Publications

2011
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights
Moyn, Samuel. “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights.” In Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, 85-106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Publisher's Version
The First Historian of Human Rights
Moyn, Samuel. “The First Historian of Human Rights.” American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (2011): 58-79. Publisher's Version
Preface
Moyn, Samuel. “Preface.” In The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Survivor's Memory, 1942-43. New York: Pegasus, 2011. Publisher's Version
2010
Personalismus, Gemeinschaft, und die Ursprünge der Menschenrechte
Moyn, Samuel. “Personalismus, Gemeinschaft, und die Ursprünge der Menschenrechte.” In ., Moralpolitik: Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010. Publisher's Version
The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2010. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future.

For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront.

It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

2009
Antisemitism, Philosemitism, and the Rise of Holocaust Memory
Moyn, Samuel. “Antisemitism, Philosemitism, and the Rise of Holocaust Memory.” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 1 (2009): 1-16. Publisher's Version
Appealing to Heaven: Jephthah, John Locke, and Just War
Moyn, Samuel. “Appealing to Heaven: Jephthah, John Locke, and Just War.” Hebraic Political Studies 4, no. 3 (2009): 286-303. Publisher's Version
   The Assumption by Man of His Original Fracturing: Marcel Gauchet, Gladys Swain, and the History of the Self
Moyn, Samuel. “ The Assumption by Man of His Original Fracturing: Marcel Gauchet, Gladys Swain, and the History of the Self.” Modern Intellectual History 6, no. 2 (2009): 315-41. Publisher's Version
The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory
Breckman, Warren, Peter E Gordon, Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn, and Elliot Neaman, ed. The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Some of the most exciting and innovative work in the humanities currently takes place at the intersection of intellectual history and critical theory. Just as critical theorists are becoming more aware of the historicity of theory, contemporary practitioners of modern intellectual history are recognizing their potential contributions to theoretical discourse. No one has done more than Martin Jay to realize the possibilities for mutual enrichment between intellectual history and critical theory. This carefully selected collection of essays addresses central questions and current practices of intellectual history and asks how the legacy of critical theory has influenced scholarship across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. In honor of Martin Jay's unparalleled achievements, this volume includes work from some of the most prominent contemporary scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

2008
Hannah Arendt on the Secular
Moyn, Samuel. “Hannah Arendt on the Secular.” New German Critique, no. 105 (2008): 71-96. Publisher's Version
On the Intellectual Origins of François Furet's Masterpiece
Moyn, Samuel. “On the Intellectual Origins of François Furet's Masterpiece.” Tocqueville Review 29, no. 2 (2008): 59-78. Publisher's Version
Jacques Maritain: le origini dei diritti umani e il pensiero politico cristiano
Moyn, Samuel. “Jacques Maritain: le origini dei diritti umani e il pensiero politico cristiano.” In Dialogo interculturale e diritti umani: La Dichiarazione Universale dei Diritti Umani, Genesi, evoluzione, e problemi odierni (1948-2008), edited by Luigi Bonanante and Roberto Papini. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008. Publisher's Version
   Marxism and Alterity: Claude Lefort and the Critique of Totality
Moyn, Samuel. “ Marxism and Alterity: Claude Lefort and the Critique of Totality.” In The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory, edited by Warren Breckman, Peter E Gordon, Dirk A Moses, Samuel Moyn, and Eliott Neaman. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Publisher's Version
2007
From Experience to Law: Leo Strauss and the Weimar Crisis of the Philosophy of Religion
Moyn, Samuel. “From Experience to Law: Leo Strauss and the Weimar Crisis of the Philosophy of Religion.” History of European Ideas 33, no. 2 (2007): 174-94. Publisher's Version
2006
Empathy in History, Empathizing with Humanity
Moyn, Samuel. “Empathy in History, Empathizing with Humanity.” History & Theory 54, no. 3 (2006): 397-415. Publisher's Version
Democracy Past and Future
Rosanvallon, Pierre. Democracy Past and Future. Edited by Samuel Moyn. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Democracy Past and Future is the first English-language collection of Pierre Rosanvallon's most important essays on the historical origins, contemporary difficulties, and future prospects of democratic life.

One of Europe's leading political thinkers, Rosanvallon proposes in these essays new readings of the history, aims, and possibilities of democratic theory and practice, and provides unique theoretical understandings of key moments in democracy's trajectory, from the French Revolution and the struggles for universal suffrage to European unification and the crises of the present. In so doing, he lays out an influential new theory of how to write the history of politics. Rosanvallon's historical and philosophical approach examines the "pathologies" that have curtailed democracy's potential and challenges the antitotalitarian liberalism that has dominated recent political thought. All in all, he adroitly combines historical and theoretical analysis with an insistence on the need for a new form of democracy. Above all, he asks what democracy means when the people rule but are nowhere to be found.

Throughout his career, Rosanvallon has resisted simple categorization. Rosanvallon was originally known as a primary theorist of the "second left", which hoped to stake out a non-Marxist progressive alternative to the irresistible appeal of revolutionary politics. In fact, Rosanvallon revived the theory of "civil society" even before its usage by East European dissidents made it globally popular as a non-statist politics of freedom and pluralism. His ideas have been shaped by a variety of influences, ranging from his work with an influential French union to his teachers François Furet and Claude Lefort.

Well known throughout Europe as a historian, political theorist, social critic, and public intellectual, Pierre Rosanvallon was recently elected to a professorship at the Collège de France, Paris, a position held at various times by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu. Democracy Past and Future begins with Rosanvallon's groundbreaking and synthetic lecture that he delivered upon joining this institution. Throughout the volume, Rosanvallon illuminates and invigorates contemporary political and democratic thought.

2005
A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France
Moyn, Samuel. A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005. Publisher's VersionAbstract

How has the world come to focus on the Holocaust and why has it invariably done so in the heat of controversy, scandal, and polemics about the past? These questions are at the heart of this unique investigation of the Treblinka affair that occurred in France in 1966 when Jean-Francois Steiner, a young Jewish journalist, published Treblinka: The Revolt of an Extermination Camp. A cross between a history and a novel, Steiner’s book narrated the 1943 revolt at one of the major Nazi death camps. Abetted by a scandalous interview he gave, as well as Simone de Beauvoir’s glowing preface, the book shot to the top of the Parisian bestseller list and prompted a wide-ranging controversy in which both the well-known and the obscure were embroiled.

Few had heard of Treblinka, or other death camps, before the affair. The validity of the difference between those killing centers and the larger network of concentration camps making up the universe of Nazi crime had to be fought out in public. The affair also bore on the frequently raised question of the Jews’ response to their dire straits.

Moyn delves into events surrounding the publication of Steiner’s book and the subsequent furor. In the process, he sheds light on a few forgotten but thought-provoking months in French cultural history. Reconstructing the affair in detail, Moyn studies it as a paradigm-shifting controversy that helped change perceptions of the Holocaust in the French public and among French Jews in particular. Then Moyn follows the controversy beyond French borders to the other countries—especially Israel and the United States—where it resonated powerfully.

Based on a complete reconstruction of the debate in the press (including Yiddish dailies) and on archives on three continents, Moyn’s study concludes with the response of the survivors of Treblinka to the controversy and reflects on its place in the longer history of Holocaust memory. Finally, Moyn revisits, in the context of a detailed case study, some of the theoretical controversies the genocide has provoked, including whether it is appropriate to draw universalistic lessons from the victimhood of particular groups.

Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics
Moyn, Samuel. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Publisher's VersionAbstract

The French-Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) is today remembered as the central moralist of the twentieth century and remains a major presence in the contemporary humanities. In this book, written in lucid and jargon-free prose, Samuel Moyn provides a first and controversial history of the makings of his thought, and especially of his trademark concept of “the other."

Restoring Levinas to the intellectually rich and combative atmosphere of interwar Europe, Origins of the Other overturns a number of views that have attained almost stereotypical familiarity. In a careful overview of Levinas's career, Moyn documents the philosopher's early allegiance to the great German thinker Martin Heidegger. Showing that Levinas crafted an idiosyncratic vision of Judaism, rather than returning to any traditional source, Moyn makes the startling suggestion that Protestant theology, as it spread across the continent in new forms, may have been the most plausible source of Levinas's core concept. In Origins of the Other, Moyn offers new readings of the work of a host of crucial thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth, Karl Löwith, Gabriel Marcel, Franz Rosenzweig, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Wahl, who help explain why Levinas's thought evolved as it did.

Moyn concludes by showing how "the other" assumed an ethical bearing (long after its first invention) when Levinas's thought crystallized in Cold War debates about intellectual engagement and the relation of morality and politics. An epilogue relates Levinas's Totality and Infinity to current philosophical discussions in Europe and America and reflects on the difficult relationship between philosophy and religion in the modern world.

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