Similarly, the 1941 Atlantic Charter and the Declaration of the UN the following year included "human rights" as a "throw-away idea", only for the Allies systematically to deny them to people in Europe's colonies. They were not concerned with individual rights but with the achievement of national self-determination. Moyn argues that it was the failure of all such political utopias, including the project of national liberation itself, which cleared the way for the emergence of his "last utopia". In this view, the impact of the Holocaust — through the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — was little more than a cul-de-sac, as evidenced by the confused Western responses to post-war genocides, to which solutions were humanitarian rather than legalistic. The end of European empire in the 1960s and America's defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s enabled the West to argue the human rights case without much hypocrisy.

The 1970s were the crucial initiating decade, with the Jackson-Vanik amendment in 1974, which tied Soviet Jewish emigration to trade with the US. This was followed, in 1975, by the Helsinki Accords, which created mechanisms to hold the Soviet Union and its satellites accountable on fundamental human rights. Although Moyn rightly points to the precedent of Hungarian Cardinal József Mindszenty — who lived in the US embassy in Budapest for 15 years after being granted asylum — he says that the international celebrity conferred on Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn was a key development, as were the activities of Amnesty International (awarded a Nobel Prize in 1977) in highlighting individual prisoners of conscience. Failed political utopias were replaced by the morality of small steps. The Carter administration then tried to make human rights the basis of US foreign policy, a theme reprised with teeth by the Bush/Blair doctrine of humanitarian intervention. Those misadventures have been accompanied by the mutation of a moral concern with human rights into a structural one with "governance". In other words, the last utopia is becoming as politicised as its predecessors and this may be its undoing. Juvenal's question "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" is as pertinent to human rights lawyers who wish to rule the world as it was to ancient tyrants.