Samuel Moyn and the new history of human rights

Abstract

Human rights is suddenly a booming field for historians. Political theorists, international relations specialists and legal scholars for years have explored the intellectual and political concept of human rights with acuity. But not historians. Legions of histories cover rights struggles in particular settings. Intellectual histories abound that locate the origins of rights in Ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence or 17th-century Britain or, perhaps more fantastically, in Mesopotamia and the Hammurabi Code. But a history of human rights in a broad sense, one that places the near-present in historical context, that explores the political and social as well as the intellectual history of rights, all with a global dimension and in critical fashion – that has been sorely lacking, although we are on the cusp of a small wave of interesting works. Certainly, the phrase human rights now pops up in countless dissertations and as the title of articles in numerous issues of historical journals. In North America, every undergraduate and graduate curriculum, it seems, has introduced, just in the last few years, a rich pallet of courses on human rights. Into this slowly boiling cauldron comes Samuel Moyn with the first critical history of human rights. The book is a significant achievement. The very small collection of histories that we have – literally a handful, though that is fast changing – has been linear and triumphalist and, very often, focused nearly exclusively on the United States, as Moyn rightly argues. Instructive they have been, and many historians and human rights scholars in general have benefited greatly from the works of Paul Gorden Lauren, Micheline Ishay, Mary Ann Glendon, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Lynn Hunt and Jean Quataert, to name some of the most prominent examples. But their histories have been written as if a straight line runs from the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Or the founding moment is seen to be 1941 and the Atlantic Charter or 1945 and the establishment of the United Nations, both expressions of the high tide of