Historical writing comes in different shapes and sizes. Seed-like microhistories — the kind Jill Lepore has popularized in recent years in the pages of the New Yorker  — start small before blossoming out into the air of the present and digging their roots into the soil of age-old questions. Inflated global histories, by contrast, swiftly bounce like a beach ball from one event, country, or time period to another, covering in a handful of pages what other scholars might in a lifetime.

Acute in its attention to epochal shifts, the style of legal historian Samuel Moyn’s 2012 book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, might best resemble a scalpel. His is a reconstructive history whose procedures include trimming down sweeping claims and excising carcinogenic histories absorbed in a singular moment (i.e. the French Revolution).

Moyn’s goal in The Last Utopia is to specify, not broaden, the history of human rights. Against scholars who look back centuries to find its origins, he argues human rights only appeared with the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1948. And even then, it entered like a whisper into an international political and legal scene marked by demands for Holocaust reparations, the establishment of the welfare state, and an end to colonialism.