The most dramatic feature of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia is a graph that tracks appearances of the phrase “human rights” in The New York Times and the Times of London since 1785. Essentially flat until the turn of the twentieth century, the line begins to move around the outbreak of the First World War and rises dramatically with the entry of the United States in World War II. The early years of the Cold War, however, see a decline to pre-war levels. References really take off only in the early 1970s. By 1977, the year Amnesty International received the Nobel Peace Prize, they were mentioned more than 3,000 times, compared with the previous peak of just under 1,000.

The graph is arresting because it belies the standard story about the rise of human rights. According to that story, human rights emerged from classical philosophy, went on to inspire the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, and were finally recognized as a universal imperative in response to the Holocaust. In many versions, the moral necessity of human rights is treated as proof of their inevitability. But if human rights were discovered only in the 1940s and then virtually forgotten until the Carter administration, this story looks more like an article of faith than a serious explanation. In place of what he calls the “church history” of human rights, Moyn suggests that human rights “are best understood as survivors: the god that did not fail while other political ideologies