the present. Moyn has written the perfect history of human rights for the post-Bush era. --Matt Moore ( Dissent 20110101) As Samuel Moyn reminds us in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History , it is really just a few decades since human rights became the world's preferred vocabulary for talking about justice. In dating the birth of human rights, as an ideology and a movement, to the mid-1970s, Moyn is deliberately bucking a trend...Moyn argues convincingly, however, these attempts to create a "usable past" for human rights, well-intended though they are, actually distort the truth. To understand the real strengths and limitations of the idea of human rights, he argues, it is necessary to see it not as an ancient tradition but as "the last utopia" which emerged "in an age when other, previously more appealing utopias died."... The Last Utopia will shed important light on the actual history of our new global faith. --Adam Kirsch ( Barnes and Noble Review 20100920) In his erudite new book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History , Samuel Moyn...argues that it was only in the 1970s, when other utopian ideologies--socialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-communism--fell by the wayside that human rights assumed its stature as the ultimate moral arbiter of international conduct. --Jordan Michael Smith ( Slate 20110103) [A] brilliantly illuminating book...Moyn's account of the utopian origins of the contemporary human-rights movement is impressively worked out and largely convincing...Human rights are not the last utopia--just the one we must presently live with. The