Human Rights and the Uses of History. Samuel Moyn
But America like the entirety of the transatlantic space (including once-Communist lands after the Cold War ended) was the scene of a vigorous reconceptualization of World War II several decades after the fact. In fact, it is broadly mistaken to associate human rights in their era of annunciation with Holocaust consciousness, of which there was little for a long time. But surely the next item on the agenda is to conceptualize and research their intersection, which fatefully affected both.
Culminating in the 1970s, these essays do not give a fair sense of the global radiance of human rights in our times, in considerably different forms, and especially their role in European governance. An epilogue reconsiders the argument, offering some reasons to reclaim human rights from the liberal internationalism that has as much neutralized their implications—especially when it comes to economic and social rights—as accounted for their fame. In my judgment, the history of rights in domestic spaces offers considerable material for reflection on how to push human rights beyond their accommodating version in recent history. If human rights originated in our time as a response to the perceived failures of nationalism and socialism, at first for the sake of a minimalist reform (though ending up serving as a core theme of post–Cold War rhetoric), it will take spirit and energy to push them in a new direction. There is no historical basis in international affairs for this program, but the history of rights as citizenship entitlements so profoundly redefined through vision and contest offers a memorable basis for the future.
In domestic spaces, rights as formal entitlements concerning mind and body were not only given further enumeration to honor the claims of the least powerful, but were placed within a social vision authorizing the state to seek the conditions for citizen enjoyment of entitlements of all sorts. Any new human rights movement will, to be sure, need to be different, not least in ensuring that local and global politics intersect in ways that the older progressive movement failed to imagine, let alone accomplish. To use the past in a better way than to abuse it for the sake of the limited human rights movement of our day, with its post–Cold War dreams and disappointing outcomes, seems the most worthwhile goal.
The enterprise of writing the history of human rights has become a widespread activity only in the past decade. Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights is its most prominent result so far, identifying the Enlightenment and the age of democratic revolutions as the moment when the cause was born.1 Yet if human rights history is now chic, it is also confused. Not long ago the president of the main American professional association of historians announced to all students of the past—whatever the place and time and subject of their research—that they “are all historians of human rights.”2 But what could such a claim possibly mean?
The most troubling shortcoming of the contemporary attempt to give human rights a history is that it distorts the past to suit the present. And in this gambit, it is late, fatally late: the current wave of human rights history is the tardy fruit of the fashion of human rights in politics, and contributors to the genre clearly set out to provide backstories to the vogue of human rights just a few years ago, when they exercised a literally millennial appeal. But the vine withered as the fruit ripened. The sad fact is that historiography has not caught up with history, and even the professionals—especially the professionals—are still providing the prologue to the idealism so powerful during Bill Clinton’s presidency.
The shift in political debate has been impossible to miss. Even those who retain an investment in human rights cannot treat them as an unquestionable good, mainly because the America that once seemed to many enthusiasts to be the prospective servant of universality abroad all too quickly became the America pursuing low-minded imperial ambitions in high-minded humanitarian tones. The effect on human rights as a public language and political cause has been staggering, and it is not yet clear whether they can recover.
If radical apostasy is the sign that times have changed, then the ideological journey of the writer David Rieff provides the most spectacular evidence. Once a paladin of human rights—and a champion of American humanitarian intervention—Rieff has now turned on the politics he once embraced. For Rieff, human rights, far from being the universal panacea he and writers such as Michael Ignatieff and Samantha Power once considered them, now stand revealed as an ideology perfectly designed to cloak the “military humanism” of empire.3 Agree with him or not, Rieff’s evolution shows that Communism is not the only god that can fail.
The conversion of Tony Judt has been less radical but more interesting. He made his name excoriating French left-wing intellectuals for their failure to champion rights—a failure he saw as rooted in their nation’s revolutionary tradition, especially when measured against Anglo-American political wisdom. Rights have an “extrapolitical status,” he wrote thirteen years ago, diagnosing as French pathology the error of making them “an object of suspicion.”4 Now he says that universalistic invocations of rights often mask particular interests—and never more so than in America’s current wars—even though he once chastised opponents of rights who took this very position. Formerly treating them as an intellectual talisman, Judt now complains in passing about “the abstract universalism of ‘rights’—and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimes in their name.” He warns that such abstractions can all too easily lead those who invoke them to “readily mistake the US president’s myopic rigidity for their own moral rectitude.”5 Of course, Judt still understands himself to be a committed liberal intellectual, at a time when he thinks practically all other liberals have disappeared. But not just the world has changed; he has too, and most strikingly in his acknowledgment that his old standard can hallow many causes.6
The travails of rights today mean there is more, not less, at stake in excavating their history. Hunt’s account falls neatly into two parts. The first deals with Enlightenment humanitarianism. She argues that the early-modern explosion of novels, especially the wildly popular sentimental novels of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, led people beyond aristocratic and religious frameworks to see one another as fellow humans worthy of empathy. In this connection, Hunt devotes an interesting chapter to the eighteenth century’s rejection of torture—a topic that gives her book obvious contemporary relevance. Since the majority of human cultures have valued or at least tolerated bodily violation, the repugnance it now inspires has to be explained. Hunt suggests that the rise of sentiment purveyed by the novel combined with a new view of the integrity of the body, with potent results. Torture—together with other corporal violence like honorable dueling, beating wives, spanking children and baiting animals—began to fall from favor in Western culture (save in exported form in colonial rule).7
It is true that a rise in compassion for suffering humanity was one ingredient in the explosion of claims for political rights. As Hannah Arendt once observed, in Roman times to call someone a “human” meant referring to him as “outside the range of the law and the body politic of the citizens, as for instance a slave—but certainly a politically irrelevant being.”8 Of course, the eighteenth century had a foundation on which it could build in conferring meaning and value on being human alone. Monotheistic religions always made room for notions of common brotherhood. The source of “empathy” with suffering humanity, for its part, has most plausibly been located in changes in medieval spirituality: Jesus began to be valued as an exemplar of corporal suffering, and Mary became central to Christian piety for having practiced the virtue of compassion.9 Meanwhile, it is familiar to credit the Renaissance for discovering (or rediscovering) the dignity of man; in his famous study of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt claimed that this period elevated humanity from a merely “logical notion” to a morally resonant force.10 The eighteenth century doubtless did more to strengthen and secularize the emotive appeals to dignified and suffering humanity than it did to create them. Still, Hunt is surely right about the crucial significance of the Enlightenment—an age of feeling as much as it was an age of reason—for spreading the value of humanity as an end in itself.
If there is a connection between the