perspectives on revolutionary-era rights forces the same recognition. In order for the contemporary human rights movement to emerge, old meanings and associations had to be dropped and new ones formed. What Hunt presents as an epilogue to a creation long ago turns out to be what really needs explaining. This is what Marc Bloch meant when, in The Historian’s Craft, he indicted “the idol of origins.” A distant precondition for something is never its cause or trigger, and even continuity in history has to be explained in virtue of not just the long run but also the short term.
When, then, were human rights invented? As Hunt admits, the phrase hardly ever shows up in English in her period. And while it percolated in diplomatic and legal circles beginning in the 1940s, it was not until the 1970s, with the emergence of dissident movements in Eastern Europe, that it entered common parlance. This is the period that historians need to scrutinize most intently—the moment when human rights triumphed as a set of beliefs and as the stimulus for new activities and institutions, particularly non-governmental organizations. Yet the minds of human rights scholars constantly wander backward—disinclined, it seems, to face up to the recent vintage and contingent beginnings of their subject.
Of course, with the founding of the United Nations and its Universal Declaration (along with related instruments like the genocide convention, as well as the beginnings of intra-European rights protection), the 1940s were of obvious significance. But if there is little reason to locate the “invention” of human rights as we now know them in the late eighteenth century, there are scarcely more grounds for rooting them in World War II’s aftermath.
Currently, a powerful movement among American historians portrays contemporary human rights as flowing directly and fully formed out of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wartime vision and planning, much as Athena sprang from Zeus’s skull. For this school, the internationalist rights agenda is an American invention that extended and supplemented the nation’s original commitment to liberty with more full-bodied social protection. In Elizabeth Borgwardt’s phrase, human rights were America’s “new deal for the world.”24 The wistfully nostalgic tones of the historians of an invigorating and well-intentioned American liberalism are poignant and can lead to insight. But there are serious objections—political and interpretive—to this story.
For one thing, it makes human rights seem like the natural outcome of the last consensual war, an uncontroversial good that emerged in response to incontestable evil (never mind that the assertion of rights bore little relationship to the Nazi genocide). Second, it Americanizes rights, evoking a time when the US government could be seen as a benevolent guarantor of universal norms of conduct. Self-evidently, the actual content of the portrayal of human rights as the product of a moment when America offered a genuine universalism is the contemporary moral it allows: that Bush’s worst sin is to have ruined the storyline that began with America’s invention of human rights in the 1940s and was finally on the way to fruition thanks to Bill Clinton’s commitment to enforce them in the 1990s.
As David Rieff has argued, affirming America’s universalistic self-image in the past (as the city on a hill, the leader of the free world, or the indispensable nation) is to fail to ask just how it was that Bush was able to succeed so easily in burnishing the morality of his adventures—as if what went wrong were a purely accidental perversion of America’s true and proper vocation.25 But there are also historical distortions. Scholars who return to the 1940s, like Borgwardt and Cass Sunstein, devote little or no attention to non-American contributions to “rights talk” in the era, and exaggerate its importance and impact at the time.26 They select and single out what now look like milestones, because of their retroactive importance, but fail to grasp their marginality in their own period, from which no broad-gauged international movement emerged. Once again, historians are choosing tunnel vision over historical sense.
None of this means that the new fashion of human rights history is entirely misguided. Only those who missed the last thirty years of ideological history—like certain Marxists who regard “human rights” as nothing but a rhetoric that makes the cage of globalizing neoliberalism more bearable—could think so.27 But it does mean that we need to understand that human rights in their specific contemporary connotations are an invention of recent date, which drew on prior languages and practices the way a chemical reaction depends on having various elements around from different sources, some of them older than others. The explosion took place only yesterday, and we have to come to grips with why it happened and what the costs and benefits have been for us all. The fact that it only recently occurred to historians to uncover the origins of human rights is itself a sign that they should not seek to find them too long ago and far away.
But there is also a strategic consideration. Human rights norms and organizations remain the chief source of idealistic passion in the world—at least among its well-meaning cosmopolitan elites. Any future idealism will have to draw on the power of their current ethic and put it to good use. In this regard, Hunt is exactly right to stress the emotional charge of human rights. But besides lacking any coherent understanding of how human rights came to have their current power, we have not even begun thinking about how to reinvent the creed in ways that are progressive rather than brutal.
In closing what feels in the end like a creation myth, Hunt writes: “The human rights framework, with its international bodies, international courts, and international conventions, might be exasperating in its slowness to respond or repeated inability to achieve its ultimate goals, but there is no better structure available for confronting these issues.”28 For better or worse, the plangent reassurances have lost their power to comfort, and deep background—especially when brought to bear so instrumentally on our very different present—is of little use in allaying our confusion and dismay.
THE SURPRISING ORIGINSOF HUMAN DIGNITY
“A king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad,” Ishmael jokes in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, in the course of cataloging every last use of whale blubber. “Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process,” he adds. “Dignity” appears twenty times in Melville’s novel, and usually refers to the high standing of offices and activities—including, inevitably, whaling. But most often, dignity pertains to monarchs, and the humorous treatment that somehow elevates kings does not work its magic on everyone. For Ishmael, the notion that democracy offers everyone the dignified prerogatives of kings seems mistaken, if not ridiculous. “In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil,” he surmises, “can’t amount to much in his totality.”1
In Dignity, Rank, and Rights, Jeremy Waldron, perhaps the leading legal and political philosopher of our day, argues that the notion of human dignity originated in the democratization of the high social status once reserved for the well-born.2 “Dignity” means rank, and Waldron argues that we are the beneficiaries of a long, gradual process he calls “leveling up.” More and more people, he says, are treated as high-status individuals, deserving of the social respect once restricted to the solemnly oiled. In an age of human rights, everyone can become a king, at least on paper or in court, where claims that basic human dignity is non-negotiable have achieved a remarkable presence in the last few years.
Since the end of World War II, nobody besides conservative and typically Catholic thinkers had staked philosophical systems on the notion of human dignity, but liberal philosophers like Waldron are flocking to it to revitalize theories of political ethics. Around the same time as Waldron turned to dignity, the late Ronald Dworkin, in his masterwork Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), claimed that it is the most basic value society should advance. Jürgen Habermas, the great German thinker, recently admitted that human dignity had not featured as the cited authority for human rights for most of modern
