On the French Origins of Samuel Moyn’s the Last Utopia

Abstract

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to provide an account of an important yet overlooked source of inspiration in Samuel Moyn’s contributions to the historical turn in the field of human rights studies. It examines the impact of an earlier French debate that occurred within a reflection group for political thought, headed by the French historian François Furet, on Moyn's scholarship. A notable similarity between the French debate that emerged in the late 1970s and the historical turn in Anglophone scholarship a couple of decades later is the emphasis on the temporal dimension of human rights. However, the French debate placed greater emphasis on the effects of human rights on a society's capacity to orient itself temporally, while Moyn and his intellectual adversaries primarily addressed genealogical questions. The article highlights the different temporal aspects of the human rights debate emphasized by these two debates: as a politico-temporal issue (as seen in the French debate), and primarily as a historiographical problem (as exemplified by Moyn’s approach).