General Information

Author/Creator

Moyn, Samuel.

Language

English.

Published

Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.

Physical Description

337 p. ; 22 cm.

Contents/Summary

Summary

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today's idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. Here, historian Samuel Moyn elevates that transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal's troubled present and uncertain future. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.--From publisher description.

Subjects

Subject

Human rights > History.

Bibliographic Information

Responsibility

Samuel Moyn.

Content

Humanity before human rights -- Death from birth -- Why anticolonialism wasn't a human rights movement -- The purity of this struggle -- International law and human rights -- The burden of morality -- "Human rights" in Anglo-American news -- Human rights in the 1940s -- Human rights between 1968-1978.

ISBN

9780674048720

0674048725

Holdings

Item Type	Current Location	Collection	Call Number	Volume Info	Shelving Location	Public Note
Book	OSA Archivum Library	Reference collection	323.09 MOY		Reference	-

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