Week 5: Moyn
As I started reading Samuel Moyn’s book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights In History, the mentioning of Greek philosophy and early literary works stood out to me immediately. These early literary works did not think of any of the concepts that they included in their writing to be “rights” of any individual, because that notion didn’t exist at the time. Although, Moyn tries to make sense of it all by finding a way to interpret these early writings into the contemporary human rights we know today. Moyn defines contemporary human rights as “a set of global political norms providing the creed of a transnational social movement” (Moyn 11). Much like a previous text we read, Moyn defines contemporary human rights as a political movement, although that’s how it was even before the concept of “human rights” came about.
Although before the term “human rights” came about, a different set of rights that were created with the intentions to protect an individual’s rights, was accepted. That was known as the “rights of man”, with the title saying they will protect an individual’s rights however, that individual is a man. In addition, Moyn states that since human rights came into politics, they have been proclaimed the “birthright of man” (Moyn 14). However, Moyn is arguing that there is a great difference between the rights of man and human rights, even though they seem to come hand in hand.
One prime example is that the early rights of an individual, the rights of man, were mainly politically motivated and maneuvered. While social and economic issues were regarded as second generation issues or problems (Moyn 17). The incorporation of not only political and civil rights, but social and economic rights are a part of the new, contemporary human rights. Human Rights is as Moyn said a movement, although not come tell political anymore. Moyn quotes Hannah Arendt, who points out that after the second World War, people were intent on helping to make human rights transcend the “nation state” (Moyn 42).
Moyn also quotes from Arendt, “if simple humanity in Rome had moral associations beyond the realm of educational formation, it implied unimportance rather than ultimate value. ‘A human being or homo in the original meaning of the word,’ she observed, ‘indicat [ed] someone outside the range of law and the body politic of the citizens, as for instance a slave – but certainly a politically irrelevant being.”(Moyn 15). The very definition of a human being and that we are to exist outside the law and any restrictions.
