Assignment 04
Samuel Moyn takes us through multiple points that describe the differences in the earlier “rights of man” theories and the contemporary “human rights theories. Foremost among his arguments is the relationship of the theories to politics and government, but before getting into that Moyn lays some groundwork. He encourages us to look at history with a more critical eye, and see that events and philosophies that we accept as obvious precursors, leading to one inevitable end that is human rights, are actually just part of the random facts of history, created by warring factions, personal desires and mistakes. That means that human rights is only one universal ideology, not the only one, despite it’s present ubiquity and acceptance,. It also indicates that we as humans likely will evolve and expand up on this theory or remove it altogether as another dominating moral thread comes into power. The true nature of the definition of human rights is further shown by tracing the individual histories of each right considered part of current dogma (using the UN Declaration). The different paths each right took didn’t necessarily interact or engage at all, and came from various instances, from fights for suffrage, to the civil rights movement. Moyn points out that social and economic rights are considered part of a newer group of rights to be considered, but reaching back to supposed precursors of human rights, pre-Enlightenment, it is easy to find examples of worries of socioeconomic inequality (one prime example being the Bible).
As we saw when discussing Enlightenment theorists (and as Moyn points out – their influences from Ancient Greece and Rome, to Stoicism, through various religions) the rights of man were structured through government. This is especially clear when considering both the American and French revolutions, whose concern with rights was wrapped up in their discontent with the monarchies. The rights of man were set up by these groups to be within the realm of the government – the government couldn’t infringe upon them (and, as in the original contract) was responsible for maintaining and protecting them. While the advent of the human rights movement really was a movement to transcend and go beyond governments, who were not adequately protecting rights. Human rights define themselves outside and above the government, as a universal right of all humans for simply existing, not due to their belonging to one or another nation, as with the rights of man. The universality and “natural” qualities of these rights may seem similar, but as we discussed, “universal” meant something very different during the Enlightenment (and earlier) – it meant property owning white men.
