Scholars of history, law, theology and anthropology critically revisit the history of human rights.

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. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. 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. 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.

Ishay recounts the struggle for human rights across the ages, from the Mesopotamian Codes of Hammurabi to the era of globalization. She illustrates how the history of human rights has evolved from one era to the next through texts, cultural traditions, & creative expression.

There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this book, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous - few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as this author shows, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.

This volume explores the place of human rights in history, providing an alternative framework for understanding the political and legal dilemmas that these conflicts presented, with case studies focusing on the 1940s through the present.

A noted legal scholar examines the source of human rights, arguing that rights are the result of particular experiences with injustice and looking at the implications in terms of the right to privacy, voting rights, and other rights.

This book focuses on one of the most significant issues of our time-international human rights. Using the theme of visions seen by those who dreamed of what might be, The Author explores the dramatic transformation of a world patterned by centuries of traditional structures of Authority, gender abuse, racial prejudice, class divisions and slavery, colonial empires, and claims of national sovereignty into a global community that now boldly proclaims that the way governments treat their own people is a matter of international concern -- and sets the goal of human rights for all peoples and all nations.