T wo large questions dog the theory and practice of human rights in our time. Although many claim that these rights have a long ancestry in the history of human thought, why do they seem to have emerged in force only in recent decades? And why does the language of human rights lend itself so easily to abuse, malevolence, and near meaninglessness, to the point where we’ve nearly come to expect that UN human-rights bodies will be chaired by dictatorships?

Samuel Moyn’s brilliant and bracing new book explicitly sets out to answer the first question, and in doing so goes a long way toward answering the second. It also gestures toward a third crucial question: Where do we go from here?

Moyn’s arresting thesis is that, as his title implies, “human rights” as we know them–a growing body of international law, rhetoric and, occasionally, policy–are not only a recent invention, but a utopian one at that, whose rise to prominence on the world stage resulted, perhaps paradoxically, from the ideological collapse in the 1970s of the utopias of the left. His subject is less human-rights activism than the conceptual and rhetorical history of those rights. Richly researched and powerfully argued, this volume will be the starting point for future discussions of where human rights have been, why they look like they do, and how to think about them down the road.

A historian at Columbia University, Moyn has written several well-received volumes of European intellectual history. Here, Western intellectuals, activists, jurists, and other elites are his focus. He begins with a brief historical survey and observes that rights in the modern sense–individual entitlements to civic and political freedom, expression, and material well-being–emerged of a piece with the modern nation-state. He notes that after a seeming eighteenth-century apotheosis, rights talk as such declined in the nineteenth century, except among laissez-faire capitalists who used it to ward off regulation. That century did, however, see the advent of an international humanitarianism in which liberal moral sentiments, Christian evangelicalism, and advocacy by transnational groups galvanized mobilizations across borders to abolish slavery, protest forced labor in Congo, and protect persecuted Jews. While Moyn rightly points out that those groups did not use rights rhetoric, they were likely more important to the development of contemporary human-rights activism than he suggests.

Yet the most powerful moralizing impulses of the nineteenth century, Moyn argues astutely, were those associated with nationalism. Today, when nationalism seems synonymous with chauvinist violence, it’s hard to remember that it once was a preeminently liberal cause. Up to the First World War, nationalism was a moral claim pressed by discrete minority groups against repressive empires: Czarist, Ottoman, British, French, Hapsburg, and so on. After the war, with three of those gone and the dissolution of the others already in motion, those same minorities were left to fight it out with one another in the imperial ruins.

Moyn’s narrative gathers steam with the Allies’ efforts to remake the world order and create the UN in the wake of World War II. The legacies of liberal humanitarianism were apparent in the Nuremberg trials and in 1948 in the adoption of the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Moyn argues, though, that these documents and what they represented were far from the Allied Powers’ central objectives during the war and after. Human rights as such, though noble, were not a solution to any of the problems facing them in the postwar era: securing social welfare, maintaining domestic peace, minimizing armed conflict. Nor were they muscular enough for the struggle against totalitarianism. For the powers–the Nuremberg trials notwithstanding–human rights were more than propaganda but less than policy, a way of articulating, a la Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” the basic moral impulses of the Allies’ war effort, without giving them concrete expression. While Raphael Lemkin’s Genocide Convention did indeed emerge in deliberate response to the Holocaust (as did another UN creation that year, the State of Israel), the writing and adoption of the Universal Declaration reflected other concerns. The Declaration announced in its first article that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood,” and proceeded to enumerate rights to life, liberty, due process, property, and a number of social and economic entitlements, including “a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.” The rights enunciated by the declaration were to be achieved through states and citizenship, and thus, Moyn writes, it “more preserved a memory of the rights of man and citizen than it pointed ahead to the utopia of supranational governance through law.”

In the first decades of the Cold War human rights were justly identified with anti-communism. Meanwhile, anti-colonial movements spoke a different language. Postwar anti-colonialists from Gandhi to Nkrumah to Nasser, Moyn writes, trumpeted national and not individual rights, and rarely human rights. Self-determination to statehood was their goal, and if they looked beyond the sovereign state, it was to forms of internationalism other than human rights, such as collective development, Pan-Africanism, or Pan-Arabism. Anti-colonialism, in other words, competed with human rights; and if decolonization universalized anything, it was national liberation.

Indeed, it seems to me that a dynamic similar to that of post-Versailles nationalism took hold in the wave of postwar decolonization. Self-determination and national liberation mutated from a moral claim against empires into a license for violence and repression. In other words, what happened in Europe and the Mideast earlier in the century repeated itself in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, but in a Cold War context, with the abstractions of Marxism and the romance of revolution providing the utopian template for violence in Maoist China, Castro’s Cuba, Kaunda’s Zambia, and elsewhere.

By the mid-1970s–after the rise of Third World dictatorships, the long morning after the heady failures of 1968, the tarnishing of America in Vietnam, and the relative thawing of the Soviet system that enabled the emergence of dissidents such as Sakharov and Sharansky, who earlier would simply have been shot–human rights finally found their moment. After languishing in obscurity both in practice and, as Moyn shows in a fascinating chapter, in academia, they offered Western elites a way to square a number of circles; under their banner one could, at least in theory, oppose both Soviet totalitarianism and anti-communist juntas.

Where did it all come from? Moyn writes that through the 1950s, human rights were mostly discussed by Christian intellectuals, such as Jacques Maritain and Charles Malik, who, he says, saw in them “a third-way, personalist and communitarian alternative to liberal atomism and materialist communism alike.” This view was kept alive by activists like Moses Moskowitz of the Consultative Council of Jewish Organizations and the redoubtable Roger Baldwin, who from 1942 onwards headed the International League for the Rights of Man; founded the year before, the League was at the time a rarity, a human-rights organization unaffiliated with a specific religious, ethnic, or national group.

Until, that is, Amnesty International, which “invented grassroots human rights advocacy,” and brought it to the fore of public consciousness. The organization was founded in 1961 by London attorney Peter Benenson, who, at the time, said he hoped “to find a common base upon which the idealists of the world can co-operate,” especially “since the eclipse of Socialism.” He tellingly said in the same interview that the concrete effects of this work on political prisoners and others mattered less than “harness[ing] the enthusiasm of the helpers.” Though Benenson himself was Jewish, Amnesty drew on Christian peace groups’ search for an outlet for their idealistic politics that could bypass governments, and Amnesty’s mass participation letter-writing campaigns brilliantly did the trick. Unlike earlier human-rights groups, Amnesty seemed above politics in its willingness to criticize Communists and non-Communists alike (which, in the charged atmosphere of the Cold War, was hard not to see as a political stance).