vintage, specifically of the mid-1970s, and that the reason it arose when it did was that it filled a void left by the collapse of alternative, collective notions of human emancipation (e.g. socialism). (This chart graphically illustrates the point Moyn makes in qualitative detail: [...] Human rights, in other words, was a specifically anti-political reaction to the failures of other, more political Gods. But at the same time, it is precisely its anti-politics that has limited human rights' effectiveness and scope. On the one hand, human rights advocates have been fundamentally ambivalent about how to incorporate social and economic exclusions that undermine the meaningfulness of political rights; on the other hand, the language of human rights has revealed itself as all too readily hijackable by rights-negating militarists like George W. Bush. In the end, Moyn points out that this "last utopia," while noble in conception, is also limited in