The Utopian

By Samuel Moyn.

“There is a risk that human rights will be called on to do so much, precisely because no powerful imaginative alternatives exist, that they will lose even the minimal promise of transformation that allow the norms to inspire so many.”

A response to Adam Etinson.

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After Utopia is the title of a little-known book — her first — by the great political theorist Judith Shklar, one of my favorite authors. In her autobiographical lecture, she commented amusingly that she didn’t even give her book its title (her editor did). But she found herself swept up in Cold War debates about the status of utopia in political theory anyway. In his insightful commentary, Adam Etinson thinks I am like Judith Shklar: I wrote a book with utopia in the title, but forgot to comment on the topic. I beg to differ. The concern about what happens to the utopian imagination once it becomes rights-based is in fact the book’s main question, one that determined how I wrote it, and inhabits it from beginning to end.

In the book’s first half, I try to show that there were other utopias than international human rights all through modern history. And I also try to show that, to the extent there were rights-based utopias, they were very different from ours. The greatest prophet of the rights of man in modern history, I think, remains the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini, who lit the world on fire by insisting that individual protection is inseparable from political emancipation. And in the rest of my book, I try to document how it was that the romantic conjunction of these two aspirations was fatefully put asunder, as people lost faith in the utopias of nationalism and socialism. At stake in this approach is precisely seeing how the “last utopia” of international human rights did not simply arise on the ruins of predecessors, but conquered what it might mean to have hope in the world. Indeed, to borrow a formulation from the book, human rights have conquered the terrain of the imagination much more than they have changed the world itself. International human rights captured the utopian imagination, which in theory is supposed to fight free of imprisonment in any single reverie. For this reason, both the introduction and epilogue to the book end by asking whether utopia ought to fight its way free of human rights in the future.

But Etinson is probably correct that I left the consequences for utopia in the rise of human rights too implicit in what I wrote; and so I am grateful for his wise commentary on the need to recall the independence of utopianism from rights, with which I basically concur. He has pursued that topic far more philosophically and constructively than I could. And I appreciate his impressive venture. Yet it is not just because I look backward as a historian rather than forward as a philosopher that I chose the emphasis at the end of my book that Etinson singles out for attention.

After all, asserting the claims of the imagination against human rights today is important but can’t stop there. For the fact is that there is an equal and opposite risk that human rights will be called on to do so much, precisely because no powerful imaginative alternatives exist, that they will lose even the minimal promise of transformation that allow the norms to inspire so many. In the crisis of utopia today, of which the prominence of international human rights is simply one sign, the task therefore has to be to seek the next utopia, while making sure the last one is not destroyed in the meantime. It is much better to have a disappointing utopia than none at all, and to guard the flame of utopia in its defective forms rather than to see it put out altogether. Perhaps it could even help light other fires.

Samuel Moyn teaches history at Columbia University.