Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T04:32:49.309Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Toward a New Politics? On the Recent Historiography of Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2011

DEVIN O. PENDAS
DEVIN O. PENDAS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA; [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When the late Kenneth Cmiel undertook the first systematic analysis of the emerging historiography of human rights in 2004, he surveyed a field that was ‘refreshingly inchoate’. In the ensuing seven years, the scholarship on the history of human rights has burgeoned considerably. Yet one might still reasonably characterise the field overall as inchoate. Like any new subfield of historical inquiry, there is a clear lack of consensus among leading historians of human rights about even the most elementary contours of the subject. What are human rights? When and where did they emerge? How and why did they spread (if, indeed, they spread at all)? Who were the crucial agents in this history? Few historians working in the field seem to agree in their answers to any of these questions.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 95 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Cmiel, Kenneth, ‘The Recent History of Human Rights’, American Historical Review, 109 (Feb. 2004), 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 41Google Scholar.

3 Bloch, Marc, The Historian's Craft (New York: Knopf, 1953), 29Google Scholar.

4 As Bloch also noted. ‘In a word, a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time’: Bloch, Historian's Craft, 35.

5 The philosophical debates addressing whether human rights really are universal, whether they are, in other words, natural, are enormously complex. One could usefully start with Boylan, Michael, A Just Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004)Google Scholar vs. Mutua, Makau, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Lauren, Evolution of International Human Rights, and Ishay, Micheline R., The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

7 Lauren, Paul Gordon, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 2Google Scholar.

8 Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965 [1931]), vGoogle Scholar.

9 Ishay, History of Human Rights, 3.

10 Ibid., 4–5.

11 Some, however, have pointed to the coincidence of natural rights and the first wave of European imperialism. See, for example, Tuck, Richard, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar or Pagden, Anthony, ‘Human Rights, Natural Rights, and Europe's Imperial Legacy’, Political Theory, 31 (2003), 171–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Vasak, Karal, Les Dimensions internationales des Droits de l'Homme (Paris: UNESCO, 1978)Google Scholar.

13 See, for example, Lauren, Evolution, 10–21 and Ishay, History of Human Rights, 63–116.

14 Hunt, Lynn, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 19Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., 21–2.

16 If, indeed, they did think of them as universal. This is one of the issues at stake in the debate on origins.

17 Ibid., 26.

18 Ibid., 27.

19 Ibid., 29.

20 Ibid., 33–4.

21 Ibid., 20.

22 Ibid., 147.

23 This is a story Hunt first told in Hunt, Lynn, The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Boston: Bedford, 1996)Google Scholar.

24 Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 31.

25 Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph, What is the Third Estate, in Baker, Keith Michael, ed., Readings in Western Civilization, vol. 7: The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 157Google Scholar.

26 ‘The Terror was a regime where men in power designated those who were to be excluded in order to purify the body of the nation’, Furet, François, Revolutionary France, 1770–880 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 140Google Scholar.

27 Samuel Moyn, ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, The Nation, 16 April 2007.

28 Henkin, Louis, The Age of Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 1Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., 143.

30 Glendon, Mary Ann, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), xvGoogle Scholar.

31 See, for example, Fink, Carole, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

32 Pendas, Devin O., ‘Toward World Law? Human Rights and the Failure of the Legalist Paradigm of War’, in Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 215–36Google Scholar.

33 Borgwardt, Elizabeth, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Ibid., 53.

35 Ibid., 71.

36 Ibid., 72.

37 Ibid., 251.

38 Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 61Google Scholar.

39 Kochavi, Arieh J., Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

40 Hirsch, Francine, ‘The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Post-War Order’, The American Historical Review 113 (June 2008), 701–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Borgwardt, New Deal for the World, 286.

42 Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

43 Borgwaerdt, New Deal for the World, 251.

44 Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 2010)Google Scholar.

45 Ibid., 1.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid., 22–3.

48 Ibid., 45.

49 Ibid., 116.

50 Ibid., 117.

51 Ibid., 165. One is reminded here of Julian Bourg's account of the turn to ethical theory in France in the aftermath of the perceived failure of revolutionary activism in ‘1968’. Bourg, Julian, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

52 Shklar, Judith N., Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986 [1964]), 209–24Google Scholar.

53 Rejali, Darius, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

54 Moyn, Last Utopia, 121. He demonstrates this with a striking chart tracking the usage of the phrase ‘human rights’ in the New York Times and the London Times, showing a dramatic spike in the 1970s (appendix 1).

55 Adam Hochschild has made a case for considering both as early human rights movements without specifically considering the definitional issues Moyn raises. See Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998)Google Scholar and idem, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

56 See, for example, Jennifer Amos, ‘Embracing and Contesting: The Soviet Union and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948–1958’ and Benjamin Nathans, ‘Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era’ both in Hoffmann, Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, 147–65, and 166–90.

57 Simpson, A.W.B., Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Afshari, Reza, ‘On the Historiography of Human Rights: Reflections on Paul Gordon Lauren's The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen’, Human Rights Quarterly, 29 (2007), 1–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Burke, Roland, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Ibid., 33–4.

60 Ibid., 58.

61 At least, if properly understood as engaging the intersection of social structure and short-term, agentive ‘events’. See Sewell, William J. Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Quataert, Jean H., Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Ibid., 295.

64 On the link between postmodernism and post-Fordism, see Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar.

65 Postone, Moishe, ‘History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism’, Public Culture 18/1 (2006), 93–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Kotkin, Stephen, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

67 Michael Geyer, ‘The Disappearance of Human Rights post 1800 with an Eye on the Situation post 2000’, paper presented at the conference, Human Rights in the Twentieth Century: Concepts and Conflicts (Berlin, 21 June 2008).