Beyond a Genealogy of Human Rights. Introduction to a Discussion Forum

Abstract

General histories of human rights have become quite popular recently . Suffice it to say that while I was working on this discussion forum, one more big history of human rights was published, and several more are being prepared .1 There is an upsurge of scholarly interest in this topic, there is a lot of energy invested in it, but in which direction should this energy be channeled? In what follows, I will first try to explain the situation which prompted me to organize this forum, and secondly, provide a summary of Dan Edelstein ́s new book On the Spirit of Rights, which is the subject of our comments .2 Unfortunately, the field has been dominated by two prolific American authors who tend towards extremely simplistic views, which present, I believe, a dangerous obstacle to a free exploration of the early history of human rights in the Age of Enlightenment . This is not to deny that Jonathan Israel helped to rehabilitate intellectual history and that Samuel Moyn recalled the significance of Jimmy Carter ́s human rights campaign, but the interpretative frameworks behind these achievements are rather reductive, to say the least . Whereas Jonathan Israel with his atheism-oriented interpretation3 has found respect but no imitators, Samuel Moyn, with his insistence on the „breakthrough moment“ in the 1970s,4 did find several followers among historians of the twentieth century .5 This new chronology goes hand in hand with a silent reshuffling of human rights