Week 20110923) Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia is a major contribution to the history of twentieth-century human rights, but at the same time a salutary inquiry into the tensions between the rights of citizens as members of sovereign nation-states and the post-national or extra-national rights claims of humans. Moyn has produced a rich, fertile and challenging study of the modern history of rights...Moyn has shown that the history of human rights was a precarious, contingent, protracted and uneven development...If natural rights died as a consequence of secularization, can human rights decline with the erosion of Western liberalism and the securitization of the modern state? With the rise and fall of utopian dreams, academic opinions about the prospects of human rights may differ--however, from now on taking rights seriously means reading Moyn seriously. --Bryan S. Turner ( Contemporary Sociology 20110901) Samuel Moyn's book is bold in its theory, and accessible in its logical reasoning. Moyn breaks down the view of Human Rights History as a long steady building to the current movement. Instead he recognizes the significant and recent leaps of thinkers in the 70's. In looking at this recent history he brings important questions about the relevance and nature of the Human Rights Movement today. I recommend this to anyone who cares about the Human Rights Movement and is willing to think critically about it. Great read. 11 of 14 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars The recency and contingency of individualist notions of human