What are the origins of human rights? This question, rarely asked before the end of the Cold War, has in recent years become a major focus of historical and ideological strife. In this sequence of reflective and critical studies, Samuel Moyn engages with some of the leading interpreters of human rights, thinkers who have been creating a field from scratch without due reflection on the local and temporal contexts of the stories they are telling.
Having staked out his owns claims about the postwar origins of human rights discourse in his acclaimed
Last Utopia, Moyn, in this volume, takes issue with rival conceptions – including, especially, those that underlie justifications of humanitarian intervention.
Despre autor
Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, and Christian Human Rights (2015), among other books, as well as editor of the journal Humanity. He also writes regularly for Foreign Affairs and The Nation.