Human Rights and the Uses of History - Samuel Moyn

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with more full-bodied social protection. In Elizabeth Borgwardt’s phrase, human rights were America’s “new deal for the world.”24 The wistfully nostalgic tones of the historians of an invigorating and well-intentioned American liberalism are poignant and can lead to insight. But there are serious objections—political and interpretive—to this story.

      For one thing, it makes human rights seem like the natural outcome of the last consensual war, an uncontroversial good that emerged in response to incontestable evil (never mind that the assertion of rights bore little relationship to the Nazi genocide). Second, it Americanizes rights, evoking a time when the US government could be seen as a benevolent guarantor of universal norms of conduct. Self-evidently, the actual content of the portrayal of human rights as the product of a moment when America offered a genuine universalism is the contemporary moral it allows: that Bush’s worst sin is to have ruined the storyline that began with America’s invention of human rights in the 1940s and was finally on the way to fruition thanks to Bill Clinton’s commitment to enforce them in the 1990s.

      As David Rieff has argued, affirming America’s universalistic self-image in the past (as the city on a hill, the leader of the free world, or the indispensable nation) is to fail to ask just how it was that Bush was able to succeed so easily in burnishing the morality of his adventures—as if what went wrong were a purely accidental perversion of America’s true and proper vocation.25 But there are also historical distortions. Scholars who return to the 1940s, like Borgwardt and Cass Sunstein, devote little or no attention to non-American contributions to “rights talk” in the era, and exaggerate its importance and impact at the time.26 They select and single out what now look like milestones, because of their retroactive importance, but fail to grasp their marginality in their own period, from which no broad-gauged international movement emerged. Once again, historians are choosing tunnel vision over historical sense.

      None of this means that the new fashion of human rights history is entirely misguided. Only those who missed the last thirty years of ideological history—like certain Marxists who regard “human rights” as nothing but a rhetoric that makes the cage of globalizing neoliberalism more bearable—could think so.27 But it does mean that we need to understand that human rights in their specific contemporary connotations are an invention of recent date, which drew on prior languages and practices the way a chemical reaction depends on having various elements around from different sources, some of them older than others. The explosion took place only yesterday, and we have to come to grips with why it happened and what the costs and benefits have been for us all. The fact that it only recently occurred to historians to uncover the origins of human rights is itself a sign that they should not seek to find them too long ago and far away.

      But there is also a strategic consideration. Human rights norms and organizations remain the chief source of idealistic passion in the world—at least among its well-meaning cosmopolitan elites. Any future idealism will have to draw on the power of their current ethic and put it to good use. In this regard, Hunt is exactly right to stress the emotional charge of human rights. But besides lacking any coherent understanding of how human rights came to have their current power, we have not even begun thinking about how to reinvent the creed in ways that are progressive rather than brutal.

      In closing what feels in the end like a creation myth, Hunt writes: “The human rights framework, with its international bodies, international courts, and international conventions, might be exasperating in its slowness to respond or repeated inability to achieve its ultimate goals, but there is no better structure available for confronting these issues.”28 For better or worse, the plangent reassurances have lost their power to comfort, and deep background—especially when brought to bear so instrumentally on our very different present—is of little use in allaying our confusion and dismay.

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       THE SURPRISING ORIGINSOF HUMAN DIGNITY

      “A king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad,” Ishmael jokes in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, in the course of cataloging every last use of whale blubber. “Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process,” he adds. “Dignity” appears twenty times in Melville’s novel, and usually refers to the high standing of offices and activities—including, inevitably, whaling. But most often, dignity pertains to monarchs, and the humorous treatment that somehow elevates kings does not work its magic on everyone. For Ishmael, the notion that democracy offers everyone the dignified prerogatives of kings seems mistaken, if not ridiculous. “In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil,” he surmises, “can’t amount to much in his totality.”1

      In Dignity, Rank, and Rights, Jeremy Waldron, perhaps the leading legal and political philosopher of our day, argues that the notion of human dignity originated in the democratization of the high social status once reserved for the well-born.2 “Dignity” means rank, and Waldron argues that we are the beneficiaries of a long, gradual process he calls “leveling up.” More and more people, he says, are treated as high-status individuals, deserving of the social respect once restricted to the solemnly oiled. In an age of human rights, everyone can become a king, at least on paper or in court, where claims that basic human dignity is non-negotiable have achieved a remarkable presence in the last few years.

      Since the end of World War II, nobody besides conservative and typically Catholic thinkers had staked philosophical systems on the notion of human dignity, but liberal philosophers like Waldron are flocking to it to revitalize theories of political ethics. Around the same time as Waldron turned to dignity, the late Ronald Dworkin, in his masterwork Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), claimed that it is the most basic value society should advance. Jürgen Habermas, the great German thinker, recently admitted that human dignity had not featured as the cited authority for human rights for most of modern history, whether in 1776 in Virginia or 1789 in France or thereafter; he concluded from this fact that dignity must have been implicit to human rights all along. That cannot be correct. During most of that time dignity served to elevate some people over others, rather than putting them on the same level.3 And when dignity did finally enter politics—mysteriously encoded at mid-century in the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and West German constitutional Basic Law (1949)—it was not the watchword in philosophy or political theory that it has become. Which leads to a question: what is in the water—other than fewer whales than in Melville’s day?

      Before the modern era, dignity was not considered to be an inviolable value. The Renaissance guru Pico della Mirandola, who wrote an oration in the fifteenth century later called “On the Dignity of Man,” is often regarded as a confused precursor of later understandings of it. (In Dignity: Its History and Meaning, Harvard political theorist Michael Rosen treats Pico this way.4) But Pico, a Cabbalist and magician, was too idiosyncratic a thinker to be anyone’s ancestor.5 After all, he insisted that what makes humans different than everything else in the universe is their lack of any defined essence. As contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has noted, Pico’s discourse “does not contain the term dignitas, which … could not in any case refer to man. For the central thesis of the oration is that man, having been molded when the models of creation were all used up, can have neither archetype nor proper place nor specific rank.”6

      In modern times, Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to write about the democratization of high standing. A French aristocrat who travelled to America to size up a newfangled thing called “democracy,” Tocqueville warned that if aristocratic values were not somehow preserved after the departure of feudal kings and nobles, humanity would be debased. “In aristocratic ages vast ideas are commonly entertained of the dignity, the power, and the greatness of man,” he noted.7 Democracy might promise leveling up but mainly threatened to flatten distinctions altogether—a risk which neither Waldron nor other current chroniclers of dignity seem to take seriously. But even on its own terms, there are problems with Waldron’s argument.

      Aristocratic

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