Poslední utopie - Lidská práva v dějinách – Moyn Samuel (2022)

The concept of 'human rights' has been a fixed and inseparable part of political discourse and our language for several decades. Academics, journalists, commentators, and intellectuals of all kinds talk and write about human rights, activists, politicians, and statesmen advocate for them – in short, this concept has permanently settled in the public space. Despite its omnipresence, however, there are distorted perceptions of how human rights and the human rights movement originated, what this 'last utopia' stems from, and where its roots lie. This is precisely the theme of Moyn's book, The Last Utopia, which has been prefaced by Pavel Barša in its Czech edition. Moyn primarily demonstrates that it would be a mistake to seek the roots of the idea of human rights deep in the past and to understand our present as the culmination of the universal history of humanity, where the historical struggle for human rights has been completed. Moyn refutes the generally accepted thesis that the philosophical origins of human rights trace back to the natural law of the Stoics and Christians, which later influenced the social contract theories of the seventeenth century, and that their political origins lie in the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century. The notion that human rights were born in the year...