Andrea J. Horbinski (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ahorbinski) wrote2013-07-26 08:44 pm
ahorbinski) wrote2013-07-26 08:44 pm
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Book review: The Last Utopia
Bibliographic Data: Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.
Main Argument: The human rights movement, rather than having roots stretching back at least to the Enlightenment, arose in the 1970s and is a minimalist moral utopia of antipolitics that ought to be superseded by non-globally minded movements within states.
Historiographical Engagement: Moyn trained as an intellectual and legal historian at Berkeley, and his sources are mostly philosophers, lawyers, and, in the 20thC, notable public thinkers such as Václav Havel and Malcolm X. Although he never mentions them, he is arguing against the school of human rights history loosely headed by Lynn Hunt and Gary Bass, which maintains precisely the opposite. In typological terms, he is of the revisionist school of human rights history.
Prologue: Argument, Sources, Examples Moyn starts by arguing that the cause of contemporary human rights is "a recognizably utopian program" (1) that is a relatively recent development. Moyn locates the rise of human rights, in a word, in the 1970s, before he goes on to excoriate the rights of man as "another conception altogether" than human rights (2) on the grounds that their outcomes were so different. For Moyn, human rights emerged in the 1970s "seemingly from nowhere" (3) because "they were widely underwood as a moral alternative to bankrupt political utopias" (5). Moyn is writing an unabashedly revisionist history, which he calls the "true history of human rights," the main challenge of which is according to him "understanding why it was not in the middle of the 1940s but in the middle of the 1970s that human rights came to define people's hopes for the future as the foundation of an international movement and a utopia of international law" (7)--because there was no "Holocaust consciousness" as such in the 1940s. [This is actually factually accurate, unlike some of Moyn's other claims, for example regarding Amnesty International's organizing tactics.]
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Humanity before Human Rights" covers the pre-history of human rights from whenever until approximately the 1940s. Moyn opens by quoting Borges on Kafka: "Each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, just as it will modify the future" (11). Essentially [say it with me], Moyn believes that human rights have no history prior to the 1970s, and that the efforts to find a "deep history" of human rights or even to locate its origins in the 17thC Enlightenment thought that eventually gave rise to the rights of man are all fundamentally wrong. The way that he does this is to define "rights" as things that "were deeply bound up with the construction, through revolution if necessary, of state and nation" (20), collapsing the rights of man into "the rights of man and citizen." Similarly, Moyn deals with the 19thC by stating categorically that "the achievements of social rights were first and foremost revisions of citizenship in the state--not the state's transcendence" (35). "It did not yet occur to anyone to assert the one over or against the other" (37). Well, if you define human rights solely according to how they were defined in the 1970s, yes. Thus the transition from seeing rights as things enjoyed in the state to things that transcended the state (and this is not without problems, as Hannah Arendt knew) can only be a "broken history" for Moyn, hinging on "the moral displacement of politics" (43).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Death from Birth," is Moyn's attempt to argue that the human rights consciousness of the 1940s didn't matter because of reasons: specifically, "human rights turned out to be a substitute for what many around the world wanted, a collective entitlement to self-determination" (45). Specifically, Moyn charts how the new language of "human rights" as such became mired in the politics of the early postwar period: "human rights and other idealistic formulations reflected a need for public acceptance and legitimacy, as part of the rhetorical drive to distinguish the [United Nations] organization from prior instances of great power balance" (59). Immediately being taken into the U.N., where they essentially died in committee, "it was also the case that human rights became almost immediately associated with anticommunism" (71), but even for committed conservative and religious anti-communists like Gerhard Ritter and John Foster Dulles, human rights "solved no problems" (72), leaving later generations to give new meaning to this legacy. It's not clear how this history that Moyn tries to deny is different from any other legacy of whatever depth, however.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapter three is literally titled "Why Anticolonialism Wasn't a Human Rights Movement." It's also in this chapter that the characteristic Moyn construction, "The great irony of X is that it was part of Y that had to be overcome before Z could happen…" becomes fully appreciable as a characteristic tic of thought-rhetorical pattern. From the observation that the decolonization movement rarely invoked "human rights" as such Moyn builds something of a straw man, namely that anticolonialism should have been thought of as a human rights movement, or was thought of as a human rights movement, by someone somewhere at some point. At times, however, much of the evidence Moyn summons, such as quotations from Malcolm X, seems head-scratchingly self-evident, as when X lays out the difference between civil and human rights. Be that as it may, Moyn notes that by the early 1960s, "human rights were defined by antiracism and anticolonialism more generally, fully reversing the imperialist entanglements of the concept of human rights in the postwar moment" (99). Still, by the early 1970s anticolonialism was largely dead as a cause to inspire the masses on a global scale and human rights were on the rise: why? "First, the sordid nature of colonial rule had to be revealed for all to see, and ultimately ended once and for all" (117). "Second, the widespread rise of the belief that anticolonialism in its classic forms had shipwrecked as a moral and political project mattered a great deal too" (118).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "The Purity of This Struggle," is the heart of the book, and ostensibly it covers the crucial decade of the 1970s and in particular the turning point of 1977. This chapter contains a lot of patently teleological statements along the lines of "the true significance of X was the Y that it allowed when the time was right;" it also contains a long quotation from former Polish dissident Bronislaw Baczko, who one suspects speaks for Moyn when he claims that "the disenchantment with utopian 'systems' goes together with the persistence of diffuse utopian hopes and modes of thought which might betray the presence in our times of two contradictory attitudes: the distrust of utopia together with the desire to have one anyway" (qtd. 120). In Moyn's telling, the triumph of human rights was the result of Jimmy Carter introducing them to the world in 1977 along with the rise of dissidence in the eastern European bloc, which in Moyn's view "worked by leaving behind political alternatives in the name of moral criticism" (136). The ostensible dichotomy of politics and morality continues throughout the chapter, eventually leading Moyn to claim that the anti-politics of dissidents weren't political, which is a rather naive interpretation. (Indeed, in "The Power of the Powerless" Václav Havel talks about how in the post-totalitarian state the entirety of the individual's existence is politicized by dint of all aspects of one's life depending on the state.) Human rights, for Moyn, is a movement of exhausted romantics, sloughing off the demands for economic and social equality that the U.S. civil rights foundered on earlier in the same decade: "human rights came to the world as its partisans abjured the maximalism that had once lent utopias glamor--especially utopias that required profound transformation, or even revolution or violence" (171). There are some who might view the practical idealism of human rights as a feature rather than a bug; Moyn is not one of them. The end of the chapter finds him intimating dourly that human rights' "substitution of plausible morality for failed politics may have come at a price" (175).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter covers "International Law and Human Rights" and explores the reasons why the discipline took what might be termed the "human rights turn" beginning in the late 1970s. Moyn concludes that "the rise of human rights in international law occurred not for reasons internal to international law as a profession, but due to the ideological changes that set the stage for a moral triumph of human rights--one that in turn gave a whole new relevance to the field's mission" (210). Moyn calls this "a paradox" (as if professions develop solely according to internal logics) and makes quite a few comments about lawyers not "having adopted more full-blown utopias before" human rights that suggest that he thinks of utopias as a zero-sum game (ibid). The lawyer Louis Henkin, who taught at Berkeley beginning in the 1970s, looms large in this account, largely for his failure to anticipate the new rights-based turn. (Moyn calls this "evolution by catastrophe," but evolution by catastrophe--i.e. mass extinction--is not unnatural, and promotes bursts of rapid evolution.) At times, however, Moyn seems to be missing his own point, as when he quotes Princeton international lawyer Percy Corbett, who in 1953 wrote of human rights in legal fora that "the climate, it seems, remains obdurately unsuitable; but the pictures in the seed-catalogues are lovely, and who knows when the climate may change" (qtd. 190)?
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples The epilogue, "The Burden of Morality," has Moyn characterizing human rights as "a minimalist utopia of antipolitics" (218) and charting what he calls "the slow amalgamation of humanitarian concern for suffering with human rights as both a utopian idea and a practical movement" (220). NB, "it is simply mistaken to conceive of these [19thC humanitarian organizations] as human rights organizations, as they were almost never understood in that way by their participants" (ibid). He also, staggeringly, asserts that racism ended along with formal empire (217), which the very fact that he is forced to qualify as "formal" betrays as false. And in the end Moyn shows his cards, arguing that human rights "still trade on the moral transcendence of politics that their original breakthrough involved. And so it may not be too late to wonder whether the concept of human rights, and the movement around it, should restrict themselves to offering minimal constraints on responsible politics, not a new form of maximal politics of their own" (227). For Moyn, the real betrayal of the human rights movement is not its unrealized promise but its temerity in daring to assert its transcendence over the state.
Critical assessment: It's difficult to overstate the problems I have with this book. (Granted, I would have problems with this book, as I am almost by default part of the Berkeley school of human rights history that Moyn has set himself against, neatly symbolized by the fact that Moyn doesn't mention Berkeley in his acknowledgments, despite the fact that he did his PhD here.) I not only think Moyn is wrong about the history of human rights but also that Moyn's practice in this book is profoundly anti-historical in the sense that several of his rhetorical moves seem to go against the very practices of the profession. For instance, Moyn's view of human rights is that its only "true" meaning is that of the 1970s--in other words, he denies even the possibility of change over time, which ought to be the historian's stock in trade. Another problem is his using the present to bludgeon people in the past for their supposed failures of imagination or for having the gall to think about human rights at a time when the time was out of joint, or "unpropitious" (42). If actual people in history thought that way, slavery would still be legal worldwide--I'm looking at you, William Wilberforce.
At times I felt like I was reading a book written by the reincarnation of Thomas More. Samuel Moyn hates utopias, though he never says why they are a priori bad, which adds another deeply frustrating layer to reading this book. Moyn is, in essence, articulating a deeply conservative vision in the Burkean tradition, and it's no surprise that the paperback edition has glowing blurbs from the Wall Street Journal and The National Interest. It's also just a weird read, because the entire book is leading up to a moment in the 1970s--May 1977, to be precise--that, once Moyn gets there, turns out to be a turning point that doesn't quite turn because the narrative doesn't go anywhere from there. The wave of the future breaks on the sand and the book loses its force, as Moyn has already spent the force of his argument denying things in earlier chapters.
The meat of my criticisms have been discussed in the chapter notes and above. Suffice it to say here that I question Moyn's constant equation of human rights with morality and with antipolitics (one of these things is not like the others), as well as his final assertion that "the last utopia cannot be a moral one" (227): why not? And how does the extreme teleology of Moyn's arguments negate what he sees as the teleology of "deep histories" of human rights?
Further reading: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Meta notes: Principis obsta. Finem respice. The age of chivalry is dead. That of sophists, economists, and calculators has succeeded…
Main Argument: The human rights movement, rather than having roots stretching back at least to the Enlightenment, arose in the 1970s and is a minimalist moral utopia of antipolitics that ought to be superseded by non-globally minded movements within states.
Historiographical Engagement: Moyn trained as an intellectual and legal historian at Berkeley, and his sources are mostly philosophers, lawyers, and, in the 20thC, notable public thinkers such as Václav Havel and Malcolm X. Although he never mentions them, he is arguing against the school of human rights history loosely headed by Lynn Hunt and Gary Bass, which maintains precisely the opposite. In typological terms, he is of the revisionist school of human rights history.
Prologue: Argument, Sources, Examples Moyn starts by arguing that the cause of contemporary human rights is "a recognizably utopian program" (1) that is a relatively recent development. Moyn locates the rise of human rights, in a word, in the 1970s, before he goes on to excoriate the rights of man as "another conception altogether" than human rights (2) on the grounds that their outcomes were so different. For Moyn, human rights emerged in the 1970s "seemingly from nowhere" (3) because "they were widely underwood as a moral alternative to bankrupt political utopias" (5). Moyn is writing an unabashedly revisionist history, which he calls the "true history of human rights," the main challenge of which is according to him "understanding why it was not in the middle of the 1940s but in the middle of the 1970s that human rights came to define people's hopes for the future as the foundation of an international movement and a utopia of international law" (7)--because there was no "Holocaust consciousness" as such in the 1940s. [This is actually factually accurate, unlike some of Moyn's other claims, for example regarding Amnesty International's organizing tactics.]
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Humanity before Human Rights" covers the pre-history of human rights from whenever until approximately the 1940s. Moyn opens by quoting Borges on Kafka: "Each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, just as it will modify the future" (11). Essentially [say it with me], Moyn believes that human rights have no history prior to the 1970s, and that the efforts to find a "deep history" of human rights or even to locate its origins in the 17thC Enlightenment thought that eventually gave rise to the rights of man are all fundamentally wrong. The way that he does this is to define "rights" as things that "were deeply bound up with the construction, through revolution if necessary, of state and nation" (20), collapsing the rights of man into "the rights of man and citizen." Similarly, Moyn deals with the 19thC by stating categorically that "the achievements of social rights were first and foremost revisions of citizenship in the state--not the state's transcendence" (35). "It did not yet occur to anyone to assert the one over or against the other" (37). Well, if you define human rights solely according to how they were defined in the 1970s, yes. Thus the transition from seeing rights as things enjoyed in the state to things that transcended the state (and this is not without problems, as Hannah Arendt knew) can only be a "broken history" for Moyn, hinging on "the moral displacement of politics" (43).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Death from Birth," is Moyn's attempt to argue that the human rights consciousness of the 1940s didn't matter because of reasons: specifically, "human rights turned out to be a substitute for what many around the world wanted, a collective entitlement to self-determination" (45). Specifically, Moyn charts how the new language of "human rights" as such became mired in the politics of the early postwar period: "human rights and other idealistic formulations reflected a need for public acceptance and legitimacy, as part of the rhetorical drive to distinguish the [United Nations] organization from prior instances of great power balance" (59). Immediately being taken into the U.N., where they essentially died in committee, "it was also the case that human rights became almost immediately associated with anticommunism" (71), but even for committed conservative and religious anti-communists like Gerhard Ritter and John Foster Dulles, human rights "solved no problems" (72), leaving later generations to give new meaning to this legacy. It's not clear how this history that Moyn tries to deny is different from any other legacy of whatever depth, however.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Chapter three is literally titled "Why Anticolonialism Wasn't a Human Rights Movement." It's also in this chapter that the characteristic Moyn construction, "The great irony of X is that it was part of Y that had to be overcome before Z could happen…" becomes fully appreciable as a characteristic tic of thought-rhetorical pattern. From the observation that the decolonization movement rarely invoked "human rights" as such Moyn builds something of a straw man, namely that anticolonialism should have been thought of as a human rights movement, or was thought of as a human rights movement, by someone somewhere at some point. At times, however, much of the evidence Moyn summons, such as quotations from Malcolm X, seems head-scratchingly self-evident, as when X lays out the difference between civil and human rights. Be that as it may, Moyn notes that by the early 1960s, "human rights were defined by antiracism and anticolonialism more generally, fully reversing the imperialist entanglements of the concept of human rights in the postwar moment" (99). Still, by the early 1970s anticolonialism was largely dead as a cause to inspire the masses on a global scale and human rights were on the rise: why? "First, the sordid nature of colonial rule had to be revealed for all to see, and ultimately ended once and for all" (117). "Second, the widespread rise of the belief that anticolonialism in its classic forms had shipwrecked as a moral and political project mattered a great deal too" (118).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "The Purity of This Struggle," is the heart of the book, and ostensibly it covers the crucial decade of the 1970s and in particular the turning point of 1977. This chapter contains a lot of patently teleological statements along the lines of "the true significance of X was the Y that it allowed when the time was right;" it also contains a long quotation from former Polish dissident Bronislaw Baczko, who one suspects speaks for Moyn when he claims that "the disenchantment with utopian 'systems' goes together with the persistence of diffuse utopian hopes and modes of thought which might betray the presence in our times of two contradictory attitudes: the distrust of utopia together with the desire to have one anyway" (qtd. 120). In Moyn's telling, the triumph of human rights was the result of Jimmy Carter introducing them to the world in 1977 along with the rise of dissidence in the eastern European bloc, which in Moyn's view "worked by leaving behind political alternatives in the name of moral criticism" (136). The ostensible dichotomy of politics and morality continues throughout the chapter, eventually leading Moyn to claim that the anti-politics of dissidents weren't political, which is a rather naive interpretation. (Indeed, in "The Power of the Powerless" Václav Havel talks about how in the post-totalitarian state the entirety of the individual's existence is politicized by dint of all aspects of one's life depending on the state.) Human rights, for Moyn, is a movement of exhausted romantics, sloughing off the demands for economic and social equality that the U.S. civil rights foundered on earlier in the same decade: "human rights came to the world as its partisans abjured the maximalism that had once lent utopias glamor--especially utopias that required profound transformation, or even revolution or violence" (171). There are some who might view the practical idealism of human rights as a feature rather than a bug; Moyn is not one of them. The end of the chapter finds him intimating dourly that human rights' "substitution of plausible morality for failed politics may have come at a price" (175).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter covers "International Law and Human Rights" and explores the reasons why the discipline took what might be termed the "human rights turn" beginning in the late 1970s. Moyn concludes that "the rise of human rights in international law occurred not for reasons internal to international law as a profession, but due to the ideological changes that set the stage for a moral triumph of human rights--one that in turn gave a whole new relevance to the field's mission" (210). Moyn calls this "a paradox" (as if professions develop solely according to internal logics) and makes quite a few comments about lawyers not "having adopted more full-blown utopias before" human rights that suggest that he thinks of utopias as a zero-sum game (ibid). The lawyer Louis Henkin, who taught at Berkeley beginning in the 1970s, looms large in this account, largely for his failure to anticipate the new rights-based turn. (Moyn calls this "evolution by catastrophe," but evolution by catastrophe--i.e. mass extinction--is not unnatural, and promotes bursts of rapid evolution.) At times, however, Moyn seems to be missing his own point, as when he quotes Princeton international lawyer Percy Corbett, who in 1953 wrote of human rights in legal fora that "the climate, it seems, remains obdurately unsuitable; but the pictures in the seed-catalogues are lovely, and who knows when the climate may change" (qtd. 190)?
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples The epilogue, "The Burden of Morality," has Moyn characterizing human rights as "a minimalist utopia of antipolitics" (218) and charting what he calls "the slow amalgamation of humanitarian concern for suffering with human rights as both a utopian idea and a practical movement" (220). NB, "it is simply mistaken to conceive of these [19thC humanitarian organizations] as human rights organizations, as they were almost never understood in that way by their participants" (ibid). He also, staggeringly, asserts that racism ended along with formal empire (217), which the very fact that he is forced to qualify as "formal" betrays as false. And in the end Moyn shows his cards, arguing that human rights "still trade on the moral transcendence of politics that their original breakthrough involved. And so it may not be too late to wonder whether the concept of human rights, and the movement around it, should restrict themselves to offering minimal constraints on responsible politics, not a new form of maximal politics of their own" (227). For Moyn, the real betrayal of the human rights movement is not its unrealized promise but its temerity in daring to assert its transcendence over the state.
Critical assessment: It's difficult to overstate the problems I have with this book. (Granted, I would have problems with this book, as I am almost by default part of the Berkeley school of human rights history that Moyn has set himself against, neatly symbolized by the fact that Moyn doesn't mention Berkeley in his acknowledgments, despite the fact that he did his PhD here.) I not only think Moyn is wrong about the history of human rights but also that Moyn's practice in this book is profoundly anti-historical in the sense that several of his rhetorical moves seem to go against the very practices of the profession. For instance, Moyn's view of human rights is that its only "true" meaning is that of the 1970s--in other words, he denies even the possibility of change over time, which ought to be the historian's stock in trade. Another problem is his using the present to bludgeon people in the past for their supposed failures of imagination or for having the gall to think about human rights at a time when the time was out of joint, or "unpropitious" (42). If actual people in history thought that way, slavery would still be legal worldwide--I'm looking at you, William Wilberforce.
At times I felt like I was reading a book written by the reincarnation of Thomas More. Samuel Moyn hates utopias, though he never says why they are a priori bad, which adds another deeply frustrating layer to reading this book. Moyn is, in essence, articulating a deeply conservative vision in the Burkean tradition, and it's no surprise that the paperback edition has glowing blurbs from the Wall Street Journal and The National Interest. It's also just a weird read, because the entire book is leading up to a moment in the 1970s--May 1977, to be precise--that, once Moyn gets there, turns out to be a turning point that doesn't quite turn because the narrative doesn't go anywhere from there. The wave of the future breaks on the sand and the book loses its force, as Moyn has already spent the force of his argument denying things in earlier chapters.
The meat of my criticisms have been discussed in the chapter notes and above. Suffice it to say here that I question Moyn's constant equation of human rights with morality and with antipolitics (one of these things is not like the others), as well as his final assertion that "the last utopia cannot be a moral one" (227): why not? And how does the extreme teleology of Moyn's arguments negate what he sees as the teleology of "deep histories" of human rights?
Further reading: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Meta notes: Principis obsta. Finem respice. The age of chivalry is dead. That of sophists, economists, and calculators has succeeded…