The International Human Rights Movement: A History
POSTWAR UNIVERSALISM AND LEGAL THEORY
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights
In the summer of 1947, the Institute for International Law reconvened after a ten-year hiatus. For decades the self-appointed tribune of European “civilization” and the legal conscience of humanity, the Institute now hoped to retake its former role.
Given its prominence in the rhetoric of the Allied new order during World War II, the new concept of human rights – though international lawyers had not even fl irted with it before – stood as the fi rst item on their agenda. The atmosphere was one of bitter disappointment: Whatever the idealism of wartime dreams, the sad but obvious fact was that when it came time to enact a peaceful order – most fl agrantly in the Dumbarton Oaks documents, in which human rights did not even fi gure – a theory of sovereign power politics ruled. As for the United Nations Charter, the great powers had it adorned with the phrase human rights without providing either any definition of its values or any institutional means for their defense.
The international lawyers of Europe were, they believed, perhaps the last best hope for making good on what now seemed like broken promises. “Neither the Charter nor diplomatic wrangling is reassuring,” noted Charles de Visscher, Belgian international lawyer and judge (1946–1952) on the International Court of Justice who prepared the Institute’s report and proposal on human rights, in his opening remarks. “International organization,” he complained indignantly, “looks like a mere bureaucracy with neitherdirection nor soul, unable to open to humanity the horizons of a true international community.” A new international law, based on human rights and theorized and implemented by the caste of jurists, might, however, provide the “morally-inspired salvation” that the world clearly needed. Now comes a very curious statement: “Since the end of the second world war, a powerful current of ideas has arisen against the nameless abuses that we have witnessed: it is the personalist conception of society and power. The intellectual elites of all of the countries with liberal and democratic traditions are rallying to this conception.”
According to de Visscher, this “personalist conception” alone could provide the basis of an authentic turn to human rights and guide the response of law to Machiavellian power. In spite of the recent wave of studies of the origins of human rights after World War II, one would be hard pressed to understand what this leading international lawyer of the time was talking about. In fact, however, personalism was a principal feature of human rights consciouness of the 1940s, especially, though not exclusively, on the European Continent. What was personalism how was it possible to view it as the key to the turn to human rights, and how thoroughgoing a resonance did it really have in the postwar moment? Forgotten now, the spiritual and often explicitly religious approach to the human person was, this essay suggests, the conceptual means through which Continental Europe initially incorporated human rights – and, indeed, became the homeland of the notion for several decades. Recovering the centrality of personalism, however, should deeply unsettle prevailing opinion about what the concept of human rights implied in its founding era.
This essay surveys a few of its sources, looks at the breadth of its percolation (not least in legal thought), and evaluates the signifi cance of the personalist vehicle for rights in the 1940s. If this episode is missing from the emerging understanding of human rights, it should also drive home a larger lesson about the teleology, tunnel vision, and triumphalism that has so deeply affected current historiography. Universalistic and formalistic languages always have a historically specifi c and ideologically particular meaning, which it is the mission of historians to seek out. In early postwar Europe, human rights were – contrary to current expectations and desires – most associated with neither a revolutionary nor a republican heritage. For almost nobody were they the essence of post-Holocaust wisdom, not least since the crimes of Nazi evildoers were not yet understood to be primarily ones against the Jewish people.
Finally, they were not the inspiration for a new sort of private activism, which had other and later sources. Instead, human rights need to be closely linked, in their beginnings, to an epoch-making reinvention of conservatism. This defi ning event of postwar West European history is familiar from the more general historiography of the period in the form of Christian Democratic hegemony, but is absent so far from human rights history – even though this same Western Europe became the earliest homeland of the concept. In sum, human rights came to the world not just as part of a wartime internationalization of the American New Deal, but also, and just as crucially, as one element of a European reinvention of its humanism as it tried to put self-imposed disaster behind it. The first surprise, perhaps, is that concept of the person not only preexisted the mid-1940s, but had originally served different forces.
“We are neither individualists nor collectivists, we are personalists!” So proclaimed perhaps the earliest personalist political manifesto, put out by the rightist club Ordre Nouveau (New Order) in 1931. In its 1930s popularization, the person was an anti-liberal conception, and the chief task of tracing its eligibility for its postwar role is to follow the reversal that led it to imply rather than forbid a formalistic conception such as rights – or even a reinvention of international law based on it. The sources of “the person” – besides the Thomistic rendition of Jacques Maritain, who would become the premier postwar philosopher of human rights – were various. One important reference was the émigré Russian Orthodox philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, who brought to the West an Old Russian tradition of religious personalism.
Most decisive, according to the historian John Hellman, may have been the infl uence of the originally Russian-Jewish convert Alexandre Marc, who founded Ordre Nouveau together with the shadowy guru Arnaud Dandieu, an atheist follower of Friedrich Nietzsche considered the secret genius of personalism (though a mere librarian by day). In Germany, the most prominent personalist was Max Scheler, who also exerted influence elsewhere. Not just the cacophony of voices starting in the early 1930s but the essential indeterminacy of the concept made personalism highly ambiguous: the common but deeply contentious cause of Christian and para-Christian intellectuals from the far right to the communitarian “left.” The thinker who was to forge the most durable version of personalism, Maritain, could generously acknowledge as much: “There are at least a dozen personalist doctrines, which, at times, have nothing more in common than the term ‘person’.” Yet the ambiguity of personalism was, in a sense, its genius; it signaled the identity of the opposition clearly, while leaving fl exibility about what the alternative program was. (Its ambiguity was also a minimum condition for its eventual extrication from its typically reactionary and always illiberal origins.)
Personalism – linked quickly to spiritualism and humanism, and not infrequently to European identity – meant a repudiation of the rival materialisms of liberalism and communism. In the fi rst place, then, personalism was different than individualism, for it championed a figure who was supposed to overcome the destitute atomism of the politics and economics of the nineteenth century. If, however, the person provided a connection to community that individualism ruled out, it also provided the key source of value omitted in, and the political bulwark against, communism. Most boldly, personalists claimed that capitalism and communism, apparently foes, deserved each other, and canceled each other out, in their common materialism .
The spectrum of opinion championing personalism in the inaugural years of the early 1930s ranged from the far right to the farrago of publicists now known as experimental “non-conformists.” The so-called Young Right (Jeune Droite), an up-and-coming cohort of young reactionaries, self-proclaimed “defenders of the West,” were those originally part of Maritain’s reactionary circle when he affi liated with the royalist and anti-Semitic Action Française.
But, unlike him, they remained within the fold of the French conservative revolution as Maritain cut his ties with it. “Before the tragic failure of materialist prosperity,” one of these fi gures, Thierry Maulnier, wrote in 1932, “political humanism – the just reckoning of the person, and its possibilities and rights – would seem the sole formula… to furnish the acceptable elements of a reconstruction.” A group such as Ordre Nouveau was representative of nonconformism, a set of movements “neither right nor left” or rather both, since many of its members thought what was true in Marxism and communism – their opposition to bourgeois decadence and their hankering for the death of individualism – had to be saved, so as to redirect revolution against the bourgeoisie in a spiritualist and often explicitly Christian direction.
These were the early themes of personalism, then. But if the essential meaninglessness of the person was a minimum condition for the fact that it could eventually be extricated from its reactionary and non-conformist origins, one must at leastalso note that, for a time after 1934, communism tried to claim the slogan too. In that year, Nicolai Bukharin helped transform the appeal of communism in the West when he announced that the Soviet Union would make the realization of “the personality” for “the fi rst time… a mass phenomenon and not just… part of the slave-owning upper class in its various historical variants.”
Such a promise profoundly affected the way ordinary people imagined and constructed themselves; but its ramifi cations were also legal, as the Stalin Constitution of 1936 – in whose drafting Bukharin played an instrumental role – makes clear. Without question, however, the man who made the intellectual fortune of personalism was Emmanuel Mounier, due to the terrifi c impact of his nonconformist journal Esprit beginning in the early 1930s. Drastically expanding the purchase of the theme of the person in his early essays, Mounier proposed going back to where modernity started out in the Renaissance and trying again with a genuine humanism that freed Europe of the secular and liberal mistake of individualism. For Mounier, the challenge was to use the person to insist on respect for self-realization that “collectivism” ruled out, while pressing it to imply a community that brought atomized individuals back together.
This common idea was one that Mounier developed at length, including in his famous Manifesto in the Service of Personalism. Far from implying rights, this central personalism of the 1930s instead sought new forms of post-liberal politics as well as a personalist economy to go with them. “On the altar of this sad world,” Mounier wrote in an illustrative passage, “there is but one god, smiling and hideous: the Bourgeois”:
He has lost the true sense of being, he moves only among things, and things that are practical and that have been denuded of their mystery. He is a man without love, a Christian without conscience, an unbeliever without passion. He has defl ected the universe of virtues from its supposedly senseless course towards the infi nite and made it center about a petty system of social and psychological tranquility. For him there is only prosperity, health, common sense, balance, sweetness of life, comfort.… Next in line among bourgeois values are human respect and protection of rights.… Law is for him not an institution for justice, but the defence of the injustices he infl icts. Thence comes his harsh legalism.
Repudiating France’s then minuscule Christian Democratic party – in a notorious fracas with Paul Archambault, who considered him dangerous in the extreme – Mounier declared that “the ideology that we are combatting, and which still poisons all democrats, even Christian democrats, is the ideology of 89,” whose principles such as individual rights had to be “evaluated inthe light of our conception of man [and] of the Community that completes him.”
The puzzle is how the person, in spite of all these associations, would be readied for its intellectual – and harsh legalistic! – role later; and much of the solution to that puzzle depends on Jacques Maritain, who would, not coincidentally, become the most prominent thinker of any kind across the world to champion rights in the postwar moment. Personalism survived its original connotations, as the communitarian third way that it promised between individualism and communism transcended its reactionary (and occasional leftist) connotations to be linked tightly to Cold War conservatism. Maritain’s career provides the best guide, as a proxy for other trajectories in various places.
Ironically, the Young Right’s clearest source for claims about the relevance of the person was that very mentor who, many years later, would make it the foundation for human rights: Besides a few stray references, Maritain toyed with the sociopolitical relevance of “the person” first in his popular Action Française era book Three Reformers (1925). There he argued that the catastrophe of modernity, due to the sensualist heresiarch Martin Luther, the solipsist metaphysician René Descartes, and the bourgeois reformer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, left behind Saint Thomas’s person for the new individual. Thus, not just generally, but in Maritain’s own case, the basic claim of the political importance of “the person” antedated any break with the far right of his day, rather than driving it. “Are you well-informed about the ideological adventure that two pages of Three Reformers [those that originally introduced the
person/individual distinction] have allowed?” Maritain’s disciple Yves Simon could ask him in a letter as late as 1941, when the person still remained chiefly a reactionary conception, in spite of Maritain’s extraordinary labors by then to make it mean something different.
Yet Maritain had left the personalist revolution to others for a decade, while he continued his original and enduring interests in metaphysics and aesthetics. In the mid-1930s, this changed. As much as the negative example of the far right, it was Mounier’s para-Catholic and this-worldly combat for a personalist rupture – whatever that meant – that pushed Maritain to elaborate his own politics. (Intellectually and organizationally, Maritain had been instrumental in Mounier’s path to Esprit, but the obverse of the relationship has not been suffi ciently stressed. Maritain opposed Mounier’s drifts into apparent proximity to fascism, but would never have become a politicalthinker without Mounier’s example.) It is also clear that, though by then an anti-communist of quite long standing, Maritain was angered by the huge propaganda successes of communism in the West in the mid-1930s in the cultural preparation of Popular Front anti-fascism, as fi gures such as André Gide and André Malraux responded to Bukharin’s new propaganda by insisting that the Soviets might have the true recipe for the achievement of dignified humanity. Yet even in his Integral Humanism (1936), in which he spelled out his politics of personalism in most classic form, Maritain endorsed the person without endorsing rights, which was a sign of his proximity to non-conformist and illiberal currents in European thought.
There is no way to fathom Maritain’s conversion to rights – and that of the whole Continent – without looking to the larger Catholic Church’s conversion to personalism. How this happened was unexpected and dramatic, and due above all to events in the mid-1930s that decided Pius XI to commit the Church to anti-totalitarianism. The move toward the later twentiethcentury embrace of rights-talk as the essence of Christian social thought occurred neither at a slow and steady pace nor all at once in a single transformative moment. Famously, the Church had treated the notion of rights with vituperation for the entire modern period. It is not impossible to find allusions to the person and even to rights (though always those of family or labor) before the period of reversal. Yet these usages were “neither comprehensive nor tightly systematic.” The same was true of the rhetoric of new Catholic social movements that were of such signal importance to interwar history.
The crucial leap, which has not been effectively studied, occurred when Pius XI toward the end of his papacy began to use the terms in a more serious and organizing way. This remarkable turn against “statolatry” by no means compelled any embrace of rights as an organizing doctrine, but it did involve the assertionof religious sovereignty over personal conscience; very often, this sovereignty attached to the previously peripheral fi gure of the person. Interestingly, it was most frequently anti-liberal premises that led to what may seem a liberalizing outcome in this denunciation of the era’s dictators (Benito Mussolini sometimes exempted), with the modern and “secularist” separation of state from church often presented as having allowed the menacing totalitarian hypertrophy of the state to occur. 18 In any event, it was at this moment that Pius – who knew Maritain well and esteemed his work – turned emphatically to personalism as the foundation of Church’s spiritual alternative to totalitarianism, in 1937–1938. “Man, as a person,” Pius declared, “possesses rights that he holds from God and which must remain, with regard to the collectivity, beyond the reach of anything that would tend to deny them, to abolish them, or to neglect them.” This phraseology, from the anti-Nazi encyclical of March 1937, Mitbrennender Sorge , was matched by the anti-communist encyclical of the same month, Divini redemptoris , the latter with greater emphasis on the right of property in the context of a more general scheme of the rights of the person against the totalitarian collective.
It was thus in a moment of discovering two extreme political ideologies that, in its view, left no room for Christianity that some insisted on sovereignty over the “human,” over which in turn no merely temporal politics can claim full authority. Soon to become Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, in the summer of 1937, made clear the centrality of this new fi gure, decrying “a vast and dangerous conspiracy” threatening unlike any prior occasion “the inviolability of the human person that, in his sovereign wisdom and infi nite goodness, the Creator has honored with an incomparable dignity.” Further, Pacelli cited the critical line from Mit brennender Sorge to make clear that this inviolable dignity gave rise to some set of rights. Of course, personalist rights implied moral community, not the selfi sh entitlements of the bankrupt nineteenth century.
All the same, “if a society adopted the pretense that it could diminish the dignity of the human person in refusing it all or some of the rights that come to it from God, it would miss its goal.” What such changes in papal political theory meant on the ground, in the context of much other doctrine and the inherited weight of tradition, varied widely – especially after Pius XII’s election a year later to face the final crisis of the 1930s and the diffi cult choices of the war. With respect to thelanguage of rights as well as in other ways, Pius XII, like any good strategist, left his options open, encouraging some possible lines of future development and tolerating others. In different national contexts, rights-talk had different fates: The new language of the rights of the human person was not just passively received, but was creatively interpreted from place to place and moment to moment. As Paul Hanebrink has shown in the case of Hungarian debates, for example, what was at stake for some churchmen and Christian politicians was only “the rights of (Christian) man,” chiefl y the defense of the right of conversion against racist essentialism, still in the name of a exclusionary vision of a Christianized nation.
But in America – before Maritain ever turned to rights – a small band of liberal Catholics chose a different direction. In tune with his fi nal thought, Pius XI had written barely two months before his death that “Christian teaching alone gives full meaning to the demands of human rights and liberty because it alone gives worth and dignity to human personality.” In a pastoral letter in response to this statement in honor of the golden jubilee of Catholic University, American bishops took the argument a (textually unwarranted) step further: “His Holiness calls us to the defense of our democratic government in a constitution that safeguards the inalienable rights of man.” American Catholic liberals opposing Father Charles Coughlin’s Jew baiting founded the publication The Voice for Human Rights in 1939. Historians who have examined the crucial early war years to trace the remarkable affl atus of the hitherto largely unused (in English) phrase “human rights” have discovered minor percolations but little else until something happened to catapult the term into its immediate postwar career. Completely neglected among thesepercolations so far highlighted, however, is the comparatively early Catholic articulation of the human rights idea.
Soon European Catholics were repeating the slogan, and Maritain, on an American sojourn when France fell but transmitting his ideas back to the Continent throughout the war, made himself the premier interpreter of human rights among Catholics, and indeed almost singlehandedly reinvented them as a Christian tradition. By itself, personalism could have led Maritain, like so many other others, into the arms of the Vichy government, whose leader, indeed, himself proclaimed that “individualism has nothing in common with respect for the human person” (a respect he promised his regime would restore, along with religious civilization as a whole). Maritain’s formulae of the “primacy of the spiritual” and “integral humanism” were even used as sloganeering buzzwords by Vichyite intellectuals and youth. But Maritain, in exile, opposed Vichy uncompromisingly and soon became an inspiration for the Resistance, even if he was ambivalent about Charles de Gaulle as the Free French leader, on the grounds that de Gaulle would not concur with his vision of personalistic democracy. It was most clearly in early 1942 that Maritain transformed into the philosopher of human rights that he had never been before. In Natural Law and Human Rights, Maritain took what would be a fateful step for postwar intellectual history as a whole, making the claim that a revival of natural law implies a broad set of pre-political human rights.
What would have been – and still is – curious about this claim, of course, is that whatever their opinions of the origins of modern rights-talk, nearly all histories of the political language concur that the rise of rights in political theory occurred after and because of the destruction of the Thomistic natural law tradition. In either a stroke of a master, or a sleight of hand, or both, Maritain – as if the Thomistic movement had not long and unanimouslyrejected modern rights – claimed that the one implied the other and, indeed, that only the one plausibly and palatably justifi ed the other. Thanks to Maritain above all, the older view that Christianity’s political and social doctrine could not be reformulated in terms of rights was dropped in exchange for the claim that only the Christian vision placing them in the framework of the common good afforded a persuasive theory of rights. By his Christmas message of 1942, the one frequently discussed solely for its insuffi cient reference to Jewish suffering, Pius too was laying out his postwar vision in terms of the dignity of the person and human rights. This trajectory cemented the resonance of the dignity of the human person as the communitarian framework for the new rights-talk. By 1942, British Catholic Christopher Dawson (who had imported Maritain in his reactionary phase to Great Britain along with Carl Schmitt in his Catholic phase) was sounding similar themes. “We are standing against an order in which all human rights and the human person itself are immolated on the altar of power to the glory of the New Leviathan,” he wrote. Alluding to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “four freedoms,” he now explained, in spite of his formerly reactionary politics,
The liberties which we demand and which humanity demands are not the right of the strong to oppress the weak or the right of the ambitious to enrich themselves at other men’s expense: but the elementary right which are to the human spirit what air and light are to the body: freedom to worship God, freedom of speech, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
All the same, he clarified that if Christianity now implied some sort of democracy, it could not be a liberal kind: It must be a social order directed to spiritual ends.… From this point of view the use of the term “Democracy” as the defi nition of our cause is not completely satisfactory. For Democracy has a restricted political signifi cance which by no means covers the whole field of values that has to be defended, and the confusion of Democracy as a general term for our tradition of social freedom, and its more limited but more accurate political meaning, is apt to produce misunderstanding and disagreement. For the cause that we are defending is far more fundamental than any form of government or any political creed. It is bound up with the whole tradition of Western and Christian culture.…
No doubt Democracy as an ideal does stand for these things and is the outcome of this tradition. But in practice modern democratic culture often represents only a debased and secularized version of this ideal and in many respects, as de Tocqueville saw more than a century ago, it prepares the way for the coming of the new mass order which achieves political form in the totalitarian State. What we are defending, in short, is not democracy but humanity. 31Dawson’s argument made sense in light of prewar conceptions of democracy, which prioritized its formalistic associations as a “bourgeois” electoral and economic phenomenon that both far left and Christian politics were agreed in rejecting in the name of substantive moral community. As the war continued, however, one of Maritain’s main purposes was to lay out a new, Christian conception of democracy that transcended these narrow limits, and soon the Pope would agree. Democracy and humanity could coincide.
In the flow of Christian political theory in these years, in fact, the original commitment of the non-individualist person in the non-totalitarian community remained stable, as the overall governing framework into which rights were introduced. In other words, the superimposition of rights on personalism meant as much continuity as change. In an atmosphere in which many Catholics understood the defense of the West to mean all-out war against Bolshevism even at the price of alliance with unholy forces, Maritain’s message was primarily directed against the European preference for fascism as the lesser evil. “An obscure process of leniency toward totalitarian forms that lying propaganda tries to picture as the upholders of order,” Maritain regretted at the University of Pennsylvania bicentennial in 1940, “has thus invaded parts of the believing groups in many countries.”
“The error of those Catholics who follow Pétain in France or Franco in Spain,” Maritain wrote Charles de Gaulle in 1941, “is to convert Catholic thought, through lack of social and political education, in the direction of old paternalistic conceptions of history rejected in the meantime by the popes and condemned by history.” In the process, Maritain’s attitude toward the catastrophe of modernity softened slightly but discernibly (though it never reversed). The ambivalence is well captured in his Fortune magazine story of 1942 in which he still castigated modern man for “claim[ing] human rights and dignity – without God, for his ideology grounded human rights and human dignity in a godlike, infi nite autonomy of human will,” while also now referring to the apparently alternative “concept of, and devotion to, the rights of the human person” as “the most signifi cant political improvement of modern times.”
His relative move toward an affi rmation of a specifi c kind of state framework within which alone a “new Christian order” could come about forced Maritain to quietly but decisively drop old associations of formal liberties and formal democracy with liberal individualism on its deathbed. He broke largely with visions, such as either Marxism or Mounier’s personalism that treated formal rights and democracy as elements of a hypocritical capitalistsham.
