Book Talk: The Last Utopia

Meet Visiting Professor Samuel Moyn and listen to a discussion of his most recent book The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, with commentary by Yale Law Professor John Fabian Witt .

For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront.  It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence.