Samuel Moyn

"The drama of human rights, then, is that they emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere. If the Soviet Union had generally lost credibility (and America’s Vietnamese adventure invited so much international outrage), human rights were not the immediate beneficiaries."

"Human rights are only a particular modern version of the ancient commitment by Plato and Deuteronomy—and Cyrus—to the cause of justice. Even among modern schemes of freedom and equality, they are only one among others; they were far from the first to make humanity’s global aspirations the central focus. Nor are human rights the only imaginable rallying cry around which to build a grassroots popular movement."

"The true history of human rights matters most of all, then, in order to confront their prospects today and in the future. If they do capture many longstanding values, it is equally critical to understand more honestly how and when human rights took shape as a widespread and powerful set of aspirations for a better and more humane world. After all, they have done far more to transform the terrain of idealism than they have the world itself."