Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Harvard University. His work delves into the history and future of human rights, exploring their origins, evolution, and contemporary challenges. Moyn analyzes how the concept of human rights became the dominant ideal of the 20th century, while critically assessing its limitations and possibilities. His writing offers a profound insight into one of the most fundamental political and moral ideas of our time.
"Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was among the most accomplished Jewish philosophers of modern times. This newly translated collection of his writings illuminates his achievements for student readers and rectifies lapses in his intellectual reception by prior generations"--
How the case to abolish conflict failed and heralded the era of 'forever wars'.
Exploring the evolution of Emmanuel Levinas's thought, the book delves into the insights of influential philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. It highlights how the concept of "the other" gained ethical significance during the Cold War, particularly in discussions around morality and politics. The epilogue connects Levinas's work to contemporary philosophical debates in Europe and America, examining the complex interplay between philosophy and religion in today's society.
In Christian Human Rights, Samuel Moyn asserts that the rise of human rights after World War II was prefigured and inspired by a defense of the dignity of the human person that first arose in Christian churches and religious thought in the years just prior to the outbreak of the war.
"The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. As state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality has quietly disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization has emerged as the dominant economic force. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn considers how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of a broader social and economic justice. Moyn places the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift and explores why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside exploding inequality"--Page 4 of cover
Human rights offer a vision of international justice that 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. This book elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage.
There is a struggle for the soul of the human rights movement, and it is being waged in large part through the proxy of genealogy ... Samuel Moyn ... is the most influential of the revisionists. -Philip Alston, Harvard Law Review Praise for The Last Utopia : With unparalleled clarity and originality, Moyn's hard-hitting, radically revisionist, and persuasive history of human rights provides a bracing historical reconstruction with which scholars, activists, lawyers and anyone interested in the fate of the human rights movement today will have to grapple. -Mark Mazower, author of No Enchanted Palace: The End of Imperialism and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations A most welcome book, The Last Utopia is a clear-eyed account of the origins of 'human rights': the best we have. -Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 A triumph of originality, scholarship, concision ... A genuinely thrilling account of the modern history of human rights. -S.N. Katz, Choice A major contribution to the history of twentieth-century human rights ... From now on taking rights seriously means reading Moyn seriously. -Bryan S. Turner, Contemporary Sociology From the Hardcover edition.
The Cold War roots of liberalism's present crisis "[A] daring new book."--Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post "A fascinating and combative intellectual history."--Gideon Rachman, Financial Times By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In his iconoclastic style, Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism.
Where do ideas fit into historical accounts that take an expansive, global view of human movements and events? Teaching scholars of intellectual history to incorporate transnational perspectives into their work, while also recommending how to confront the challenges and controversies that may arise, this original resource explains the concepts, concerns, practice, and promise of "global intellectual history," featuring essays by leading scholars on various approaches that are taking shape across the discipline. The contributors to Global Intellectual History explore the different ways in which one can think about the production, dissemination, and circulation of "global" ideas and ask whether global intellectual history can indeed produce legitimate narratives. They discuss how intellectuals and ideas fit within current conceptions of global frames and processes of globalization and proto-globalization, and they distinguish between ideas of the global and those of the transnational, identifying what each contributes to intellectual history. A crucial guide, this collection sets conceptual coordinates for readers eager to map an emerging area of study.
Intellektuelle im Kalten Krieg und die Entstehung der Gegenwart | Die historischen Ursachen der Krise des Liberalismus
Im Kontext des 20. Jahrhunderts analysiert Samuel Moyn, wie Liberale angesichts der modernen Herausforderungen wie Kriege und Totalitarismen die Ideale der Aufklärung in Frage stellten. Er beleuchtet, wie bedeutende Denker während des Kalten Krieges den Liberalismus umformten und damit ein problematisches Erbe schufen. Das Buch regt zur Reflexion über die Auswirkungen dieser Transformation an und hat in der angelsächsischen Welt eine lebhafte Debatte entfacht. Moyns Argumentation bietet neue Perspektiven auf die Verbindung zwischen Liberalismus und zeitgenössischen Krisen.