A pithy and readable challenge to the concept of human rights What are the origins of human rights? This question, rarely asked before the end of the Cold War, has in recent years become a major focus of historical and ideological strife. In this sequence of reflective and critical studies, Samuel Moyn engages with some of the leading interpreters of human rights, thinkers who have been creating a field from scratch without due reflection on the local and temporal contexts of the stories they are telling. Having staked out his owns claims about the postwar origins of human rights discourse in his acclaimed Last Utopia, Moyn, in this volume, takes issue with rival conceptions – including, especially, those that underlie justifications of humanitarian intervention.
5. OF DESERTS AND PROMISEDLANDS: ON INTERNATIONALCOURTS
6. HUMAN RIGHTS IN HISTORY
7. THE INTERSECTION WITHHOLOCAUST MEMORY
8. TORTURE AND TABOO
9. SOFT SELLS: ON LIBERALINTERNATIONALISM
10. RECLAIMING THE HISTORY OFDUTIES
EPILOGUE:THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
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Samuel Moyn is professor of law and history at Yale University. He is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and Christian Human Rights, among other books, as well as coeditor of the journal Humanity. He writes regularly for Dissent and The Nation.
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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.
In contrast to Judt—not to mention Karl Marx, to whose critique of the language of rights she devotes only a desultory page—Hunt is not sensitive to the way that formalistic invocations of rights can sometimes mask narrow agendas. For her, the true significance of this same “abstract universalism” is that it can permit proliferating rights claims. But what is at stake in interpreting the unintended consequences of abstraction is nowhere more in evidence than in recent shifts of views about the meaning of the Haitian uprising of 1791–1803. Until recently, the standard interpretation of the “Black Jacobins” of the Caribbean—in the phrase C. L. R. James gave to his 1938 masterpiece on the subject—saw them as presaging an era of revolutionary nationalism, decolonization and even Third World socialism. Today, in the work of Laurent Dubois and now in Hunt’s book, Caribbean antislavery insurgencies are seen as human rights causes. But this idea seems as much a reflection of contemporary passions as the old filiation it displaces.18
