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This essay evaluates Samuel Moyn's claim that human rights emerged primarily in response to Christian political interests in the mid-twentieth century.

May 8, 2026Open Access

The Long History of Human Rights: Review of Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights

Key Points

This essay evaluates Samuel Moyn's claim that human rights emerged primarily in response to Christian political interests in the mid-twentieth century.
Reviewed historical context of human rights from classical Roman to contemporary discussions.
Analyzed Moyn's arguments against earlier traditions in human rights law and thought.
Examined the contributions of various religious and philosophical perspectives on human rights.
Moyn's perspective underestimates the historical evolution of rights since classical times.
The essay emphasizes that various beliefs, including religious and philosophical, played significant roles in shaping modern human rights.
Moyn's account overly attributes the rise of modern human rights to conservative Catholic thought.

Abstract

This Essay assesses Samuel Moyn's revisionist argument that human rights were born only in the mid-twentieth century and then mostly as a shrewd Christian response to the secular liberalism and communist materialism that endangered the Church's political interests and influence. This account largely ignores the West's enduring and evolving tradition of rights, which have been an integral part of its commitment to the rule of law and constitutional order. Jurists since classical Roman and medieval times used rights language to define the law's protection, support, limitations, and entitlements of various persons and groups in society, and to map the proper interactions between political and other authorities and their respective subjects. Early modern Catholics, Protestants, and Enlightenment liberals built on this tradition, setting out most of the rights that the twentieth century declared to be universal rights of humankind. Moyn exaggerates the conservative Catholic influences on the mid-twentieth-century international human rights movement, and fails to credit the wide range of religious and philosophical views that were equally influential. And he exaggerates the secular character of contemporary human rights discussions, and fails to recognize the essential role of religion and belief in making rights real.

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