Review of Joe Renouard, Human Rights in American Foreign Policy; From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), ISBN 9780812247732, 324 pages.

Authors

David P. Forsythe, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

2016

Citation

Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 38, Number 3, August 2016, pp. 841-846

Abstract

There are historians who do dense narrative history with great attention to documenting the details. And there are other historians who use history to paint a big conceptual picture whose accuracy often leads to much debate. Joe Renouard is in the former camp, with his new book on human rights in US foreign policy during the middle and late stages of the Cold War. Samuel Moyn is in the latter camp, with his stimulating and widely read but controversial interpretations in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.