Illusions and Realism in the History of Human Rights

Abstract

Review article of Frederick Schauer, The Force of Law, Cambridge, Mass . Harvard UP 2015; Allen Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights, New York, Oxford UP 2013; Samuel Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History, New York, Verso 2014; Brian Tierney, Liberty and Law. The Idea of Permissive Natural Law, 1100-1800, Washington, CUA Press 2014 . There has been much talk about revisionism in the history of human rights recently . Most often this term has been associated with Samuel Moyn and his book The Last Utopia . Apart from that the label „new histories of human rights“ has also appeared in connection with two conferences taking place in the USA in 2015 .1 What is new about these new histories? In his influential book Moyn rejects the triumphalism of old-style narratives about human rights and argues that real human rights did not appear until the 1970s . Before that, the noble idea had only been abused to protect national states and their sinister interest . To be honest, I do not see much difference between Moyn’s alleged revisionism and the enthusiastic language of older human rights histories . The developments in „new democracies“ in Eastern Europe after 1989 and the Middle East after 2010 should have warned us that enthusiasm is a very misleading guide, and imitating the American rights-talk does not solve any of the difficult issues of a just political order in a real world . If the idea of human rights is to be of any help in maintaining democracies, it would be more appropriate to require more realism and less enthusiasm in histories of human rights . For I believe that if historiography is to make a meaningful contribution to the study of the phenomenon we call human rights, it has to turn away from illusionary approaches to realism .