Human Rights and the Uses of History. Samuel Moyn

       CONTENTS

      Preface

       1. On the Genealogy of Morals

       2. The Surprising Origins of Human Dignity

       3. On Altruism without Politics

       4. Spectacular Wrongs: On Humanitarian Intervention

       5. Of Deserts and Promised Lands: On International Courts

       6. Human Rights in History

       7. The Intersection with Holocaust Memory

       8. Torture and Taboo

       9. Soft Sells: On Liberal Internationalism

       10. Reclaiming the History of Duties

       Epilogue: The Future of Human Rights

       Notes

       Acknowledgments

       Index

       PREFACE

      All history is contemporary history, Benedetto Croce said, and nowhere is this maxim truer than when it comes to the sudden rise of human rights history. A few short years ago, there was no such domain of historical inquiry. Now it is ubiquitous. It has verged on absorbing past themes that once stood on their own or served other purposes, like the meaning of the eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions or the nineteenth-century campaigns against slavery. And it has sparked new and fascinating investigations into transformations of world governance, social movements, and international law.

      And yet the rise of human rights history raises plenty of questions of its own. This sequence of essays presents my engagements with other attempts to stake out the coordinates of the domain. It was these inquiries into how others proposed to define a new field that originally drove me on the path to my own interpretation of where human rights came from, which appeared as The Last Utopia¹ a few years ago—and which I am now following towards a sequel on contemporary developments. The emphasis of these essays falls on distinguishing the abuses from the uses of history for thinking about the present and future of one of the most central notions and most illustrious political movements of our time.

      Historians always engage in a double activity, beyond the accumulation of information that provides the necessary basis of their work. One is to demonstrate that facts about the past, even new facts, do not compel interpretations, which are always inflected by our own circumstances. And in particular, anxious about the threat of anachronism our present-day perspective necessarily breeds, historians show how other views, usually through selective evidence or misleading interpretation, betray the dead whom the writing of history is supposed to let live again on their own terms.

      In this sense, history should be “antiquarian.” Insofar as they are not ideologues, historians think that, whatever the ethical value of the past, there is also an ethical command to respect its “alterity.” They feel the power of Jacob Burckhardt’s moral outrage at those who cast the annals as no more than a vast preparation for the way things are, and the way people think, right now: “Each man regards all times as fulfilled in his own, and cannot see his own as one of many passing waves. Just as if the world and its history had existed merely for our sakes!”² Our ancestors were trying to be themselves rather than to anticipate somebody else. The past is not simply a mirror for our own self-regard.

      And yet antiquarianism for its own sake is neither viable nor desirable. Too little understood is that arguments about history—including arguments insisting on the autonomy of the past from the present—can never do other than serve the present, since they are inevitably motivated by its chronologically temporary and thematically narrow concerns.³ The stress on the different futures the past left open only takes place in the mix of a broader and undoubtedly presentist activity, that either monumentalizes some current person, group, or project, or criticizes them in the name of something different. Whatever respect we owe the dead, history is still written by—and meaningful to—the living. If so, abuses of the past call for uses in the name of a better future.

      In the old days, when Burckhardt’s companion Friedrich Nietzsche originally offered the distinction between antiquarian, monumental, and critical history, it was the nation-state that historians chose to build up or tear down; in our day, it has frequently become human rights, along with their international laws and transnational servants. The main goal of this book is to insist on the critical impulse: human rights history should turn away from ransacking the past as if it provided good support for the astonishingly specific international movement