VIDEO
Past, Present and Future of Human Rights on the European Union
Human Rights as History
The doxa of a society, those convictions that are tacitly accepted as naturally given, can be recognized as such only in the moment that they lose their self-evidence, that is, when they become historical. Does approaching human rights as history implicitly call into question the universality of those rights?
For how can human rights be universal if they are – as the contributors of this volume argue the -product of a global history of violence and conflict?
If we understand this history as one of “hegemonic contestations” (Martti Koskenniemi) that possesses no telos and could also have occurred entirely differently, as it becomes clear that there was not one but several competing universalisms, each able to invoke human rights? Moreover, this contends that the emergence of global law in the twentieth century went hand in hand with the fragmentation of the means for its enforcement. Should we thus agree with critics from Edmund Burke to Hannah Arendt who preferred the rights of citizens to human rights because only the state, and not “humanity,” represented a historically viable political entity that could guarantee concrete rights? Does the invocation of absolute morality (or moral emergencies) in politics ultimately lead to violence, as Arendt holds in her reading of the predicament of Captain Vere (of the ship Rights of Man), in Melville’s Billy Budd, since politics is about conflict and compromise and not about good and evil? 75 And yet it was Arendt who insisted, as quoted at the beginning of this introduction, that human beings have the right to have rights. According to Arendt, however, this right should be derived not from the teleological loaded laws of “history” or “nature,” but rather from concrete, contradictory human experiences and the unpredictable histories resulting from them. 76 Or as Edmund Burke wrote in a letter to a correspondent in Paris in November 1789: “You have theories enough concerning the rights of man; it may not be amiss to add a small degree of attention to their nature and disposition. It is with men in the concrete; it is with the common human life, and human actions, that you are to be concerned.” 77In this respect, writing the history of human rights has only just begun.
Human rights as a history of political contestations, as proposed, do not have to diminish our moral convictions about such rights. 78 On the contrary, by gaining an insight into the historical contingency of our normative concepts, their emergence from concrete experiences of violence and conflict, we may comprehend better why the politics of human rights continues to fail in our time.
75. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, 1963), 74–83.
76. See Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Koselleck, Arendt, and the Anthropology of Historical Experience,” History and Theory, 49 (May 2010), 212–236.
77. Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont, in Edmund Burke, Further Reflections on the Revolution in France , ed. Daniel E. Ritchie (Indianapolis, 1992), 13.
78. Similarly Thomas L. Haskell, “The Curious Persistence of Rights Talk in the ‘Age of Interpretation,’” Journal of American History , 74:3 (1987), 984–1012, here 985–86, as well as Hans Joas, “The Emergence of Universalism: An Affi rmative Genealogy,” in Peter Hedström and Björn Wittrock (eds.), Frontiers of Sociology (Leiden, 2009), 15–24.
