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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 of the last few decades. That movement comprises a politics for which history offers little validation because it is so new. If study of the past is useful at all in coming to terms with what happens today in the name of timeless and universal values, it suggests the reinvention of our movement in the name of a more just world. Human rights have so far done too little to bring that world about, which leaves a task beyond interpreting the past: crafting the future.

These chapters make particularly vivid the intersection of the writing of human rights history with America’s politics of liberal internationalism, which rose after the horrors of the Vietnam War in tandem with the search for a new geopolitical role for the country. Invented just before the end of the Cold War, liberal internationalism surged in the decade after, with massive consequences for history. The search for the origins of human rights is a by-product of the end of the Cold War—more specifically, the temporary age between the bipolar standoff of the past and the multipolar struggle of the future. During what now seems a brief post–Cold War interregnum that will not last long, human rights looked to a great many like a concept that could bridge the distance between unipolarity and humanity itself. If there is a common thread in what follows, it is that liberal internationalism has both motivated and misled our inevitable conversation with the past about what to think and how to proceed now—not least because America’s unipolar moment seems set to wane. The history of human rights first emerged as something like the history of American morals, analogous to texts that Victorians once wrote to assess how far they had come and to stabilize the self-regard of their civilization even as the threats began to lurk that would soon engulf them in catastrophe and decline. Now it looks like the confused early epitaph of a giant entering senescence.

The evidence from the past for the centrality of human rights to the new liberal internationalism is hardly promising. The ancient past from the Greeks and the Bible on hardly provided plausible sources, but then it has always been easy to update the myth of “Western civilization” to suit momentary agendas. The Atlantic revolutions did not serve much better, notwithstanding President Jimmy Carter’s rousing assertion in his farewell address to the country: “America did not invent human rights,” he noted, introducing a theme repeated in variation by every president since. “In a very real sense, it is the other way round. Human rights invented America.”⁴ Yet especially in the origins of America (not to mention France), rights had originally been a revolutionary conception, authorizing violence if necessary, and for the sake of national liberation. In the recent search for a usable past under the auspices of America’s liberal internationalism, however, the revolutionary origins of rights have been domesticated and the primarily statist and nationalist associations rights maintained for most of modern history were quietly dropped. The first chapter of this collection, on the book by Lynn Hunt on the revolutionary origins of human rights that has done most to define the field, pursues these troubling reinventions.

Worse yet, the British empire against which American revolutionary rights were originally asserted became a prized source for the new human rights history in the age of American liberal internationalism—and perhaps not surprisingly, since Great Britain did have its own early version of liberal internationalism, corrupted though it was by formal imperialism. In fact, humanitarianism and rights rarely crossed into (let alone defined) each other in the hierarchical global order and world visions of the nineteenth century. But an imperial rhetoric of fellow-feeling benevolence sometimes associated with Great Britain’s global preeminence has been explicitly revived in human rights history as template and threat. On the one hand, it is a model in which uplifting moralizing seems often taken at face value—as if the British Empire’s leading role in combating the slave trade or targeting other people’s violence in early humanitarian intervention were worth dusting off now, without reflecting on their congenital impurity first. On the other, it is a hazard in which Britain’s high-minded excuses for violent rulership show why its record has to be treated as a cautionary tale that the less self-interested and more authentically humane American hegemony will avoid.

Several of the chapters consider the British Empire as a source of human rights and a comparative template for liberal internationalism today. I reach the position that it is misleading to treat the British imperial past as a museum of horrors from which a few masterpieces are to be salvaged today to mount on our own walls. In part, the reason is that it is wrong to regard writing history as a project of moral connoisseurship allowing past enterprises to be saved from their own times. But in part, the reason is that there is no absolute way to distinguish between their maleficent empire and our benevolent hegemony; and if so, our desire to admire the good parts of a past we otherwise abhor in order to smuggle them across a neatly marked border can never be fulfilled. There is little interest in unmasking liberal internationalism as an imperialism that dare not speak its name. But by the same token, the relationship between the past and present is far too murky to allow simple reclamation of its good things, while exempting ourselves from its abhorrent violence.

Not all Americans are liberal internationalists, and it would clearly be wrong to reduce the uses and abuses of history within the field of human rights to this framework. And I am myself of course subject to the maxim that all history is contemporary history. Reviewing these chapters, it is clear to me how deeply I have responded, in the years since the search for the origins of human rights began, to a specifically American vision of liberal internationalism that the end of the Cold War seemed to anoint as the framework for a human global order in the future. When I criticize others for keeping that dream alive rather than reflecting on the consequences of our experiences—notably but not exclusively in the Iraq war—for our original assumptions, I am clearly writing from a time-bound and local resistance to a central item in recent American intellectual history. More to the point, I am engaging as much in self-criticism as anything else, for few avoided the enthusiasm that the post–Cold War moment evoked through the dream of human rights.

That is why, unlike some harsher critics of human rights, I strive in this book to understand what made humanitarianism for Great Britain and human rights for the United States much more than rhetorics of global engagement. For one thing, neither country’s representatives could claim proprietary control over them, which could serve and have served to indict them and their projects as much as to serve those projects.

If those who invoke humanity always and simply are trying to cheat for the sake of narrow interests, as the great (though Nazi) jurist Carl Schmitt famously alleged, it would not explain why anyone ever believes in them, or why the regular response to ideological mobilizations of sentimental and ethical norms is new and sometimes more generous claims on human universalism. This book cynically punctures illusions, historical and political, but not in the name of cynicism. If humanitarianism had been purely rhetorical high-mindedness for Britain, or human rights were simply an apology for American power, they would never have become the highly mobile and contested categories they remain today.

For that reason, I have sought in and through historical commentary and scholarship to understand not simply the conditions in which human rights could play the role of post–Cold War creed for liberal internationalists but also how they might transcend that role. To do so, the specific historical role international human rights have taken on needs to be grasped—a project ill-served by associating them with violent revolution or imperialist humanitarianism. Not that there is no continuity in history, but these old projects do not repay the study they have attracted in the search for the origins of our highest moral beliefs and aspirational legal projects.

Instead, my argument insists on the need to look in a more recent time for the inception of international human rights politics. A last tranche of these essays touches on a contrast I have pursued at much greater length in The Last Utopia: between the 1940s when human rights fell on deaf ears, and the 1970s when they experienced their first global breakthrough. A summary piece presents my general reasoning in this regard. It bears the marks of the moment it was published, under Barack Obama’s first term as president and his decision (surprising and disappointing to some fervent enthusiasts) to give human rights norms a back seat as the global struggle against terrorism continued, albeit with some modest tweaks.

Given the risk of occluding the important fact that America in the 1970s came a few years late to the cause of universal human rights, especially at the level of social movements, a subsequent piece emphasizes how Amnesty International—at first a British and West European group—paved the way for the global anti-torture norm so much at play in recent American political debates. 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.