Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights

Summary

How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so? – Does that state it aright? You sign sad assent. Well, I too feel that, the full force of that. It is Nature. But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King. Though the ocean, which is inviolate Nature primeval, though this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the King’s officers lies our duty in a sphere correspondingly natural? So little is that true, that in receiving our commissions we in the most important regards ceased to be natural free agents.

Herman Melville, Billy Budd

Who would not agree today with Hannah Arendt’s famous dictum that there is and always has been an inalienable “right to have rights” as part of the human condition? Human rights are the doxa of our time, belonging among those convictions of our society that are tacitly presumed to be self-evident truths and that define the space of the conceivable and utterable. Anyone who voices doubt about human rights apparently moves beyond the accepted bounds of universal morality in a time of humanitarian and military interventions. The only issue still contested today is how human rights might be implemented on a global scale and how to reconcile, for example, sovereignty and human rights. Whether human rights in themselves represent a meaningful legal or moral category for political action in the first place appears to be beyond question. The contributions to this volume seek to explain how human rights attained this self-evidence during the political crises and conflicts of the twentieth century.

Implicit in this objective is the hypothesis that concepts of human rights changed in fundamental ways between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Like all legal norms, human rights are historical. Initially formulated in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, they almost disappeared from political and legal discourse in the nineteenth century, while other concepts such as “civilization,” “nation,” “race,” and “class” gained dominance. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did human rights develop into a political and legal vocabulary for confronting abuses of disciplinary state power (of “governmentality” in the Foucauldian sense) – a claim foreign to revolutionaries of the eighteenth century, who believed that the nation-state would guarantee civil and human rights and who simply assumed that those parts of the world not yet organized as nation-states were extra-legal territories. One of the paradoxical results of the catastrophic experiences of the two world wars and the subsequent wars of decolonization was that the notions of global unity and the equality of rights became objects of international politics. Our argument is that human rights achieved the status of doxa once they had provided a language for political claim making and counter-claims – liberal-democratic, but also socialist and postcolonial. It was not until the last two decades of the twentieth century that human rights developed into the “lingua franca of global moral thought.” Only at this time were they invoked to legitimate humanitarian and military interventions, thereby serving as a hegemonic technique of international politics that presented particular interests as universal.