Human Rights and the Uses of History. Samuel Moyn
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asserts between the two is overly general, because humanitarianism did not and need not always take the form of revolutionary rights assertions or the search for legal guarantees, whether domestic or international. It is also questionable because “rights talk,” rooted in ancient Stoicism, Christian natural law and seventeenth-century contractualism, had historical lineages completely different from humanitarianism. The most sensible conclusion to take away from Hunt’s book is that the rise of humanitarianism affected and broadened the rights tradition. But it hardly determined it completely.
Hunt links the rise of the phrase “rights of man” in France after the 1750s to the efflorescence of sympathy as a cultural imperative. But, as she shows, the older language of natural rights persisted, notably in the United States. More important, in spite of her claims that this transformation was also essentially connected with the creation of a new kind of autonomous individual, the humanitarian lineage does not and cannot account for many of the central notions of the rights of man, ones that Hunt ignores: other sorts of judicial guarantees, the right to practice one’s religion, the liberty to speak one’s mind or publish freely and, above all, the protection of private property.
The second half of Hunt’s book turns to some of these subjects, in a highly readable story of the revolutionary declaration of the rights of man. She gives Americans credit for announcing human rights first (even though, again, they used the phrase “natural rights” and did not accord bodily suffering the same centrality). To their discredit, Hunt argues, the Americans did not keep the faith with their own contribution. Luckily, the French soon took up the torch, especially in their Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. Hunt is most interested in what she repeatedly calls the cascading logic of human rights, whereby those who announced rights were compelled to extend them to Jews, blacks and women (or at least to consider doing so). And when groups initially excluded from humanity were not brought into the fold, as Hunt points out, they sometimes forced the issue. Early feminists like Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft declared the rights of women, while slaves in the French Caribbean demanded liberation.
Even restricting attention to what Hunt does cover, her massively disproportionate emphasis on bodily violation in general and on torture specifically is revealing. Hunt’s book is for an audience for whom torture—and other visible state action—is the most grievous affront to morality. But humanitarian sentiment will seem less praiseworthy to anyone who suspects that the focus on visible forms of cruelty obscures structural wrongs that are less easy to see—even when they sometimes also cause the body to suffer, as with the pangs of hunger or the exhaustion of work. This is the sense in which Hunt’s narrative is structured to provide background and authority for 1990s humanitarian idealism—and its recent after-effects. There is a relationship between George W. Bush’s justification of the Iraq War as a humanitarian campaign against “torture chambers and rape rooms” and the single-minded focus on America’s own torture sparked by the Abu Ghraib images.11 Only very recently could outrage so tightly focused on Abu Ghraib shift to deeper questions, whether about the morality and plausibility of the war and the global relations that permitted it or the inherently violent nature of occupation. Hunt’s exclusive concern with spectacular wrongs like torture therefore comes at a price. It leads her to overlook, among other things, the central place held by the right to private property in the declarations of the era, as well as the countervailing pressure for social and economic rights. Strangely, for a book about the revolutionary invention of human rights, Hunt fails even to mention either the “right to work,” which first appeared during the French Revolution, or the very different declaration of rights of 1793, which first featured it.
But in the end the main failing of Hunt’s book—and the contemporary agenda of human rights history—is not selectivity. In a highly summary concluding chapter, Hunt indicates that the point of her tale is to explain how it later became possible for the United Nations to base itself on human rights in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and for a global movement to form. But this is to forsake an authentically historical treatment of rights in the age of revolution. And if historians miss how different rights were in the past, they will fail even to recognize what it would take to explain rights in the present.
Hunt often treats “human rights” as a body of ideas somehow insulated from history—as if they were a set of beliefs analogous to heliocentrism or relativity, needing only discovery and acceptance. The protagonists of her book are not people thinking and acting on their convictions but rights themselves, which do things like “creep,” “thicken,” “gain ground,” “gather momentum,” “reveal a tendency to cascade,” have a “bulldozer force,” “make their way ineluctably,” “take shape by fits and starts,” “take a backseat” and “remain in need of rescue.”12 Hunt provides historical details about the recognition of human rights but ultimately seems to think of them as timeless. In a few mysterious asides, she suggests that rights have biological foundations, in spite of her own demonstration of how chronologically and culturally specific they are.
But a series of interlocking contexts for the revolutionary rights at the center of Hunt’s book shows that they need to be differentiated from contemporary “human rights,” rather than seen as paving the way for their eventual triumph. So the difficulty is not just that many of the rights of the era are left out of account but that those that are examined need to be put in the proper context.
The first crucial fact is that humanitarianism could underwrite violations of rights as well as their defense. Forty years ago, Arendt argued that the explosion of pity was the source not of rights but of terror. The most important text for critically analyzing emotion in the politics of the period, Arendt’s On Revolution (1963), interpreted Maximilien Robespierre’s Terror not as an act of demented criminality but as the first politics based on feeling others’ pain. But for Robespierre, the alleviation of suffering required what he called “a compassionate knife” to lance the dangerous pustules on the body politic, purging the enemies of virtue without and within. The results were catastrophic: “Par pitié, par amour pour l’humanité,” petitioners from the Paris Commune wrote to the National Convention, “soyez inhumains!”—out of pity and love of humanity, you must be inhuman.13 Hunt briefly acknowledges some of the dark sides of a culture of sentimental virtue, like sensationalism and compassion fatigue. But the Terror is not in her book, and so she does not confront Arendt’s disquieting contention that “pity, taken as the spring of virtue, has proved to possess a greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself.”14 (It is not for nothing that Communist parties, particularly the French one, have always seen 1917 as the logical successor of 1789.)
If humanitarianism could have ambiguous consequences, so could rights themselves. Some historians have attached great significance to the fact that the French, even in 1789, did not proclaim the rights of man alone; they declared the rights of “man and citizen,” as part of a paean to the general will. From the outset of the French Revolution, there was a conceptual and political dilemma between membership in humanity and membership in a collective. And what if a choice arose between honoring the rights of men and preserving the community of citizens? The doyenne of the field, Hunt has for a few years been insisting that the French Revolution needs to be defended as a progressive victory against those skeptics who would reduce the event to its violence and terror. She deserves great credit for doing so, but it is rather disappointing that she fails to address how revolutionary-era rights might be salvaged from their implication in the bloodshed that so swiftly followed upon their announcement.
The abolition of torture, climaxing in the Revolution, also needs to be understood in a larger context of the changing deployment of violence. In her study of the campaign against torture, Hunt echoes Michel Foucault’s view in Discipline and Punish that modernity forced the state to relinquish its hold on the body; but while Foucault famously argued that this departure involved more insidious forms of control, Hunt defends it as a good thing. Yet both overlook the fact that the violence involved in what Hunt calls the “sacrificial rite” of punishment under the Old Regime—in which the criminal’s public torture provided communal expiation—persisted in novel and magnified forms.15 As historian David Bell spells out in a fascinating book, the invention of total war over the revolutionary years, whose explosion swamped the world with more devastating