Human Rights and the Abuses of History by Samuel Moyn

Excerpt

Samuel Moyn is a human rights historian on a mission to prove two central arguments: the modern human rights movement did not start until the 1970s, and historians who look for earlier creation stories or direct antecedents are unconsciously mistaken or consciously manipulating the past. Siding more often with the latter, he posits that human rights history is often done by activists who look to justify present-day concerns and priorities by invoking illusory shadows and mirrors of the past. They are similar to priests seeking ancient (or 1940s era) scripture, prophets, and like-minded true believers to buttress the contemporary human rights “utopia” of his book’s title. The modern human rights movement derived not from Enlightenment philosophes, crusading abolitionists, Nuremberg judges, or Holocaust survivors. Such claims ignore the necessarily limiting historical context and consciousness in which the alleged activists operated. If the contemporary movement is defined as the grassroots demanding individual protections from the state via appeal to transnational bodies, often coordinated by non-governmental organizations, its formation occurred merely 40 years ago. It was in the 1970s, Moyn argues in Human Rights and the Abuses of History, that alternative inspirational visions, such as reformist communism and anti-capitalist revolution, failed. Having ended formal colonialism and withdrawn from Indochina, the West, and the United States in particular, saw human rights as a moralistic construction upon which to base a re-assertive, confident, and meaningful diplomacy. Yet its usefulness has proven to be short-lived, as its principles have been used and abused to justify bloody and failed humanitarian missions and even aggressive imperialism, as in Iraq. Moyn ends his series of essays, several of which read more like book reviews, with a call for broader focus. An updated and relevant human rights movement, he writes, would engage in mass mobilization on behalf of economic and social rights and target the law-making branches of government rather than the judiciary. …