“Decline of Natural Rights, Rise of Humanitarianism?
Emplotments of the Nineteenth-Century in Recent Human Rights History”
Matthew Specter
Central Connecticut State University
Center for Human Rights, Duke University
Jan. 15, 2012
In the historiography of human rights that has emerged over the last 10 years or
so, coverage of the long nineteenth century is the thinnest. A professor seeking to
prepare a lecture course on the evolution of human rights discourse (or the concept) from
the Enlightenment to the drafting of the Universal Declaration, could avail herself of a
great number of secondary sources on the Enlightenment up to and including the French
and Haitian revolutions. This would be equally true for the period since 1945, but she
would find far fewer resources to draw on for narrating the years 1804-1914. Lynn
Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights for example dedicates less than thirty pages of her 200page account to the nineteenth century, post-Haitian independence .1 The leading
textbook by Paul Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen,
devotes just over one of nine historically chronological chapters to the nineteenth
century.2 A popular textbook, Micheline Ishay’s The History of Human Rights, devotes a
chapter but it is considerably narrower in focus than Lauren’s.3 The journalist Adam
Hochschild has written two vivid and engaging narrative histories grounded in
scholarship by professional historians—Bury the Chains: The Fight to Free an Empire’s
1
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2007).
Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Univ. of Penn Press,
2003).
3
Micheline Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004.
2
1
Slaves, and Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, but the professor will have
difficulty inserting these into a coherent larger narrative of the nineteenth century.4
Faced with the challenge of narrating the history of human rights as a continuous
story, our hypothetical professor will find she can reach for one of two narrative frames.
(We can return to the question of whether a continuous story is necessary or desirable.)
The preponderance of the existing historiography emplots the century in one of two ways.
The first master-narrative contains “the decline of natural rights” as its plot line; the
second emplots the century as the “the rise of humanitarianism.” As I will show below,
these are the most recognizable master-narratives of the nineteenth century available for
bridging the gaps which arise between the French Revolution and the First World War.
The professor can use one or both of these narrative frames. But no sooner has our
professor found a serviceable narrative within his grasp do nagging doubts surface.
First, one wonders whether emplotments of “rise” and “decline” are adequate to
the complexity of historical process, perhaps unwittingly teleological. Second, and more
pressing, these emplotments only obliquely refer to “human rights” at all. That is, the
very protagonists of these narratives—“natural rights” and “humanitarianism”
respectively—may be construed as impostors, illegitimate substitutes for the real object
we seek. Neither natural rights nor humanitarianism are unproblematic synonyms or
analogues for the unit-idea “human rights.” And so even if we scholars could arrive at a
consensus that the nineteenth century witnessed the decline of natural rights alongside the
rise of humanitarianism, should we recognize those concepts as the genuine forerunners
of human rights? If we take Sam Moyn’s strong suggestion that human rights are wholly
4
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); idem, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in
Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
2
distinct from natural rights,5 and infer from it that a genealogy of human rights which
traces its origin to natural rights is neither plausible nor meaningful, then it appears that
the decline of natural rights metanarrative, whether correct or not, would be essentially
irrelevant.
Historians of the human rights field will also have to adjudicate to what extent
humanitarianism constitutes a bona fide part of the field, or not. Michael Barnett, the
author of a recent history of humanitarianism, offers a definition which distinguishes it
from human rights in three ways:
Human rights relies on a discourse of rights, humanitarianism a discourse
of needs. Human rights relies on legal discourses and frameworks,
whereas humanitarianism shifts attention to moral codes and sentiments.
Human rights typically focuses on the long-term goal of eliminating the
causes of suffering, humanitarianism on the urgent goal of keeping people
alive.6
If this taxonomy is plausible (as I find it) then the relevance of the second
metanarrative—the rise of humanitarianism—to our field is also in doubt. This means
that the field can be viewed in two ways: Historians have not made up their minds about
the relevance of natural rights or humanitarianism to human rights proper. If we decide
that the family resemblances between the concepts of natural rights, human rights and
humanitarianism are sufficiently compelling, then the nineteenth century field has
achieved a lot already. If these family resemblances are not compelling, on the other
hand, then the field is not only fragmented but also incoherent.
5
See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2010), 11-44.
6
Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarian ism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2011), 16.
3
The state of the field divides into roughly four clusters: one concerned with the
intersection of humanitarianism, human rights and revolution in the Atlantic world, from
roughly 1750-1830; a second, concerned with the intellectual and political history of
Western European liberal constitutionalism and its critics; a third, which treats of
Europe’s international relations with its empires and the wider world from the 1860s to
the first World War; and a fourth which examines the connection between minority rights
and the nation-state, the politics of inclusion and exclusion. While the first cluster has
privileged the methods of cultural history, and the second intellectual history, the third
and fourth have privileged transnational or international history.7
The field has only begun to outgrow the two most dominant emplotments of the
trajectory of rights discourse. This survey of recent work in the nineteenth century human
rights field will conclude that 1) cultural, intellectual, and international political and
international legal history need to be better integrated; 2) European, Atlantic and global
perspectives need to be better integrated; and 3) that the concepts of “humanity,”
“civilization,” and “internationalism” may help us transcend the currently dominant
emplotments of the century in terms of rise vs. decline and presence vs. absence. New
work on the intersection of empire, international politics, and rights discourse points the
way to a more integrated discussion of rights discourses, social movements and
humanitarian practices.
The Decline of Natural Rights - and its Successors
7
Compare Stefan Ludwig-Hoffmann, “Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights,” 1-28 in idem, ed.
Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6-13.
4
In a recent methodological essay, “Genealogies of Human Rights,” Stefan
Ludwig-Hoffmann suggests that the gap between natural rights (18th century) and human
rights (20th century) cannot convincingly be bridged by “prevailing conceptions of a
seamless evolution of human rights.” Rather we should aim “to explicate more clearly
their [human rights’] historical reconfigurations and ruptures between 1800 and 1945.”8
The case for studying reconfiguration and rupture stems from the recognition of a
problem: namely, that natural rights declined or disappeared in this period. As LudwigHoffmann writes:
The concept of the ‘rights of man,’ however, essentially vanished from
European politics in the epoch between the 18th century revolutions and
the world wars of the 20th century, or was replaced (again) by (civil)
liberties…Nor did the notion of human rights have great currency in 19th
and early 20th century political thought.9
Ludwig-Hoffmann is not alone in concluding that natural rights declined, even to the
vanishing point. According to political philosopher Michael Freeman, “The period from
the French Revolution to the Second World War was the dark age of the concept of
human rights. We are now in its second age.”10 In Freeman’s highly compressed
narrative, the violence of the French Revolution discredited natural rights; utilitarianism
moved into the gap left by its retreat, permitting it to “supersede” natural rights as the
theoretical basis for political reform in both England and France.11 Freeman
acknowledges the existence of rights discourse in Hegel, but argues that Hegel shifted the
emphasis from individual entitlements to the collective good. Of Marx, Weber and
Durkheim, he writes, “If the concept of rights appeared in such analyses at all, it did so
8
Ludwig-Hoffmann, “Genealogies,” 7.
Ludwig-Hoffmann, “Genealogies,” 6-7.
10
Michael Freeman, Human Rights: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Second Edition. Cambridge UK:
Polity, 2011), 37.
11
Freeman, Human Rights, 32.
9
5
not as a fundamental philosophical category to guide ethical and political action, but
rather as an ideological construct to be explained by social science.”12 Freeman
concludes his brief tour d’horizon with the following observation:
Certain practical political questions-- such as those concerning slavery,
minorities and colonial rule—were sometimes discussed in the language
of the Rights of Man…Other social movements…[e.g.] for the social and
political rights of women; workers’ and socialist movements; and the
development of the humanitarian laws of war--laid important foundations
for the future of human rights.13
Thus while Freeman begins his account of the nineteenth century with the trope of the
“dark age,” he concludes, awkwardly, that important foundations for human rights were
laid in this period. Moreover, these “important foundations” for 20th century human rights
are said to have been laid by the same 19th century socialists whom he earlier described
as apostates of rights discourse.
In an unpublished chapter of his new book, political theorist Jeremy Waldron
concurs with Freeman about the French Revolution: “There can be no doubt about the
impact of the French Revolution and the subsequent Terror in discrediting natural right at
least in the first twenty or thirty years of the nineteenth century.”14 But he also wonders
to what extent the decline of natural right can be attributed to the reaction against the
revolution in France, and by contrast, to what extent “it was the effect of independent
streams of thought, such as positivism and historicism.”15 Waldron’s argument resembles
Freeman’s in two other ways. Waldron writes that: “As a framework for thought, natural
right suffered a radical decline in the social and political sciences.”16 He argues that most
12
Freeman, Human Rights, 35.
Freeman, Human Rights, 36.
14
Waldron, “The Decline of Natural Right,” Ch. 20, unpublished book manuscript, 7.
15
Waldron, “Decline,” 3.
16
Waldron “Decline,” 3.
13
6
intellectual endeavor was “inhospitable” to natural rights, but “matters were not so clear
in jurisprudence [or in the]…writings of some prominent economists.” 17 Finally, like
Freeman, Waldron (who follows George Sabine), emphasizes that the English
utilitarians—Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill found the discourse of natural right
uncongenial to the project of institutional reform, presumably, Waldron writes, because
the assertion of foundational first principles inhibited the careful weighing of
consequences.18
Neither for Marx nor for the socialists who shared liberal ideals, Waldron writes,
was the theory of natural right appealing.19 “Like the utilitarians, they believed that their
affirmative claims should be made directly, without having to be phrased in the idiom of
a less disingenuous understanding of natural right.”20 In a brief section of Inventing
Human Rights, Lynn Hunt describes the relationship of socialism and communism to
rights discourse ambivalently, vacillating in her description:
Socialists and Communists wanted to ensure that the lower classes would
enjoy social and economic equality rather than just equal political rights.
Yet even as they drew attention to rights that had been shortchanged by
the proponents of the rights of man, Socialist and Communist
organizations inevitably downgraded the importance of rights as a goal.21
Hunt is trying to have it both ways, but her difficulty seems symptomatic of the
awkwardness of fitting Marxism into the human rights canon. Does the unsparing critique
of liberal constitutionalism in Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”(1842) really belong as a
point in a nineteenth century narrative arc, or does it mark the vanishing point of human
17
Waldron “Decline,” 3.
Waldron “Decline,” 9.
19
Waldron, “Decline,” 10.
20
Waldron, “Decline,” 11.
21
Hunt, Inventing, 196.
18
7
rights?22 What kinds of absence constitute a presence for Hunt is left unclear:
[While]…Marx’s view was clear-cut…Socialists and Communists nonetheless
raised…enduring questions about rights.”23 For Michéline Ishay, socialist rights
discourse merit an entire chapter: “Human Rights in the Industrial Age: The
Development of a Socialist Perspective on Human Rights”24—whereas for LudwigHoffmann, the nineteenth century European Left’s program is obscured rather than
illumined by the category of human rights because workers sought rights that depended
on membership in the nation-state.
The European Left emphasized not freedom from the state but rather
freedom in and through the state, over which they sought to gain
control…Only during the Dreyfus affair and the founding of the Ligue
pour la Defense des Droits de l’Homme at the end of the century did
socialists and republicans discover the value of individual rights vis-à-vis
the state.25
Ludwig-Hoffmann insists that the socialist struggles for and against rights, with which
Hunt wrestles, are better understood as a chapter in the struggles for social and political
inclusion qua citizens, rather than a struggle over the definition of rights:, i.e. the civil
and political versus the social and economic. In his brief treatment of Marx and
nineteenth century socialism, Paul Gordon Lauren, by contrast, writes: “It is out of this
context of class exploitation that we thus discover the significant emergence of a second
generation of human rights: namely, social and economic rights.”26 Perhaps it is time for
22
One appealing answer can be inferred from Warren Breckman’s conclusion to his study of the Young
Hegelians: “However the main point is that inadvertently and fatefully, in the quest for human
emancipation from all external authority, in the search for preconditions of the fullest individual selfrealization, Marx left vacant the very center of the discourse of rights, the person as the bearer of rights and
freedoms.” Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning
the Self (Cambridge UP, 1999), 306.
23
Hunt, Inventing, 196-7.
24
Micheline Ishay, History of Human Rights, 117-72.
25
Ludwig Hoffmann, “Genealogies,” 9.
26
Lauren, Visions Seen, 55.
8
intellectual historians to investigate the use of rights language by socialist and workers’
movements without the constraining assumptions made by Lauren that they are a subset
of human rights, or Ludwig-Hoffmann’s equally constraining assumption that they are
not.
The rise of nationalism has long been a staple of nineteenth century intellectual
history, and historians of human rights have begun to colonize this territory as well. Lynn
Hunt’s emplotment of nationalism, for example, depends on the “decline of natural
rights” metanarrative: universally applicable natural rights “subsided” before
constitutionally guaranteed rights. In early nationalist thinkers like Mazzini, Bolívar, and
Mickiewicz, writes Hunt, the nation became the vehicle for realizing “human rights.”27
[The] long gap in the history of human rights from their initial formulation
in the American and French revolutions to the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights has to give anyone pause. Rights did not disappear in either
thought or action but the discussions and decrees now transpired almost
exclusively in national frameworks.28
“Rights did not disappear”: again, note the contrast with Ludwig-Hoffmann’s thesis.
Hunt paints in broad strokes: the failure of the 1848 revolutions “opened the way” for
nationalism to move “from the left to the right of the political spectrum.”29 Hunt
describes this movement as the “ironic” result of history’s cunning. She sketches an
unconvincing idealist dialectic at work:
If rights were to be less than universal, equal, and natural, then reasons
had to be given. As a consequence, the nineteenth century saw an
explosion in biological explanations of difference…In effect the sweeping
claims about sameness called forth equally global assertions about natural
difference, producing a new kind of opponent to human rights, more
powerful and sinister even than the traditional ones.”30
27
Hunt, Inventing, 186.
Hunt, Inventing, 176, emphasis added.
29
Hunt, Inventing 183.
30
Hunt, Inventing 186-7, emphasis added.
28
9
Waldron also assigns to nationalism an important place in his account of natural rights’
decline. While in principle the case for democracy could be made in terms of natural
right—and was, by the Chartists for example—Waldron points out, the project of national
self-determination in 19th century Europe generally posed the question of “what peoples,
not persons, were entitled to,” and as a result, “the doctrine of natural right was pushed to
one side.”31 “…As the nineteenth century wore on…the theory of natural right was
simply marginalized in nationalist discourse or superseded by thicker theories of popular
emancipation. Natural right seemed thin, quant and irrelevant by comparison, and it
remained so until the 20th century, when people understood the need to revive it…”32
But Waldron’s story is not uniformly declinist.
If the story of natural right as “a theory of society and an inspiration for political
action” is one of decline, there is, he writes, another “side of the story” visible in the law.
“The continuing influence of natural law in 19th century Continental jurisprudence, long
after it had been marginalized to the point of nonexistence in philosophy and sociology,”
left a “modicum of space for [it].”33 This observation suggests that more attention to
jurisprudence might contain the potential to revise the declinist narrative. A similar case
might be made for theology. Consider that the Papal Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum
Novarum (Of New Things), referred explicitly to “the natural rights of mankind.”34
According to historian Jean Quataert, genealogical histories of human rights
commit one of two distinct fallacies: the first regards all historical expressions of rights
and moral principles as forerunners of human rights, and [by doing so] elides them
31
Waldron, “Decline,” 11.
Waldron, “Decline,” 12.
33
Waldron, “Decline,” 14,
34
Described in Lauren, Visions Seen, 57.
32
10
altogether. The second understands human rights to be a ‘revival’ or ‘rebirth’ of natural
rights philosophy and law characteristic of the European Enlightenment in the 18th
century. Her second point echoes Moyn’s critique of the conflation of natural rights and
human rights.35 As she puts it, the two concepts “impose very different understandings of
duties and obligations on the bearers.” While natural rights specify relations of obligation
between fellow citizens, human rights precepts “…[guarantee] all human beings rights in
international law” and thereby “shift the location of accountability from domestic to
international institutions.”36 And what is her critique of the “rebirth” motif?
A notion of rebirth leaves out the whole post-Enlightenment history of
political thought and action that critiqued the limitations of natural rights
principles. For more than a century and a half, radical, socialist, feminist,
nationalist and anticolonial struggles emerged to defend alternative visions
and strategies to achieve justice, dignity, freedom and equality in
society.37
While some versions of the “revival/rebirth” narrative may, as Quataert suggests, omit all
of the historical challenges to natural rights she mentions above, it must be said in
defense of Lauren and Ishay that they succeed in providing precisely what, according to
Quataert, they should be unable to. Quataert believes Lauren’s book commits the first
fallacy: “For the long time frame before the mid-twentieth century, he uses the two
concepts –natural rights and human rights--as one.”38 Even if we concede this point, it is
clear that Lauren shares Quataert’s ambition to render this same “century and a half of
radical, socialist, feminist, nationalist and anticolonial struggles,” and that he paints a
much more comprehensive portrait of this century and a half than she does. How best to
35
See Moyn, The Last Utopia, 11-44.
Jean Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylania Press, 1999), 12.
37
Quataert, Advocating, 12.
38
Quataert, Advocating, 11.
36
11
emplot rights discourse in the nineteenth century—as a tradition in decline, subject of an
ironic dialectic, or site of immanent critique and progress—remains up for grabs.
Humanitarianism and Human Rights in the Historiography of British Abolitionism,
the French, and Haitian Revolutions
In 1989, the philosopher Richard Rorty published what became one of the
signature texts for liberals in the American academy: Contingency, Irony,and Solidarity.
Following Judith Shklar’s parsimonious definition that liberals are those who think that
cruelty is the worst thing we can do, Rorty defined himself as a liberal ironist: “For
liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question: Why not be cruel?”39 The liberal
ironist in other words recognizes that humanity has a moral history, and the fact that
morality has a history means that it is not anchored in God or nature. The historicity of
morality teaches us late-modern liberals humility about the truths we hold self-evident,
for their self-evidence is an artifact of a historical evolution that could have turned out
differently.
While today there is scarcely a political actor in the world who will disavow the
commitment to human rights as a measure of political legitimacy, the increasingly
universal recognition of human rights does not attest to the discovery of what is true, on
Rorty’s analysis, as much as the accomplishment of a cultural project. Rorty had no
interest in tearing down human rights as a universal marker of political legitimacy; he
wanted, however, for Western liberals to see it as a product of a specific, contingent
history of moral learning: “In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to
be recognized by…burrowing down to previously hidden depths, but rather as a goal to
39
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xv.
12
be achieved.”40 And the engine driving this moral progress according to Rorty, is not the
rationality of secular philosophers since the Enlightenment, but its humble and denigrated
shadow: emotion. Moral imagination and empathy, not argument, is what accounts for
the successes we have already had in forging a culture committed to human rights:
“[Human solidarity] is to be achieved not by inquiry, but by imagination, the imaginative
ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection
but created.”41 Ethnography, journalist’s reports, comic books, TV docudramas and
especially the novel, all “[give] us details about kinds of suffering being endured by
people to whom we had previously not attended.”42 Hence novels, movie and television
programs “have gradually but steadily replaced the sermon and the treatise as the
principal vehicles of moral change and progress.”43
For Rorty, Kant’s ethics is emblematic of the false self-understanding of modern
liberals.
He saw respect for ‘reason’, the common core of humanity as the only
motive which was not merely ‘empirical’—not dependent on the accidents
of attention or history. By contrasting ‘rational respect’ with feelings of
pity and benevolence, he made the latter seem dubious, second rate
motives for not being cruel. He made ‘morality’ something distinct from
the ability to notice and identify with pain and humiliation.44
Rorty’s critique of Kant was aimed at more contemporary philosophers like Jürgen
Habermas who have worked in the Kantian tradition of explicating the dignity of man in
terms of his/her rationality, his ability to communicate, or his ability to deliberate
publicly on issues of common concern.
40
Rorty, Contingency, xvi.
Rorty, Contingency, xvi.
42
Rorty, Contingency, xvi.
43
Rorty, Contingency, xvi.
44
Rorty, Contingency, 193.
41
13
Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, is a nearly perfect Rortyan account of the
history of Western morality, which lends historical evidence to Rorty’s claim that it is
emotion not reason which has served as the engine of moral progress. In that work, Hunt
argues that the origin of our contemporary commitment to human rights as a marker of
political legitimacy—i.e. its codification in the Universal Declaration (1948), and
ratification by nearly every state on earth in Vienna (1993), lies in a highly contingent set
of developments in eighteenth century Europe. In her focus on emotion, she is in fact
building on nearly two decades of work by scholars of the Enlightenment which has
fundamentally revised and replaced the textbook image of the eighteenth century culture
of Enlightenment as an “Age of Reason.”
Cultural historian William Reddy synthesized much of this revisionist literature
into a new portrait of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in his 2001 work, The
Navigation of Feeling. “From 1794 to the present, the history of the Enlightenment has
been presented largely as a matter of science, rationality, social contract and natural
right.”45 What is effaced or erased thereby is the “gradual and thorough alteration of
emotional common sense that occurred between 1650 and 1789.”46 The revolution on
Reddy’s reading is the culmination of a much longer-term cultivation of humanitarian
sentiment and sensibility. Emotional commitments to the idea of humanity and a duty to
relieve suffering were the deeper substructure on which the political drama of the
revolution played out. Humanitarianism, not human rights, was its script. “The existence
of an unspoken set of sentimentalist assumptions, a different emotional common sense
from our own, is the missing link that can draw together all the recent efforts to make
45
William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 142
46
Reddy, Navigation, 143.
14
sense of the revolution.”47 The night of August 4, 1789, which set the formulation of the
Declaration in motion, “was widely described as a kind of sentimental cascade of
reforms. Expressions of feeling often brought deliberation to a complete halt.” 48
Education of the moral imagination, the cultivation of new emotions and sensations—not
the internalization of rational arguments—was the force behind the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen (1789).49
In a parallel set of Rortyan moves, Hunt argues that, “Philosophical ideas, legal
traditions and revolutionary politics had to have [an] inner emotional reference point for
human rights to be truly ‘self-evident.’ ” “Underpinning these notions of liberty and
rights,” Hunt asserts, “was a set of assumptions about individual autonomy.”50
Philosophical arguments for human autonomy, she implies, only gained cognitive
salience because of a broader social transformation which preceded their dissemination.
My argument depends on the notion that reading accounts of torture or
epistolary novels had physical effects that translated into brain changes
and came back out as new concepts about the organization of social and
political life. New kinds of reading (and viewing and listening) created
new individual experiences (empathy) which in turn made possible new
social and political concepts (human rights)…For human rights to become
self-evident, ordinary people had to have new understandings that came
from new kinds of feelings.51
Like Rorty, Hunt argues that novels “showcase” a desire for autonomy, as well as
“create” a sense of equality and empathy. The result was a new eighteenth century culture
47
Reddy, Navigation, 182.
Reddy, Navigation, 183.
49
Note that Reddy’s concept of emotives provides a much richer and cogent account of the
interrelationship of bios and logos than Hunt’s superficial remarks on how novel-reading causes “brain
changes.”
50
Hunt, Inventing, 27.
51
Hunt, Inventing, 33-34.
48
15
which “configured” our capacity for empathy.52 The authors Fielding, Von Haller and
Diderot believed that the novels of their day—Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) and
Rousseau’s Julie (1762), for example—functioned as a kind of “hothouse of emotional
learning”53 When Jefferson was asked in 1771 for a list of recommended books, Hunt
recounts, he commended fiction as a better educator of the moral sensibility than history
or other fields.54 (Perhaps a career spent amidst the Jefferson-designed campus of
University of Virginia suggested to Rorty that he revive this insight.)
The historiography of British abolitionism shares certain features with this
Rortyan historiography of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, though much of
it predates Rorty’s intervention. In Slavery and Western Culture, historian David Brion
Davis argued for the importance of the “man of feeling” in the British campaigns to end
its participation in the slave trade in 1807.55 The leadership of intellectuals like Thomas
Clarkson and William Wilberforce in these campaigns, fits the model drawn for us by
historians of an eighteenth century Enlightenment culture which prized sentiment as
much as reason.
“Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility,” a celebrated pair of
essays written in 1987 by the historian Thomas Haskell, ventured a similar argument for
the priority of sentiment and sensibility to other factors in explaining the British
abolitionist movement.56 Building on Seymour Drescher’s important conclusion in
Econocide that the movement could not be explained in terms of economic interests
52
Hunt, Inventing, 39.
Hunt, Inventing, 55.
54
Hunt, Inventing, 57.
55
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966),
363.
56
Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part I,” The American
Historical Review Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), 339-361; “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian
Sensibility, Part II,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 3 (Jun., 1985)
53
16
alone—capitalism did not on this account require that human slavery end—Haskell made
a cultural argument that contained a materialist foundation: the expansion of the market.57
Capitalism gave rise to the humanitarian sensibility, which in turn drove certain segments
of Western elites to humanitarian activism, because the expansion of a global market
opened new modes of perceiving connections, connectedness and contractual
responsibility. These changes in economic exchange and legal contracts, led to a shift in
the perception of responsibility for the suffering of distant strangers. Capitalism’s rise—
quite unintentionally, and in contradiction with its dominant party’s interests—yielded a
surprising and entirely contingent outcome: a feeling of empathy, even solidarity with
suffering strangers, and a sense of moral duty to alleviate that suffering. Haskell emplots
the rise of humanitarianism in the ironic mode.
Like Hunt and Reddy, Haskell seeks an explanation for changing forms of
cognition: “What altered cognitive style in a ‘humanitarian’ direction was not in the first
instance the ascendancy of a new class…but rather the expansion of the market…into
spheres of life previously untouched by it.”58 But unlike Hunt’s, Haskell’s method has a
more plausible materialist grounding:
The rise of antislavery sentiment was, among other things, an upwelling of
powerful feelings of sympathy, guilt and anger, but these emotions would
not have emerged when they did, taken the forms they did, or produced
the same results if they had not been called into being by a prior change in
the perception of causal relations.59
57
Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1977).
58
Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism,” 342.
59
Haskell, “Capitalism,” 343.
17
Thus on Haskell’s account, a revolution in moral concern occurred in Western Europe
between 1750 and 1850.60 But whether this revolutionary wave constitutes a chapter in
the history of human rights is contested, and rightly so. For one, Haskell’s humanitarians
are mostly elite, so if this is a revolution, it is one limited by race and class. Second, the
posture of humanitarians in this period is so paternalistic—coexisting with so many
implicit assumptions about inequality—that we may want to scrutinize its credentials
closely before including it in our purview. The case could be made that abolitionism is at
least as much a counter-revolutionary project of containing the emancipatory project that
begins with the French, and continues in the Haitian revolution.
When I teach the late 18th and early 19th century, I tend to suggest that
“humanitarianism” and human rights are both conceptually and historically distinct:
while humanitarianism is best imagined as a vertical relationship—of a feeling subject
“above” and an object of sentimental concern “below,” human rights entails a horizontal
relationship among subjects who know—not just feel—themselves to be equal, and can
rationally arrive at the conclusion that because all humans require agency and dignity,
that solidarity between equals is a moral and political imperative.61 But whether this
distinction helps or hinders us from grasping the discursive constructs and lived
experiences of the past remains an open question. I return to this point in my conclusion.
Whether we call it reformist or revolutionary, name it humanitarianism or human
rights, scholars seems to agree that a major cultural shift occurred around 1750. What
Haskell calls an “unprecedented wave of reform sentiment,” Michael Barnett dubs
60
Haskell, “An unprecedented wave of humanitarian reform sentiment swept through the societies of
Western Europe, and North America in the hundred years following 1750,”
61
My thinking on these matters has been shaped by Michael Ignatieff’s Human Rights: Politics and
Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens,
Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and generally, the writings of
Jürgen Habermas, Hauke Brunkhorst and Regina Kreide.
18
(unironically) the “humanitarian big bang”62: “a revolution in moral sentiments and the
emergence of a cultural of compassion.”63 In Adam Hochschild’s telling, the British
abolitionists who in 1787 founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave
Trade, formed not only the “greatest of all human rights movements,”64 but also the first:
“It was the first time a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for
many years, over someone else’s rights. And most startling of all, the rights of people of
another color, on another continent.”65 To historian Stefan Ludwig-Hoffmann’s more
skeptical eye, however, the techniques used by the Society to mobilize public opinion in
the 1780s, underscore the the inherently paternalistic nature of the abolitionist project: the
famous image by Josiah Wedgwood of a black man on one knee: “Am I not a man and a
brother,” figuratively expresses the wide gap between humanitarianism and human rights
proper. As Ludwig-Hoffmann points out, Hochschild himself seems to recognize this, but
nonetheless makes no effort to resolve the contradiction.66 In support of his critique of
Hochschild’s anachronisms, Ludwig-Hoffmann notes that Tocqueville believed there was
no connection between British abolitionism and “the French tradition of human rights.”67
Hochschild uses the presentist language of human rights, but occasionally speaks
in a more measured voice: for example, no sooner has Hochschild presented Thomas
Clarkson’s epiphany of 1785 as a mythical Ur-moment for the modern human rights
62
Barnett, Humanity, 51-56.
Barnett, Humanity, 52.
64
Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 112.
65
Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 5.
66
“Adam Hochschild…later contradicts himself when he writes about the sentiments of the abolitionists
towards the slaves: ‘The African may have been ‘a man and a brother,’ but he was definitely a younger and
grateful brother, a kneeling one, not a rebellious one. At a time when members of the British upper class
did not kneel even for prayer in church, the image of the pleading slave victim reflected a crusade, whose
leaders saw themselves as uplifting the downtrodden, not fighting for equal rights for all.” Hochschild,
Bury the Chains, 133-134, cited in Ludwig-Hoffmann, “Genealogies,” 8.
67
Ludwig-Hoffmann, “Genealogies,” 7.
63
19
movement, than he phrases it more modestly as a “landmark on the long, tortuous path to
the modern conception of universal human rights.”68 This phrasing raises an important
question: do emplotments of nineteenth century thinkers, social movements, texts, or
events as “landmarks” amount to teleological thinking? There are at least two ways to
defend Hochschild: the first is that his use of the term “landmark” and “path” is an
expression of the inescapably narrative character of historical thought and imagination at
work. Second, there is nothing inherently teleological in the suggestion that the path to
the modern conception of human rights was “long and tortuous”; on the contrary, it
seems to highlight the very danger of teleology in the first place.
Does Hochschild in fact blur the conceptual boundaries between humanitarianism
(vertical, paternalistic, reformist, elite) and human rights (horizontal, egalitarian,
revolutionary, universal)? He does. But Hochschild has reasons for this that stem from
his activist posture. Bury the Chains functions not only on the constative level, but on the
performative one. That is, the text seeks to make its readers feel injustice and believe in
change—it is an activist text—and in this, it faithfully replicates the experiences in the
“hothouse” of emotional learning of which Hunt spoke, and Reddy described with his
concept of “emotives.” Hochschild seeks to shape his readers and educate their emotions
with his historical narrative in precisely the ways Rorty hoped novels would.
Furthermore, blurring the human rights/humanitarianism boundary may not
constitute a historical sin per se, even if it may offend some of our philosophical
instincts. Robin Blackburn has noted that, “In fact there were to be currents of
abolitionism which, for whatever reason, did not use the language of rights, but preferred
68
Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 89, emphasis added.
20
the golden rule and basic human sympathy.”69 Barnett echoes Blackburn’s assertion that
abolitionism has a hybrid quality: “This humanitarian spirit also incorporated ideologies
of paternalism. Although humanitarianism contained discourses of human equality, they
also existed alongside discourses of Christianity, colonialism, and commerce that deemed
the ‘civilized’ peoples superior to the backward populations.”70 The hybridity of
abolitionist discourse has spurred divergent scholarly responses.
Hochschild implies that because abolitionists worked against their individual and
national economic interests, they must therefore have been animated by a spirit of
selflessness and empathy. Christopher Leslie Brown has recently reframed the debate by
proposing the notion that abolitionists gained “moral capital” from their activities even as
it depleted their economic capital. Brown notes that he is not the first scholar to argue
that the British empire sought or acquired moral capital from its antislavery initiatives,71
but he is the first to argue that the crisis of the British empire between 1763 and 1783 is
the key to understanding the timing of its emergence. “The American Revolution did not
cause abolitionism in Britain…The crisis in imperial authority did, however, make the
institution of slavery matter politically in ways that it had never mattered before.”72
Brown’s emphasis on political timing and contingency can be read as a riposte to the
cultural longue durée of sentimentalism invoked in different ways by Haskell, Hunt and
David Brion Davis.
69
Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (New York: Verso,
2011), 155.
70
Barnett, Humanity, 55, emphasis added.
71
See Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 29.
72
Brown, Moral Capital, 27. The same passage is also approvingly cited in Blackburn, The American
Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (Verso, 20110), 165, fn. 42. Whereas Drescher denies
any connection between the North American defeat and the rise of British abolitionism, Chris Brown and
Linda Colley affirm the connection. Blackburn says he is “encouraged to persist” in his view, because of
their findings.
21
If antislavery sentiment alone could have caused an anti-slavery
movement, the campaign against the British slave trade should have
commenced at least fifty years before it did. Slave traders in Britain
encountered public disapproval early in the eighteenth century, decades
before the emergence of those cultural movements often credited for
engendering antislavery sentiment, decades before the height of the
Evangelical revival, or the apex of the European Enlightenment, or the
emergence of the cult of sensibility.73
While Brown credits Davis with demonstrating significant cultural shifts in the
eighteenth century—“By the early 1770s, a large number of moralists, poets, intellectuals
and reformers had come to regard American slavery as an unmitigated evil”74—but then
suggests that Davis succumbs to teleology: “If the conclusion is incontestable, its
implications may mislead by seeming to render the emergence of abolitionism, thereafter,
as a foregone conclusion. Davis does summon considerable evidence of suppressed
impulses, false starts, and haphazard development in his account.” But, Brown writes, the
interpretive tradition to which Davis belongs, “…can tend to suggest a linear unfolding of
antislavery ideas and values…overemphasizes the march of ideas and wrongly minimizes
the social and political contexts that allowed ideas to matter.”75 In sum, Brown criticizes
Davis for overemphasizing culture at the expense of politics.
What are the implications of the moral capital turn in the historiography of
abolitionism? Ludwig-Hoffmann reads Christopher Brown’s argument for politics over
culture to suggest that neither humanitarian nor natural rights discourses were particularly
salient factors in the abolitionist project: “…The success of the [British abolitionist]
movement had less to do with a new humanitarian sensibility for the ‘rights of man’ than
73
Brown, Moral Capital, 37.
Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 488, cited in Brown, Moral Capital, 41, fn. 10.
75
Brown, Moral Capital, 41, fn. 10.
74
22
with this [Christian] evangelicalism and the political crisis of the British Empire.”76 By
contrast, Robin Blackburn adopts Chris Brown’s account of the crisis of the British
empire and appends it to the rise of humanitarian sensibility argument, without appearing
to succumb to the teleological problem Brown discerned in Davis. (Whether Blackburn
can succeed in having it both ways is beyond my expertise to judge, but the point here is
that he believes there is no contradiction.) While both Ludwig-Hoffmann and Blackburn
to some extent follow Brown’s “moral capital” interpretation, Blackburn diverges from
him by emphasizing print culture as a real force: “Print culture and the spoken word—
sermons and public reading, novels and poetry- were eventually to express a generalized
humanitarian sentiment that tried to break with the prevailing language of commerce,
civilization and racial difference.”77 In this regard, Blackburn aligns well with Haskell
and Hunt’s Rortyan emphasis on the place of print culture in the origins of the “new
politics of sensibility” and the rejection of cruelty.
Whether early 19th century struggles are distorted or illumined by the term
“human rights” is a theme raised by Robin Blackburn’s debate with Sam Moyn about the
significance of the Haitian Revolution.78 Blackburn agrees with Moyn’s assertion that
“the rights asserted in early modern revolutions and championed thereafter were central
to the construction of state and nation,” but disagrees with Moyn’s conclusion that they
“led nowhere until very recently.”79 “The historical record simply does not bear out the
claim that struggles against slavery inspired by appeals to natural rights ‘led nowhere.’ ”
76
Stefan Ludwig-Hoffmann, “Genealogies,” 7.
Blackburn, Crucible, 153.
78
See Robin Blackburn, “Reclaiming Human Rights,” New Left Review (May/June 2011), 126-138.
79
Blackburn is agreeing with this quote from Moyn: “Of all the glaring confusions in the search for
‘precursors’ of human rights, one must have pride of place. Far from being sources of appeal that
transcended state and nation, the rights in early modern revolutions and championed thereafter were central
to the construction of state and nation and led nowhere beyond until very recently.” See Moyn, The Last
Utopia, 12.
77
23
80
While Blackburn is willing to “…readily grant that it would be anachronistic to
attribute modern human rights doctrines to revolutionaries in St. Domingue or Haiti in the
1790s,” he avers that because the impact of Haiti on “modern political culture” should
not be neglected81--and thus, he implies, by a logic that is not clearly spelled out—the
human rights label is not anachronistic. Accordingly, Blackburn defends the decision of
Laurent Dubois in his Avengers of the New World, to emplot his account of the Haitian
revolution as a chapter in “human rights” history. Dubois writes that the Haitian
Revolutionaries claimed “human rights”: “If we live in a world in which democracy is
meant to exclude no one, it is in no small part because of the actions of those slaves in St.
Domingue who insisted that human rights were theirs too.”82 Dubois’s claim that the
immanent potential of rights discourse reaches its realization in Haiti: it was “the most
concrete expression that the rights proclaimed in France’s 1789 Declaration were indeed
universal.”83 Lynn Hunt embedded the Haitian Revolution in a chapter of her Inventing
Human Rights, entitled “There Will Be No End of It,” a reference to the “cascading
logic” of rights claims set in motion by the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen:
As the discussion of rights spread in France, it undercut the legislature’s
attempt to keep the colonies outside of the constitution, even as it
ineluctably galvanized the free men of color and slaves themselves to
make new demands and fight fiercely for them.84
80
Blackburn, Crucible, 5. Elsewhere, according to Blackburn, Moyn has noted that “it might be worth
pondering in what ways the campaign to abolish slavery…anticipated contemporary human rights
movements.”
81
Blackburn, Crucible, 203.
82
Dubois, Avengers of the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.
83
Dubois, Avengers of the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.
84
Hunt, Inventing, 166.
24
While Moyn has rightly eviscerated the idealist logic of a “rights cascade,”85 for its
allegedly ineluctable character, Blackburn faults Moyn for discounting the ideational
dimension of the Haitian Revolution too much. And in riposte to Moyn’s critique of
Hunt’s invocation of the “soft power” of human rights in the Haitian Revolution,
Blackburn defends Hunt: “Republican France did help—and arm—Toussaint, and did so,
at least in part, because of the ideology—soft power—of the ‘rights of man’ and ‘liberty
and equality.’”86
Blackburn’s use of the the metaphor of the “pivot” makes it clear that he is one
scholar who does believe the nineteenth century can and should be emplotted as a whole.
In the long nineteenth century, the Haitian revolution forms “the pivot” on which the
century’s progress rotates. “While general histories have rightly studied the novel
aspirations fostered by the American and French revolutions, they have to often failed
properly to register the contribution of Haiti and Spanish America in extending and
reworking the doctrine of the ‘rights of man and citizen.’ ”87 Blackburn’s metaphor of
“extending and reworking” echoes Ludwig-Hoffmann’s suggestion that we attend to the
multiple sites of the century where rights discourse is “reconfigured.” Perhaps there are a
few good books to be written on nineteenth century memory of the Haitian Revolution.
And this kind of attention to lieux de memoires may help us move beyond the still
somewhat stilted efforts to characterize the century to date.
Examples of these stilted characterizations include Barnett and Lauren’s recent
works. Barnett’s master-trope for the century, “The Age of Imperial Humanitarianism,” is
85
Samuel Moyn, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” [review of Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights] in The
Nation, April 16, 2007 [Print].
86
Blackburn, Crucible, 3.
87
Blackburn, Crucible, 4.
25
suggestive, but the breadth of the material covered in his sub-chapters may be
symptomatic of a creeping disciplinary imperialism. With sections entitled, “Saving
Slaves, Sinners, Savages and Societies,” and “Saving Soldiers and Civilians during
War,”88 one wonders what could not be emplotted under this rubric (as well as the perils
of alliteration). After digesting Lauren’s chapter on the nineteenth century, one feels a
little too full: “To Protect Humanity and Defend Justice: Early International Efforts,” is
divided into sub-topics which betray a tendency towards encyclopedism: “To Free the
Enslaved”; “To Assist the Exploited”; “To Care for the Wounded”; “To Protect the
Persecuted.”89
The Global Turn: Empire, Internationalism, and the Civilizing Mission
In a series of major essays written from 1995 to 2011, historians Charles Bright
and Michael Geyer have argued that the 1850s and 1860s form the crucial “watershed”
years in the making of the modern world political and economic order.90 In Europe, post1815 stability unraveled in the clash of the Russians and Ottomans in the Crimea; this in
turn set loose nation-building efforts in Italy and Germany; the British and French ended
up on the defensive in the face of the United States and Germany, and an overseas
scramble for territories commenced: in “a series of fallback moves…the British looked
increasingly to a secondary tier of developing nations overseas to absorb the goods they
could no longer sell in continental Europe and American markets because of rising
88
Lauren, International Human Rights, 37-70.
Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “Regimes of World Order: Global Integration and the Production of
Difference in Twentieth Century World History,” 208-229 in Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Anand
A. Yang, Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2005).
89
26
tariffs.”91 The 1850s and 60s are also the precise decades, according to historians Martin
Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, in which transnational linkages between societies achieve
the qualitative leap forward into the realm of internationalism:
Thus although this process of interlinking may have begun earlier and in
other areas, it was only the conscious creation of international movements
and the cross-national dissemination of people, commodities, and culture
from Europe that laid the foundation for our modern concept of
internationalism.”92
The work of Geyer and Paulmann as well as Bright and Geyer suggest that a global turn
may help us surmount the aporias of rise/decline, presence/absence we have encountered
in the two literatures I have surveyed thus far. A third group of historical works on the
intersection of empire, international politics, and rights discourse points the way to a
more integrated discussion of rights discourses, social movements and humanitarian
practices, and suggests that more attention to the concepts of “humanity,” “civilization,”
and “internationalism” may help us transcend the currently dominant emplotments of the
nineteenth century.
But this literature has its own master-tropes, or modes of emplotment, which seem
to limit it. Most characteristic of recent essays and books by Mark Mazower, Martti
Koskeniemmi, Jörg Fisch, and Eric Weitz, are emplotted in an ironic mode that highlights
unintended consequences, or a kind of a devouring dialectic of enlightenment. Gestures
towards inclusion mask or accompany simultaneous and more serious exclusions. A good
example of this can be found in the recent article, “International Politics and the
Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations and Civilizing Missions,” in
91
Bright and Geyer, “Regimes of World Order,” 209.
Martin Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society and Politics
from the 1840s to the First World War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2,
emphasis added.
92
27
which historian Eric Weitz argues that human rights and humanitarian projects in the 20th
century cannot be understood merely as “responses” to the “stimulus” of atrocity.93
Rather, European minority rights protections that developed beginning in the 1860s, for
example, did not constitute a “response” to the threat of deportations, but a parallel and
interrelated phenomenon:
Stimulus and response is not the appropriate metaphor, because
deportations and protection ran together—they emerged chronologically at
roughly the same point in time, the 1860s, and were both legitimized by
bilateral and multilateral treaties that the Great Powers either signed or
blessed. And they sit at the epicenter of an array of words and policies that
also marked the shift to a politics focused on populations, both within
Europe and in the larger European imperial world: civilizing mission, selfdetermination, minorities and majorities, mandates, and genocide.94
Consider in this context the parallel and overlapping argument Michael Barnett
makes about “imperial humanitarianism”:
Intervention, in other words, was intended to produce emancipation and
liberation as defined by the civilized. In this way humanitarianism’s
emancipatory spirit also contained mechanisms of control. It targeted
specific populations that might be particularly restive…These
interventions would not only give food, shelter, and hope to the indigent
and thus take the edge off of rebellion, they would also help to weave the
new moral order. What humanitarianism could give, humanitarianism
could also take away.
Mark Mazower argues in an analogous mode. In “The End of Civilization and the Rise of
Human Rights: The Mid-Twentieth Century Disjuncture,” From 1815-1945, he writes,
the idea of human rights was inextricably interwoven with the facts of European
dominance in international relations. The international state system was “based on the
primary of European power and values, and the rationalization of their imperial
93
Eric Weitz, “International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations
and Civilizing Missions,” The American Historical Review 113, 5 (December 2008), 1313-1343.
94
Weitz, “Entangled Histories,” 1313-14.
28
expansion in terms of the spreading of civilization and its accompanying rights.”95
According to Mazower, the work of legal historians Martti Koskeniemmi and Anthony
Anghie teach that international law was, both by design and in function, an ideological
prop (“moral-procedural aid for the preservation of order among sovereign states”).96
Between the 1840s and the 1860s or 1870s, Mazower argues that international law’s
standard of what counted as a “civilized” state changed. A plurality of civilizational
standards was replaced by a single one. As Mazower explains:
In 1845, the influential American international lawyer Henry Wheaton had
actually talked in terms of the ‘international law of Christianity’ versus the
law used by Mohammedan Powers’; but within twenty or thirty years,
such pluralism had all but vanished.97
After the mid-century conjuncture, therefore, Victorian international law made clear
distinctions between “a civilized Christendom and the noncivilized but potentially
civilizable non-European world.”98 Mazower refers us to the international lawer James
Lorimer, who in his writings of the 1880s, placed all states in one of three categories—
civilized, barbaric/semi-civilized, and savage.99 In the Victorian international legal mind,
the Ottoman Empire for example was imagined as “semi-civilized,” but all of Africa
“savage.” Only the Japanese, by securing the successful repeal of the unequal treaties of
mid-century after 1894, “seriously challenged the nineteenth-century identification of
civilization with Christendom.”100 European efforts to “spread rights” in the Ottoman
95
Mark Mazower, “The End of Civilization and the Rise of Human Rights: The Mid-Twentieth Century
Disjuncture,” in Stefan Ludwig Hoffmann, ed. Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 29.
96
See Martti Koskeniemmi, M. Koskeniemmi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, 1870-1960 (Cambridge
University Press, 2001); Anthony Anghie, Colonialism, Sovereignty and International Law (Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
97
Mazower,“Mid-Twentieth Century Disjuncture,” 31.
98
Mazower, “Mid-Twentieth Century Disjuncture,” 32, 34.
99
Mazower, “Mid-Twentieth Century Disjuncture,” 32.
100
Mazower, “Mid-Twentieth Century Disjuncture,” 34.
29
Empire (i.e., obtain recognition of minority rights by treaty), was “tied directly to a
willingness to override the formal sovereignty of non-European powers.” In conclusion,
Mazower implies that international law and human rights were, in this period, no more
than a “mechanism for justifying differential policies towards the sovereignty of different
types of states.”101
In an essay published a decade earlier, “Internationalizing Civilization by
Dissolving International Society: The Status of Non-European Territories in
Nineteenth-Century International Law,” Jörg Fisch makes much the same point:
Where there was no civilized state, territories were open to occupation by
any civilized state. Thus international law which had earlier recognized
non-European political entities as, in principle, equal, was dismantled in
the name of a further-reaching internationalism of civilization.102
The concept of a unitary civilizational standard, Fisch argues, functioned as a weapon by
which European powers could disregard the sovereign rights of non-European countries.
Ludwig-Hoffmann too, follows Fisch and Koskeniemmi in arguing that, “In contrast to
the constitutions of the era, natural rights arguments did still play a role in international
law…however they ultimately served European imperialism in that sovereignty was tied
to a European standard of civilization.”103
Jean Quataert extends this argument about implicit bad faith to the laws of war
promoted at the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907, two common plot points in most
19th century human rights histories. 104 As she notes, colonial powers were not obliged to
101
Mazower, “Mid-Twentieth Century Disjuncture,” 32.
102
Geyer and Paulmann, xi, 10. See Fisch, “Internationalizing Civilization by Dissolving International
Society: The Status of Non-European Territories in Nineteenth-Century International Law,” Mechanics of
Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, 235-258.
103
Ludwig-Hoffmann, “Genealogies,”11.
104
Twenty-six nations attended the first Hague peace conference; 44 attended the second, including
representatives from China, Japan, and Latin American nations.
30
adhere to the laws civilizing warfare if they were waged within the “dependent
territories” of an empire. Thus an ideologically self-serving circular logic was at work:
…The very norms of humane warfare were seen to differentiate the
‘civilized’ nations from the ‘savage’ peoples. In circular fashion, the
conventions on the laws of war were only open to the so-called civilized
states, which affirmed this status by adhering to the laws of war.105
One should compare this account of the late nineteenth-century of the humanitarian
revolution in warfare with the more sanguine (but hardly Panglossian) account of Lauren
in his chapter, “To Care for the Wounded.” There Lauren traces the development of
humanitarian law, or what is sometimes called “human rights law in armed conflict,”
from Henry Dunant’s 1862 book, A Memoir of Solferino, to the Hague Conventions of
1899 and 1907. According to Lauren, Dunant’s novelistic depiction of the horrors of the
Battle of Solferino, an 1859 battle in the Franco-Austrian War, became a best-selling
book due to its poignancy, was much translated and republished, and thereby “aroused
public opinion.” Dunant became the prime mover behind the creation of a Geneva
International Conference in 1863, which attracted delegates from fourteen nations. The
delegates formed the International Committee of the Red Cross, and “chose as their
emblem the Swiss flag in reverse, placing a red cross on a white background.”106 A year
later, sixteen governments met to negotiate the first Geneva Convention— the Geneva
Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded of 1864: “the first
multilateral treaty in history to protect the individual in times of war.”107 The 1899
Hague Peace conference merits a mention for Lauren because the Convention on the
105
Quataert, Advocating, 35.
Lauren, Visions, 60.
107
Lauren, Visions, 61.
106
31
Laws and Customs of War on Land adopted there, “spoke explicitly of ‘rights’.”108 In
conclusion, Lauren emplots the formation of the International Committee of the Red
Cross and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 as a set of:
…dramatic advances for visions of human rights. For the first time,
positive law in the form of international treaties established certain rights
for the protection of individual victims in war. These early efforts began
by acknowledging the ‘dictates of the public conscience,” by focusing on
the rights of those combatants wounded in battle, and articulating the
principles of the ‘laws of humanity.’…Together, they all thus helped to
lay the critical foundations for humanitarian law recognizing that
individuals in time of war possessed certain basic human rights and that
their protection was a legitimate issue that demanded international
action.109
While Lauren has been much criticized for his allegedly “teleological” approach, I find
much to commend in the work, and wonder if the emphasis on paradox that we find in
Mazower, Koskeniemmi, Fisch and Weitz is producing limiting distortions of its own.
Does the distinction between “human rights” and “humanitarianism” hold up in
the case of the laws of war? Quataert writes that the Hague Final Acts of 1899 “opened a
humanitarian space where the ‘necessities of war’ were expected to ‘yield to the
requirements of humanity.”110 The Martens Clause, inserted into the Preamble of the
1899 Fourth Convention, specified ‘laws of humanity’ which were to proscribe behavior
even if not explicitly prohibited by treaty.111 The language of the clause is interesting
because it appears to contradict the narrative of the decline of natural rights, that we
found so dominant in the historiography. It reads:
Until a perfectly complete code of the laws of war is issued, the
Conference thinks it right to declare that in cases not included in the
108
Lauren, Visions, 62.
Lauren, Visions Seen, 62.
110
Quataert, Advocating, 33.
111
Quataert, Advocating, 34.
109
32
present arrangement, populations and belligerents remain under the
protection and empire of the principles of international law, as they result
from the usages established between civilized nations, from the laws of
humanity and the requirements of the public conscience.112
The Martens clause was subsequently invoked at Nuremberg in the efforts to establish
jurisdiction over “crimes against humanity.”
Perhaps the decision of the editors to name their journal, Humanity: A Journal of
Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, founded in 2010, corresponds to my
own desire to find new angles of approach to a historical field which has been dominated
by the two dominant modes of emplotment described in my paper: the decline of natural
rights discourse, and the rise of humanitarian sensibility. The thesis of this essay was that
those two modes of emplotment, either singly or in tandem, have dominated the
nineteenth century field to date. The title of the journal suggests that we need not choose
between the two modes of emplotment, or the two core concepts themselves. In a recent
essay introducing their dossier on gender and humanitarianism, guest editors Samuel
Martínez and Kathryn Libal argue that a neat distinction between rights discourse and
humanitarianism is unproductive:
Rather than seeking premature and possibly false resolution of where
humanitarian representations leave off and rights-based claims begin,
contributors to this special issue foreground conjunctures and divergences
between humanitarianism and human rights both historically and as social
processes and forces today.113
But as I have already suggested above, there may be an unresolvable tension between the
agenda of the political theorist who rightfully emphasizes the differences between
empathy and solidarity, and the historian who wishes to grasp the coexistence of
112
113
Quataert, Advocating, 34.
Humanity: A Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 2, 2 (Fall, 2011), 163.
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paternalistic discourses with egalitarian ones. Does good history require precisely the
openness to a blurring of categories that political theorists seek to expunge?
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