Human Rights and the Uses of History. Samuel Moyn
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her last pages, Hunt allows that the rise of humanitarianism and the upsurge of carnage are historical twins, thanks especially to the quintessentially modern penchant to sacrifice oneself and others in war waged for humanity’s sake or at least in humanity’s name. But she seems not to grasp that this admission amounts to a considerable qualification of her thesis, and she follows this insight with the bland reassurance that empathy “has become a more powerful force for good than ever before.”17
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
It is true, as Hunt insists, that Toussaint L’Ouverture and others were spurred by the French Revolution to seize citizenship when the metropolitan government did not live up to its rhetoric. But as the “cascade” did not happen by itself, it had to be forced through violence, and what these radicals insisted on was mainly their right to be masters of their fate. Hunt pays homage to “the soft power of humanity.” Toussaint, for his part, found it necessary to resort to steely weapons. In any case, the new image of Caribbean insurrection makes one wonder why twentieth-century anticolonialism, the movement from which James took his inspiration, most often eschewed the language of human rights, even though the Universal Declaration had only just been propounded.19
The Haitian case suggests another reason the connection between the revolutionary “cascade” and contemporary rights needs to be questioned. For slowly over time, but decisively by the post–World War II era, rights became separated from the revolutionary ambience in which they were originally articulated. As Arendt emphasized, rights in the late eighteenth century were part of revolutionary foundings. But it was nationalism, and even more so socialism, that inherited their radicalism, as well as their tolerance of violence. This is what makes it so difficult to assert any real link between the French Revolution and “human rights” of today. The immediate aftermath of World War II, when the Universal Declaration appeared, partook more of the spirit of restoration than it did of revolution (and the fundamental role of Catholics in the postwar promotion of talk of human rights extended this spirit).
Thus, when Eastern European dissidents made it possible for “human rights” to be reclaimed by liberals and the anti-Communist left in the 1970s, they asserted that what mattered most about those rights is that they were antirevolutionary. Václav Havel and Adam Michnik retrieved human rights precisely against the tradition of revolution—as an “antipolitics,” in Hungarian dissident George Konrád’s influential phrase.20 So human rights arose on the ruins of revolution, not as its descendant. That these figures later played a role in “velvet revolutions” of liberal democracy only reinforces this point. And their fervent support of Bush’s war, precisely as a human rights cause, raises new doubts about the defense of rights as an extra-political moral code—the stance that made them famous—and not just about their recent peregrinations.
But the most glaring difficulty in placing the French Revolution at the origins of human rights today is that—unlike dissidence—it gave rise to nothing like the international human rights movement so central to the contemporary moral imagination. It is worth pondering in what ways the campaign to abolish slavery, which began in the years Hunt covers, anticipated contemporary human rights movements. But to do so one would have to move beyond her way of defining human rights so as to see in them a set of institutional practices, prominently including international mobilization, information gathering, public shaming and so forth. Otherwise, there simply was no “rights of man movement” in the nineteenth century—or if there was, it was liberal nationalism, which sought to secure the rights of citizens resolutely in the national framework.
Hunt’s position is that nationalism sank the rights of man after their announcement, but from the first they were seen as overlapping or even identical commitments. (The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen insists that “no body and no individual may exercise authority which does not emanate expressly from the nation.”)21 True, there were occasional proto-internationalist moments in the era, as for example in the presence in the National Assembly of the amusingly named Anacharsis Cloots, a German baron who considered himself the voice of non-French humanity. (Among other things, he begged for military action against his own people.) But such innovations hardly pointed ahead to the United Nations or anticipated the contemporary realities of international law and international groups sprouting in civil society to pressure governments to obey it. (Cloots surfaces in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, in fact, as the symbol of multicultural humanity united on shipboard in a metaphysical quest, not for prophesying an international legal regime.22)
If rights had any internationalist pedigree flowing from the French Revolution, it was, alas, mainly to be found in Napoleon Bonaparte’s claim to be spreading the flame of the rights of man as he engulfed the world in the conflagration of his imperial designs. “Oh ye Egyptians,” Napoleon proclaimed in 1798 in advertising his conquest as a benevolent act, “they may say to you that I have not made an expedition hither for any other object than that of abolishing your religion … But tell the slanderers that I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.”23 Omitting the longstanding imperial entanglements of both humanitarianism and rights simply will not do; history shows how frequently they have been offered as justifications for invasion, expansion and annexation. This is not to say that the revolutionary rights of man anticipated George W. Bush and neoconservative empire, rather than a universalistic regime of international law; merely that one cannot embrace rights in the distant past without acknowledging their radically different futures.
Each of these diverse perspectives on revolutionary-era rights forces the same recognition. In order for the contemporary human rights movement to emerge, old meanings and associations had to be dropped and new ones formed. What Hunt presents as an epilogue to a creation long ago turns out to be what really needs explaining. This is what Marc Bloch meant when, in The Historian’s Craft, he indicted “the idol of origins.” A distant precondition for something is never its cause or trigger, and even continuity in history has to be explained in virtue of not just the long run but also the short term.
When, then, were human rights invented? As Hunt admits, the phrase hardly ever shows up in English in her period. And while it percolated in diplomatic and legal circles beginning in the 1940s, it was not until the 1970s, with the emergence of dissident movements in Eastern Europe, that it entered common parlance. This is the period that historians need to scrutinize most intently—the moment when human rights triumphed as a set of beliefs and as the stimulus for new activities and institutions, particularly non-governmental organizations. Yet the minds of human rights scholars constantly wander backward—disinclined, it seems, to face up to the recent vintage and contingent beginnings of their subject.
Of course, with the founding of the United Nations and its Universal Declaration (along with related instruments like the genocide convention, as well as the beginnings of intra-European rights protection), the 1940s were of obvious significance. But if there is little reason to locate the “invention” of human rights as we now know them in the late eighteenth century, there are scarcely more grounds for rooting them in World War II’s aftermath.
Currently, a powerful movement among American historians portrays contemporary human rights as flowing directly and fully formed out of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wartime vision and planning, much as Athena sprang from Zeus’s skull. For this school, the internationalist